infundibulum

a search on alibris.

Like everyone else I tend to head off to Amazon.com to look for books. But when I ended up at alibris.com just now, I was momentarily shocked—it’s so simple and clean.

Well, come to think of it, no it isn’t—it’s just a run-of-the-mill web site: and like Amazon, it’s not just books any more. There are big tabs up top for movies and music, for instance.

I guess the bottom line is, Amazon is just a mindboggling morass of information. I think that part of the reason that people think of Amazon as “useful” is simply that it’s been around so long.

Case in point: a while back Amazon quietly added tags to their site: visitors could add labels to anything on the site. The web crowd took the fact that Amazon was using tags as a validation. But then soon after they were quietly removed. The web crowd was sad.

But who the hell even noticed? I certainly wouldn’t have seen them without reading an article about them.

That’s why Amazon isn’t just a “web site” any more. It’s an institution. Other websites write articles about Amazon.

But still, Alibris is pretty.

I feel kind of guilty not buying anything from them.