An open letter to Amazon.com

(Update 1/13: Problem fixed – thanks to everyone who forwarded, helped and empathized)

Greetings people of Amazon.com:

We’ve gotten along well. I write books and you help me sell them. Generally I’m fond of you and all you do.

Recently you’ve done something that makes it hard to sell one of my most popular books, Making Things Happen. You’ve put the cover for the out of print edition of the book, which had a different name, where the new edition should be.

This looks bad and is confusing for our customers.

It has happen before, and I’ve complained through my publisher, O’Reilly Media. It was fixed, but returned. Twice. And here we are again. Can we fix this please? I’m embarrassed by it. I assume you are too. It’s just an image file, and it can’t be hard fix.

And while you are there: I’ve asked previously for the 46 reviews from the old edition to be moved to the new, as it’s the same book, but was told no. If you can move the cover over by accident, can we move those reviews over on purpose, for my and everyone’s benefit?

Thanks,

Signed, One of your customers


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6 thoughts on “An open letter to Amazon.com

  • rcman - January 13, 2011 at 5:38 pm #
  • Scott,

    I used to work for a major publisher and the way the covers for our books got up to Amazon was by a weekly feed of .jpgs. If there was a problem with a cover image it was our doing not Amazon’s. Your beef may be with O’Reilly.

    FWIW.

  • annu - January 10, 2011 at 10:09 pm #
  • Love the power of social media, come on Amazon, you can do better than this!

  • annu - January 10, 2011 at 10:06 pm #
  • Love the power for internet. Come on Amazon, you can do better than this.

  • Sean Crawford - January 10, 2011 at 9:13 pm #
  • Good letter, good tone. I chuckled. I think I will read it aloud at work to brighten up my leadership class.

  • Anonymous - January 10, 2011 at 8:54 pm #
  • Emailed Jeff Bezos ? He has a rather effective staff of people handling customer fails emailed to him.

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