How to Lose Sales and Influence No One

Excuse me while I bitch: performing a quick but thorough search on Amazon for a book is a futile effort these days. For example, I did a search for Hudson River Valley and came up with 21240 results, all because of their inside the book feature. The featured selections are fine enough but few are relevant. So I thought I’d see what the public is buying; I changed the sort to Bestselling and found that the number one bestselling book for the Hudson River Valley is… “How To Win Friends And Influence People”—because the word ‘river’ appears a number of times I guess.

So I performed the search with the selection in quotes and found that the bestselling book is “Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” because of “the anti-rent protests against Dutch plantations in the Hudson River valley during the 1840s.” This Inside the Book feature is not only a questionable abuse of copyright but it destroys the usability of the quick search function. Amazon is in danger of becoming a dinosaur because of such user-unfriendly arrogance. Where’s Google when you need them.