Happiness is coming home and discovering a box full of books from amazon.com sitting on my study table. My love affair with amazon.com started many years ago when they first started as an online bookstore. These were wonderful days of passion because they only sell books and nothing else. I would spent hours browsing her stocks, looking at the covers and aching to read the contents between them. Then come the selecting, the buying, and then the waiting.

After months, the books will arrive in pristine condition, clean and well protected in bubble wrappers in their distinctive boxes. Amazon.com appreciated me then. Not the logarithm automatic type of appreciation that appears when I log in nowadays. Those days, they send me Christmas cards and coffee mugs with the amazon.com logos. Ah, the honeymoon period was wonderful.

Then amazon.com became successful and famous for making it as an online bookstore. Amazon.com began selling other stuff aside from their books. Initially one or two DVD will slip into the catalogue. Then whole new departments started appearing. The book department began to shrink. It has become an online shopping mall rather than a bookstore. Oh, how it hurts when amazon.com left her first love, books.

No longer do I get the lingering attention I longed for. The interface become more user friendly but not lover friendly. It takes longer for books to arrive nowadays. Books arrive dirty and tattered, wrapped in plastic over a cardboard. Like a jaded lover, I have been discarded for a bigger market and reduced to a line of code. Ah, amazon.com the online bookstore. How have I loved thee and I love thee still.

 

|posted 24 April 2007|