Dear Amazon, please stop trashing my books.
An open letter to Amazon about their quality control.
Dear Amazon,
Please stop trashing my books.
Your prices are almost unbeatable and that’s why a steady stream of your boxes continue to fill my recycling bin but I’ve had about enough. At least Alibris let’s me know ahead of time which book would arrived nearly destroyed so I can buy it elsewhere.
I have no real data backing this up, but it feels as though one in four books comes ruined and it’s to the point where I open each box with trepidation waiting to see which of the precious tomes will need re-purchasing. I can travel to Israel and back by ferry, taxi and plane without so much as creasing a page in a six hundred page book but you can’t seem to deliver them from a warehouse an hour and half away without folding a cover. The pain of a trashed book lives with me for days.
I’ve heard a rumor your prices are low because you stock the books rejected by other bookstores. If this is true, please let me know, so I can stop buying books with maladies I can’t tolerate. I’ll continue to buy your mp3s and cameras, but I’ll need to shop elsewhere for books. I’m the guy who looks at every book on the shelf at the bookstore and chooses the best copy — sometimes choosing none if there’s not one meeting my approval.
I know it’s not normal to care about this, but I once purchased a brand new book to adorn my bookcase and donated the dog-eared page, bent-spine version returned by a friend to the library because I couldn’t stand the sight of it. My father reads books borrowed from me in fear. To me cars can be scratched and gardens messy but books, my books, must be pristine.
Amazon, please stop trashing my books.
thanks, brian
I can relate. I was always the most protective of the condition of my books growing up. I’ve got an original edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Manual book that’s still in almost new condition. And I’ve actually used it quite a bit.
I used to bring in a whole mini-library of computer books to work but I stopped doing it for a couple of reasons. One, I’d find that about 3 out of 4 people who borrowed them (sometimes without asking me) would return them in a cruddy, messed up state. Dirty, stained, pages folded, dog-eared. It was shocking. And it was hard to tell ahead of time whether they would do that or not. Plus, I got sick of lugging those heavy things around, especially with an increasing amount of good documentation on the web or in e-book/PDF format.
I’ve went through about 7 copies of Java in a Nutshell, some were due to new Java major releases coming out but some because they got so cruddy I couldn’t stand them.
Amazon has always sent me books in good condition, however.