11 December 1998: In Praise of Amazon.com

Friday, 11 December 1998:

In Praise of Amazon.com

One thing to say about Amazon.com is that they've pretty much got the customer service thing down pat. A few months ago I placed an order and then decided the next day to add something to it. Their customer rep told me to just place another order with similar payment and shipping information, and he'd combine it with my first order. That worked out fine.

Well, Tuesday I placed an order, and then had to cancel one item and add another item. Cancelling is trivial - you can do it all through their Web page. But when I placed a second order with the extra item and sent them mail to combine the orders (to save on shipping), it took them a while to get back to me - presumably due to the holiday seasonal order volume they have to deal with. So the orders ended up getting shipped separately - but the customer service person who responded to my inquiry said they'd credit me with the cost of the extra shipping. And, despite the season, everything shipped pretty much exactly on time as just as if Christmas and Hanukkah weren't around the corner.

The only bad thing I've heard about Amazon so far is that they apparently fleece people on used and rare books; I guess they basically find books using Bookfinder and Bibliofind, and then mark them up. But that's not a big deal - if you're aware that you can yourself find used books on-line as easily as they can.

I've also had great luck finding import stuff - particularly CDs - through Amazon. For instance, an old college friend of mine - who just dropped me e-mail today having found my Web site after several incommunicado years - introduced me to The Crusaders, specifically their album The Second Crusade, which I finally bought on import (the only CD issuing it's had, as far as I know) through Amazon. Nice.

In other net.news, apparently public stock of eBay has gone through the roof in the last couple of months - going from $20 per share to ten times that. That's pretty amazing. I'd expect it to drop to saner levels in the long haul (a year or two from now), but they do have a rather nice system. Like Amazon, they're getting by primarily on their merits, I think. A nice thing to see in this age of Microsoft and such companies whose performance doesn't live up to their marketing.

Last night we had our monthly SF book discussion where we talked about Steven Gould's Helm, which I read quite a while ago. It was a fair-to-middling discussion; people generally thought it was enjoyable, but were disappointed that is wasn't more science-fictional, having the feel of a fantasy novel. We did have a good debate over the nature of the artifact of the title, and whether it was used wisely by anyone in the story. We also agreed that his earlier two novels were better.

Afterwards I went with my friend Doran - who I recently persuaded to start coming to the discussions - to his apartment, which I hadn't been to before. He and his SO, Fran, introduced me to their cute-but-shy cat, Jack, as well as their three rabbits and two guinea pigs ("prey animals", they called them). They were all quite nice, and one of the guineas was very friendly, enjoying attention and chirping happily when he was petted. Nice! I had a good time visiting them, and stayed there perhaps a little too late, and got to bed late and was quite tired today.

I finally completed my collection of Fantagraphics reprints of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant newspaper strip, having found the four out-of-print volumes on eBay. I read 'em all tonight; good stuff! Foster really is one of the great American illustrators. Almost certainly the greatest newspaper strip artist ever, and a strong contender for best craftsman of sequential art. His storytelling can be a little shaky - especially inasmuch as he's basically telling stories of high adventure and sometimes light fantasy - but the art more than makes up for it.

If you're a fan of Marvel Comics, you might appreciate this year's Fantastic Four Annual. It focuses on The Thing (who is, after all, the most interesting member of the foursome), who gets zapped into a parallel world where the FF really did go up in a rocket in 1963 - and is now 35 years older. The Thing of "our" world went up with his partners only ten years ago, and this was a clever way of combining "what ifs" with the necessary comic book revisionism that says our protagonists must remain forever young. The poker game between the Thing, Thor, Wolverine and Doctor Strange is cute.

Only other notable pickup this week was the paperback collection of Justice League: The Nail, the "Elseworlds" story in which Superman is not adopted by the Kents when he arrives on Earth, and the world evolves without a Superman. This story works much better in one volume than in its original three-book form, and I noticed for the first time that all of the principal heroes get a full-page panel to themselves. The Hawkwoman page is particularly striking (of course, writer/artists Alan Davis draws a [there's no better word for it] scrumptious Hawkwoman).

Called up a friend today about seeing the movie A Bug's Life. We'll probably go see it next week. I told him I'm thinking of seeing Star Trek: Insurrection this weekend, and then I added, "or maybe I'll just beat my head against a brick wall, instead." He responded, "I think I'd go with the wall, myself." He's really down on the recent Trek films, and I see Diane Patterson wrote a scathing review of it. My Dad wrote that he's seen some good reviews of it, but I've mostly heard mediocre-to-poor things about it. Of course, I thought First Contact was a terminally mediocre film, with poor plotting, weak humor, and awful characterization - especially of Picard - and it got pretty good reviews, so I don't expect much.

I don't think I've talked much about the aforementioned friend - Bill - before. He's Tracy's SO, and we game together occasionally. Very nice guy, great sense of humor, and works at Pegasus Games, which is one of the best gaming stores I've ever been so. Maybe the best.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)