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Dealing with Amazon.com

I may have found the best way to energize Amazon.com when serious errors crop up on their pages! Threaten their perceived hegemony.

Last week a casual look at their site revealed they had suddenly dropped two of our titles (previously listed correctly) with the annotation of "not yet published" even though they had over the past few months ordered from us a dozen copies of these books! I promptly went over to BarnesAndNoble.com, that had been my nemesis all along (for reasons too long to explain) and sent Amazon.com a message on the errors, attaching the relevant BarnesAndNoble.com pages with an additional note that "this is how it should be done."

Amazon.com promptly (within a day!) replied that their research still indicated our two books were not published "since they were not available via Ingram" and that they would only list them when they were "again" available via Ingram. (True, for some reason until recently only B&T were interested in carrying us.) My reply that in that case I'd have to advertise in our marketing flyers that the books were only available via BarnesAndNoble.com brought about an immediate correction of the errors...

Two morals to the story. First, monitor the online stores carefully: it's a fluid picture out there. Second, be firm: you have more clout than you can imagine!

Sam Decalo
Florida Academic Press


James A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive
Oregon, WI 53575-1129
phone: 1-608-835-7937
e-mail: mbr@execpc.com
e-mail: mwbookrevw@aol.com
http://www.midwestbookreview.com


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