#$*!%$#!!!
Not because it’s closing — although I’m sorry to see it go — but because I never knew The Book Depository was Amazon. Maybe I overlooked something obvious, but neither the landing page nor the “about us” page mentions this. I’ve not bought a lot from them, but it’s a great source for high quality editions of books I want to keep permanently, as references for myself and in the forlorn hope that they may interest my kids someday. I think my last purchase was a high quality edition of The History of Middle Earth.
(An essential book for understanding the cosmological implications of such things as the fact that Beren was an elf in the earliest versons of the Beren-Luthien story. Don’t even start to think about what that would have done to the geneologies. The evolution of the legendarium is an acquired taste. But I digress.)
Was The Book Depository an independent company that got bought up by the Borg? When?
I’ve noted before on the movie threads that of the various streamers to which we’ve had subscriptions over the years, Amazon’s algorithms consistently make the best movie recommendations to me. Not that I very often follow up on them; I tend to find movies via other routes. I identify a film I want to see and then figure out where I can watch it, not the other way around. I will buy things from the Borg when I must, but I refuse to be spoonfed by the Borg.
But anyhow, this used to puzzle me until I realized that I’ve bought books and movies from Amazon for many years. I’ve always tried to prioritize independent, books and mortar bookstores, but we lost my longtime neighborhood favorite some time back. And I’ll go to Barnes and Noble, almost always to the physical store and ordering only as a last resort.
But Amazon still has had enough orders over the years to have a pretty good consumer profile on me, and its movie algorithms obviously use the data.
Maybe one way to strengthen consumers against the Borg would be to require that all of us have access to the companies’ data files on us upon request, along with the interest profiles and predictive models into which the data is fed. IOW, make the big data harvesters transparent.
I’m sure all the big data harvesters would set up a wail that this would put them out of business.
I like this idea more all the time.
It could be like the Starbucks purchase of Teavana. Bought it to kill it.
Not because it’s closing — although I’m sorry to see it go — but because I never knew The Book Depository was AmazonExactly. It's awful to find out that some service you thought was independent is actually owned by a conglomerate.