For immediate release .
Steven A. Bassion
FEBRUARY 1999
Newsletter
AGOODBOOK.COM
the
anti-Amazon?
Last week Amazon announced that it had lost roughly four times as much money in 1998 as it had
lost in 1997 ($124.5 million, compared with a 1997 loss of $31 million), while its customer base and sales both rose by a similar factor of four. At the same time, Amazon enjoys a stock price that can only be described as fantastic, as well as an enormous amount of press attention and free publicity.
This is, as they say, remarkable . . .and I would like to offer some remarks. The speed, functions and design of the Amazon web site have been a sterling example and
inspiration, as the world wide web has grown
The cynicism with which Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, chose to sell books as a promising web commodity is personally offensive to me. Books represent the historical, artistic and cognitive traditions of thousands of years of human culture. Both in conception and in execution they can be, and often are, precious. I wish that ideas - as books and as art were not in the forefront of late twentieth-century hucksterism - cyber or otherwise.
Amazon advertises everywhere. Open an Internet site on anything from pickles to penicillin and you will be offered related reading by Amazon. And, Amazon enjoys "media darling" status - tons of free publicity.
Amazon is trading it's literally fantastic stock for a broader and deeper reach at onsumers.
Given the financial logic and realities of the moment, Amazon is pursuing the only apparent course to long-term viability. If it can't make money selling only books . . .then books and music . . .if not then, then what . . .so that one day it will have enough stuff to sell that it can cover it's overhead and variable costs . . . and make money for it's stockholders. This is called, "building a consumer franchise." This is the Henry Kissinger approach to marketing: dominance by insufferable arrogance and brute force.
What do these products have in common? They are all royalty products. Interesting; what does that mean? Artists and art. Yet where one could be discerning among styles and individual artists, Amazon (among others) is in your face pushing stuff: "Like this, try that."
I would also say it is that these products serve needs that are intangible, yet undeniably real. I would also say that the manufacturing costs of these products are infinitesimal relative to the price charged the customer.
What's constant is the human need for artistic reinforcement. What's wrong with this picture is the supermarket-style marketing: fast-talking men in cheap suits and expensive shoes, "Like cupcakes?; try wafers." It's the marketing mantra: "trade up, add value, meet un-met needs, create new needs." But what are supermarket customers looking for?
Nourishment or satisfaction. And the supermarketers are pushing taste, texture, sweetness, hope or desperation.
In art as in the super-market, the intense sales effort is missing the essential that virtually every customer is seeking: nourishment and (aesthetic) satisfaction. And the unmet need begets the unhappy purchase of more stuff.
If we abandon the possibilities of the Internet to the marketing pimps, then Internet becomes just a way we can live without seeing the hunger in everyone's eyes.*
Reader's ideas are welcome on our bulletin board.
Email me at:
Steven A. Bassion
Other matters:
THE WINNER IS: houghton@argo.net.au . Our subscriber from West Australia is winner of a copy of The Woman Who Hated Lawrence Durrell.
Register for the March giveaway, Terhanian's Logical Conclusion,
when you visit www.agoodbook.com .
Amazing Book Recommendation of the Month: Balkan Ghosts, by Robert D.Kaplan.
This is a literate and enlightening explication of two thousand years of Balkan history that
underlies the seemingly intractable terror and tragedy in Yugoslavia and it's environs
Amazing Movie Recommendation of the Month: Hope Floats.
This is a new movie, wonderfully written and directed about the lessons of life. My favorite character and actor is Gina Rowlands as the taxidurmist/mother.
Ponderable of the Month:Readers are invited to submit the name of the funniest book they
read in 1998. .
All Cyberbooks are sold with our Don't Worry; Be Happy, money-back, satisfaction guarantee.
AGoodBook Pick of the Month:
The Woman Who Hated
Lawrence Durrell
by Joy S. Lake
After losing her husband to alcohol and her agent to AIDS, a writer of romance novels travels to Istanbul, hoping to create the same sense of wonder that Lawrence Durrell created about pre-World War II
Egypt in his Alexandria Quartet. She is haunted by the contrast between her own emptiness and the lushness of Durrell's
prose.
She discovers that she cannot write about romance until she recovers a sense of faith in her own life, and in life-in-general. The results are not what she expected.
THE WOMAN WHO HATED LAWRENCE DURRELL, by Joy S. Lake, (231 pages, 330K) is available only as a download through the Internet from www.agoodbook.com , and for only $4.95.
Excerp
Studying the empty streets, Faruk nodded. He didn't touch her or
look at her. More silence. They passed pedestrians at odd places, none
seemed to belong to the night. Daphne again recalled Durrell: the
pressure of the headlights now peeled off layer after layer of the
darkness, bringing up small intimate scenes of Egyptian life--a
drunkard singing, a biblical figure on a mule with two children
escaping from Herod, a porter sorting sacks--swiftly, like someone
dealing cards.
More silence. Daphne wondered if they were headed back to her
hotel. Was it very late? She couldn't tell. She wasn't wearing a watch
and couldn't see the clock on the dash. She felt emotionally drained,
though not conscious of fatigue or drowsiness. She said nothing and
might have fallen asleep for an instant or become lost in her thoughts,
because suddenly the car was not moving. She looked up and saw they were indeed at the hotel. Faruk spoke,
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