Oh ha ha, ha ha ha…

I love the way amazon keeps sending me out recommendations, I truly do. But the one I got today made me nearly  fall off my chair laughing. In one of my insomniac periods some time back, I decided to teach Amazon’s recommendation system about what I like to read, and so I spent several hours (the wee small ones that seem to extend forever when you can’t sleep) telling it all about what I had read.

Interesting point here – I recently (yeah, couldn’t sleep again) totted up how many of the “1001 books to read before you die” that I had already read. Le answer? 641 (yes, I know, too many, it actually gave me a bit of a fright).

So imagine the hilarity when Amazon send one of their mails to me containing the following (direct cut’n'paste quote):

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Daisy Miller (Penguin Classics) by Henry James have also purchased The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection: More than 1000 of the Greatest Classics. For this reason, you might like to know that The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection: More than 1000 of the Greatest Classics is now available.  You can order yours for just $7,989.50 ($5,423.80 off the list price) by following the link below

(end cut’n'paste)

*coughs* Just $7,989.50?!?!?!?

Now call me a book snob, but that sounds like an offer best availed of by someone who does not read at all, but has fallen into a fortune and wants to have a study in their home, filled with, y’know classy books. Not someone like me who lives in a basement (or, if you prefer, abasement) that is already filled with tall, cluttered bookshelves and perilously inclining towers of books that will not fit on said bookshelves but instead climb up the sides of them like some kind of mutated bookish kudzu. See, I love books, and the thought of buying them in bulk, unseen, like that is just not something I could ever consider. Besides, I probably have a few of them already. Most people probably do. And if I had in the ballpark of $8k dollars to spare (goes without saying that I don’t, or I wouldn’t be living in a basement with no bloody central heating…..), I’d use it to have my living room kitted out with wall-round floor-to-ceiling shelving for the books I already have, and already love too much to part with.  In fact, I’d probably go for that over the heating – there would have to be some insulation value there, right?

So, surely Amazon’s computer shouldn’t be pegging book nerds like me, the ones who have already read the less famous Henry James books, the ones who, instead like the customer in that memorable episode of Black Books want to buy leather-bound editions of anything to make their office look good.  These aren’t even leather-bound, they seem to be the regular paperback editions. Plus they’re all Penguin – so right there you’re going to be missing out on some must-read books (y’know the ones Faber and other publishers have the rights to, for example).

So, am I right to find this funny (both ha ha and weird) or am I being unreasonable?

Is it not also somewhat odd that in a global recession, people are being mass-mailed about something that costs nigh on $8,000?

And as for “people who bought x, also bought y” – just how many people have already spent $7,989.50 on this set to generate the mail-out? Surely not more than a handful? Is a handful enough for the Amazon uber-computer to spam anyone who has ever bought Henry James (and not even from them I might add) or any one of the other authors contained in the package???

Not a smart mail-out Amazon, go tinker with your filtering system a bit more.

But thanks for the laugh!