Quote Originally Posted by catherine View Post
I think about how Amazon is a pretty new business model, relatively speaking. I looked at my account, and I was able to scroll as far back as 1995. My first order was December 11, 2002--and I spent $102 on five books--I'm guessing they were Christmas presents.

So in 23 years (one-third of my life) it has become embedded in a way that I now find hard to relinquish. I like the ease and convenience, the data history, the range of items to purchase, and other reasons. I could give up the Prime benefits, and I would definitely not miss Prime video because it's not as good as it used to be. But, "a luxury once tasted becomes a necessity" and, alas, I've found that Amazon comes close to being a luxury-turned-necessity.

But I would love to cut the cord.

As far as shopping local, I'm lucky in that my needs have diminished over the past few years and my area, while rural, is very friendly to small business. I tried a "shop local" personal challenge at Christmas time and it wasn't that hard to simply not shop, and then when I shopped, visit one of the retailers here.

Point is--I did without Amazon for 50 years, and I'm sure I could do without it again.
Bezos started with books and ran a book selling operation for, what, a decade and a half? Before moving into other products

in my library’s book buying operation we used Amazon in those early days for various kinds of bibliographic information including availability because it was, at the time, better than our main suppliers’ databases. Certainly it was glitzier.
So, I have a soft spot in my heart for Amazon because we used it for years and did not buy books from them, ha ha. I suppose you all would think that’s a great FU to Bezos.

One of the downsides of having Amazon on the web available to everyone is that our library employees would be frustrated when we would tell them “sorry, we can’t get [a particular title.]” And they would whine “ but it’s available on Amazon, just look there! “

The reality of those days was that stock availability didn’t really show on Amazon just the fact that the book existed, once existed, or was scheduled to exist in the future. Lots of pre-publication promotion took place for books that never were published.

A great thing about Amazon and later bibliographic databases was that they blurred the line between the old-fashioned “out of print “ and currently available status. Now it doesn’t really matter whether a book is “in print” with copies available from the publisher because near-new used copies are available all over the place.