Friday, September 26, 2008

Amazon Acts to Eliminate Shortage of New Books

The favorite time wasting activity of authors has long been checking on Amazon.com to see how their books are doing. It finally occurred to someone at Amazon that they were undercutting their own market; time spent watching your book go from 81,000 to 81,006 and back again is time not spent writing new books, and Amazon is in the business of selling books. So they pulled the plug. As of sometime today, Amazon book pages no longer show rankings. Just when I was waiting to see if the mention of Future Imperfect on Forbes.com was going to pull it up from 90,000 to 80,000.

Expect a literary renaissance real soon now.
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[Either I somehow misread the Amazon.com page or it was only a temporary change. Future Imperfect is now at 41,542, presumably due to the Forbes.com mention. Cancel renaissance.]

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you sure? I still see ranking for my book, the new school of information security.

Unknown said...

Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World (Hardcover)
Product Details
* Hardcover: 300 pages
* Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (July 21, 2008)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0521877326
* ISBN-13: 978-0521877329
* Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
* Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

* Amazon.com Sales Rank: #38,489 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories: (What's this?)
#7 in Books > Science > Technology > Technology & Society
#16 in Books > Science > Technology > Social Aspects

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Jonathan said...

I'd somehow failed to notice that Future Imperfect was available. Now being aware (quick on the uptake, this one), I've just ordered it a few minutes ago; but from Amazon UK.

Gary Y. said...

Perhaps a suggestion to Amazon that they provide an option whereby one can have the standing of a particular book emailed on a specified frequency would -- bring back the renaissance? This would possibly eliminate a few strokes worth of wasted time for authors and a bit of wasted bandwidth for Amazon's servers.

Jonathan said...

Looking again at your Web site: it doesn't seem to mention that Future Imperfect has been published, and indeed gives the impression that it hasn't ("One of my current writing projects...").

David Friedman said...

Jonathan writes:

"Looking again at your Web site: it doesn't seem to mention that Future Imperfect has been published"

Many thanks.

Now it does.