At Amazon’s Bookstore, No Coffee but All the Data You Can Drink
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Next you'll be tagged with a microchip and every action you do, every item you purchase, every location you visit will be tracked and used to push you more "specialized" and individualized content and adverts from the said mega corps.
Regarding the books, since the amazon book store is only selling books that people read and if there are nothing but amazon book stores, people can only buy (and read) the books that they sell, which means that a book that they don't sell can't be read, which means it won't be sold and thus cannot be read etc.
These days I'm buying as much as I can from places other than Amazon.
I think what will happen is a version of what you suggest where essentially megacorps will take care of the broad human needs, but the niches will remain open playgrounds. Until they become mainstream too, opening up new niches.
Why? Most of the things you described sound like a much welcome improvement over the stuff we have to deal with now.
[0] I have personal experience of this from 20+ years ago, and though I'm long since moved on there are companies I remain unwelcome at though I've never worked there. Years afterwards it could have affected me badly except that the HR at the place which asked for a work-history reference and were told nonsense actually dealt with it in an adult manner and were ok with my explanation.
Amazon made available practically every book in print to its customers, but some continue to fetishize this non-existent egalitarian book store ideal.
Look at the way information has evolved - first through local gazettes and slowly consolidating into international publishers and newspapers. Then the internet came and blew things up with a new protocol, as we all know.
The creation and delivery of physical products looks like it's going down a similar path. Amazon will be almost like an API for physical products. (Developers in the house, forgive me if my metaphor is off.)
Create stuff, send it it to the API and then wait for customers to ping the API for your products.
It will be an automated network of bots that pick up your products, store it (with refrigeration if need be) and then deliver it to any point around the world. The way information packets flow around the internet - this will be the way physical products flow around the world. 100% automated, end-to-end, fully democratizing product creation.
AI will determine which warehouses get the most of your products but every producer in the world will have access to the best logistics network in the world. Think of how many companies have a moat based on distribution. The promise of eCommerce will finally be fulfilled - and all of this because of driverless car tech and automated warehouses.
(I considered linking to its Amazon listing, but that seemed like it would've been a little too on the nose.)
MANY companies allow you to fund a wallet of one kind or another for internal transactions.
It's also happened in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
Since bitcoin, if you look at all the ICOs on the Ethereum platform then technically all these companies ARE issuing their currency (i.e. tokens).
Of course, the earlier Neuromancer had many of the same themes. Both are seminal works in the cyberpunk genre.
I spent decades browsing bookstores with their paltry inventory of bestsellers, occasionally resorting to ordering a book through them. I like Amazon a lot better (and the prices are far better, too). I buy a ton of books from Amazon.
I don't miss the bookstores.
I'm just outside of the city limits, so a library card would cost me $130 / year. I don't spend much more than that on books plus Amazon ships it to me, so it's less expensive in the end.
I was pretty excited by the fact that I could buy my own books when I got my first job. I still miss Borders.
Never seen that anywhere else.
I've seen other bookstores which at least have a quiet librarian, but frankly I don't know how half the bookstores in Toronto stay afloat.
Amazon has way more selection, including cross-listings from self publishers (which for some obscure topics and authors, is the only way). They don't try to bundle a communist manifesto with your order, and they actually list some details about the book which even somebody who's read it might have missed.
One thing I maybe miss a little is being able to feel and see the print quality of the book in advance, but I think that's more a matter of bias than a judgement of the quality of the contained words.
Besides, just today I was reading HN and saw a reference to a book. I popped over to Amazon and bought a copy. I never would have heard of the book by any bookstore proprietor (and it was published in the days before those bookstores vanished).
Amazon has hardly eliminated serendipity.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -- Haruki Murakami
Today everyone (not just those near a well-stocked bookstore with a good librarian) can browse and order from literally millions of titles.
The (relatively few) people who used to have a well stocked bookstore with a good librarian nearby are probably a bit worse off under Amazon. Everyone else is a lot better off.
This one, in particular, would be a lot more powerful from a librarian.
It seems like if the key value added is talking to the people, requiring a whole bookstore to do so was useful when you needed the bookstore itself but now it's a huge add on cost and hassle.
Effectively they were bundling two reasonably distinct services into one. One of which is now served (generally) better by Amazon.
So with that in mind, could a business be built entirely around the extra value added? Real, personalised recommendations that come from speaking to someone who loves the topic.
Pay for some time to speak to them, and get recommendations.
This could be extended into other fields too, films, tv series and games are the main ones that spring to mind.
The one-on-one approach does not scale. We already have the many-to-many form of this (goodreads, for example).
It's worth noting that what we had previously was effectively a store manager working part time as what I'm suggesting. Your hourly cost there is also (if full time) equivalent to well into the top decile of earners in the UK.
> The one-on-one approach does not scale.
Does it need to scale? The previous setup was already a one on one approach. The advantage of it now is that location is not important and I could talk immediately to a recommender pretty much anywhere rather than only the one at my local book store.
You'd probably need more than 5 minutes for the first set of recommendations, right? If they can give you 5 recs in the first 5 minutes of talking to you, then those recommendations aren't necessarily so personalized (or, at least, the nominal lift above crowd-sourced recs is dubious).
> what we had previously was effectively a store manager working part time as what I'm suggesting.
Good point. Let's call it $20/hour, then? Starts to sound a little better. (but, of course, without a physical footprint & actual books to sell, you need to spend more on marketing, so you need to charge more).
> The advantage of it now is that location is not important and I could talk immediately to a recommender...
I get the appeal. If I was provided reliable, way-better-than-crowdsourced recommendations, then that would be worth a lot to me - easily enough to justify a one-time fee (say, $30) and then $1 per book or $5 per series. I doubt that's possible, though =( Even really close friends with really similar tastes to mine, with whom I have regular long conversations about books, still have occasional misses when the recommend books to me, and vice-versa.
Their strategy is lift the burden of closing sales for their employees thanks to seamless payment (or even better, Amazon Go technology) and have them focus on adding value through conversation and recommendations.
Second hand bookshops are a different matter though.
Some chain bookstores certainly had a few good staff members, but the selection and consistent quality of the staff was lacking.
I will also humbly suggest that independent bookstores were great places to find likeminded people back when being a geek/nerd wasn't trendy.
Anyway, the internet has solved a lot of the recommendation and curation problems of the past, so the independent bookstores have had to struggle to find a way to add value such that people actually shop there. It's possible, but much tougher than the past, imho.
What if you never see great book on the shelf because it's an indie book and not published by one of the big 5? That's really where an independent bookshop comes into play. In this way Amazon operates closer to an independent because it pushes indie books as well.
It was the only place I could go to easily be exposed to technologies and products that I had never heard of. Also great where the game development books that would have a CD just full of the weirdest and craziest games that they got from who knows where.
Hmm... at one time, New York City had probably a couple of dozen full-featured daily newspapers. Does the New York Times have any "obvious signs of corporate guilt" about having driven those to oblivion?
I've been in a number of their stores over the past year and each one has felt rather different, and I discovered quite a few interesting books I otherwise would never have come across. I hope they continue to be a viable business.
On another note, I've experienced progressively worse delivery and customer service from Amazon over the past two years, causing me to cancel my Prime subscription (which I had from launch) and to stop ordering from them altogether. They need to ditch their crap courier service in the UK.
I mean, if you generated one for each class of people, you'd probably find that there are easier statistical trends, but conceptually.
In fact, now that I think about it a bit more, you likely could use something like the Netflix algorithm and very broadly read people, who overlap on what you have read, then look for books they've read that score lowest on similarity to things you've read based on inverting the scoring mechanism.
It wouldn't be perfect, but with some tuning you could probably make that work as a simpler model than the DNN one.
Go to Goodreads/Librarything, choose a subject/genre you never read and choose the 6th highest rated book (to avoid spam/flash popularity problems)
Personally I'm pretty doubtful this method will give you something you actually want to read though.
I've read about 20 books per year for the last three years. I buy most of them through Amazon and always mark them as read on Goodreads in order to get better recommendations.
And yet, I can't remember a single book that I have read exclusively based on showing up as recommended on Goodreads/Amazon. It's usually a word of mouth, some researching, and a couple of classics I've never gotten around to from time to time (currently finishing Fahrenheit 451 for example).
At best, the recommendations end up on my to-read list, usually forgotten, and disappear from there too when I do a cleaning of my to-read list because it got cluttered.
I assume it depends on the genres, especially with something like Goodreads. I mainly only read a single genre so it must be fairly easy for them to recommend me books.
To make the matter even more complicated, I sometimes read books from my own region, not translated into English (which, of course, makes them unavailable on Amazon), so the algorithm would have to count those ones into recommendations too.
I don't think that anyone is investing a lot of effort in solving this gigantic problem. Amazon just wants to sell you more books, it doesn't matter if you read them or not. I don't think that Goodreads has enough of the capacity to make their recommendations actually work for someone as complex as me.
http://bookweb.org/for-the-record
Barnes and Noble got driven out of business because they tried to be Amazon with store space. Right now it's hard to improve on Amazon's supply chain.
Independent bookstores that add value (carefully curated books, signing events, an educated staff) are doing well. They just have to put effort into it so they can make money.
This is not a case of predatory licensing, it's about adding value. Independent bookstores that are just a crappy offline version of Amazon with no differentiation are getting their lunches eaten, since they just don't add any value.
The one down the road still seems to be open and not having a liquidation sale. Maybe you're thinking of B. Dalton Bookseller or Waldenbooks?
Has anyone found good online alternatives to Amazon for books? Best I've found is jet.com which resells B&N at a lower price subsidized by Walmart - nice, but selection isn't huge. Abebooks is good but is owned by Amazon.
No one forced people to stop shopping at a mom and pop store, but why the hell would I when I can look up exactly what I want, research it in detail and buy it in less time than it takes for me to get the car down the block.