Mr. Angry

Spamazon Kibble

More wibble from me:

And don’t tell me this website looks ugly! It’s meant to! I’m angry!

I HATE AMAZON!!!!!

OK, I don't really. I'm sure they are a decent place to buy books (for people who aren't single and in full-time employment and living in the city - if you are all three of those things there's no point in mail order - and Amazon is basically mail order - because you aren't at home when the stuff is delivered). Though the only time I seriously tried to buy some books from Amazon (not-very-esoteric later volumes of "graphic novels" in the Books of Magic series of comics started by Neil Gaiman and continued by John Ney Reiber (whose name I can never spell) and others, and it didn't work because Amazon completely messed up the publishing history and titles of the volumes so it wasn't possible to tell what you would be ordering - and there were two that they didn't have anyway, neither did any of more obvious second-hand online bookshops or any of the real old-fashioned comics or SF bookshops in London and in the end I found them on the shelves of David's Book Exchange in Brighton, the shop I used to walk to when I was a kid to buy comics and books.

No, what I hate about Amazon is the way it dominates web searches for anything book-related

Searching the Web for some references to Philip K Dick's use of the words "kibble" and "kipple" (which are more or less alternate ways of spelling the same word in this context). Its damn near impossible. Not only are Google search results crapped out with online kipple about kibble - apparently if are American and your age is larger than your IQ "kibble" means a kind of cheap pet biscuits and you sometimes spell it "kipple" just to confuse the rest of us - there is an Amazon review of a PKD book that includes the line "It's not just kibble anymore."

Amazon spams itself kipple-like all over the Internet posing as "My First Bookshop" or whatever so Amazon review dominate Google hits if you have the bad luck to select search terms that match them. So that idiotic line appears on 37 different websites which all seem to be in the first 50 or so Google hits. Wasted me a whole five minutes. About half the time it took to write this. Pah!

 
 

Ken Brown, July 2007

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