Goodbye Amazon!

Apparently Amazon has come to their senses and decided to restore sales rankings to the books that they previously deranked. According to them, it was nothing more than a metadata glitch. Of course, I don’t believe them. Then again, I wouldn’t believe them if their tongue came notarized. 

I’ve been a faithful Amazon customer pretty much since their inception, and I read a lot. I read a lot of non-fiction as well as romance. Despite my  somewhat limited funds I’ve dropped a bundle with them. Especially since my son was born and I simply don’t have hours to browse in bookstores anymore. All too often, if you’re not looking for a bestseller going to a bookstore is an exercise in futility. But I’ve come to a simple realization that I don’t trust Amazon anymore. If they’ll play ducks and drakes with these data, imagine what they might be doing with my credit card information. Even if this was in fact a simple data error, it shows a level of carelessness and reckless disregard that makes me. distrust them. 

I never thought  it would come to this. When Amazon first came out it was shopping Nirvana for me. To have all the books on earth available with the click of the mouse was a book geek’s wet dream. The discovery that they  can and will in fact use  their power to make books disappear, which means all books aren’t available to me is more than a bit disturbing. How do I know which books they’ve determined aren’t fit to be seen? Today it’s Erotica and GLBTQ. Hey  tomorrow, they could de-rank ethnic books, or women’s books or anything else their little hearts desire. And I would never know. Sorry, that’s a little too The Handmaiden’s Tale for my  taste. Even my parents didn’t try  to control what I read, I’m sure as hell not going to give that power to a bunch of computer geeks.