Amazon.co.uk (amazon.co.uk)

Member Name: Lichfield1979

Product:	amazon.co.uk
Date:	15/09/08 (166 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Huge range of titles

Disadvantages: Where is this leading?

Amazon.com launched in 1995 as an online book retailer and grew steadily through the end of the decade surviving the dot-com bubble and establishing itself as one of the best-known brands on the internet. It did not operate at a profit until winter 2001 although founder Jeff Bezos was named Time Magazine's person of the year for 1999. Today its revenue still dwarves its profit and the company counters this through continued expansion and diversification. Amazon is no longer merely a bookseller and has an extensive range of software, films, music and electrical goods amongst many other products. The website attracts twice as many hits as Walmart, with perhaps fifty million Americans searching it each month. It also owns the Internet Movie Database and has recently taken over AbeBooks.

Amazon.co.uk is one of six additional main international websites the Seattle based company now operates, with the others based in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and China. Amazon's presence in Britain is now well established, with four major fulfilment centres in Bedfordshire, Inverclyde, Fife, and Neath Port Talbot. Many new features of the larger parent site tend not to roll out immediately, and so I often use both when searching, although an increasingly larger proportion of Amazon's features and database of products are available to UK users, and site redesigns tend to catch up every few months. One feature that doesn't seem to have crossed the Atlantic at all so far is the magazine subscription service.

The site allows customers to leave product ratings and feedback, and some of this can be very useful in getting a quick impression of the reputation of something you are unfamiliar with, but happen to have stumbled on. In a bookshop, you'd have to trust only the blurb written by the marketing men, and your own snap judgement. Additional information is especially welcome when comparing two similar items, although I suppose you could get too much of a good thing and be bamboozled out of making any purchase at all, but no more so than wandering down a supermarket aisle and being confronted by eighty-six different brands of hair conditioner.

The site is also able to show what products other customers who bought a particular item were interested in too. Its efforts at making personal recommendations based on your browsing history are somewhat eccentric in my opinion, but Amazon certainly knows how to group together interesting clumps of books on a particular topic that might compliment one another, in a way that at least has the appearance of being a bit more tailored to your needs than what happens to be sitting on the same shelf. At the moment though the American site looks to be ahead with regards to the comprehensiveness of coverage with all these features.

In the early days people may have been cynical about online shopping replacing the more familiar activity of browsing in store, but whilst I'm still fond of roaming around bookshops, the search inside the book function has its uses and the text concordances and statistics available on the American site are certainly an interesting curiosity. It's also possible to listen to audio-clips of CDs and to download digital content such as MP3s and videos. Additionally, Amazon is in the early stages of marketing Kindle, a portable, wireless electronic interface for reading books.

In comparison to the stock that even the largest high street bookshop or film and music store can have on site there is of course absolutely no contest, and the ultimate advantage Amazon has is that you can instantly search for pretty much any volume that's currently in print. In fact, you can also search for books that aren't in print too. Amazon has an affiliate program of smaller booksellers who can list merchandise with them and this includes second hand books. Amazon also offers commission to other websites that generate sales through referral links to its products, so has an entrepreneurial streak to it. Reportedly over a million different sellers have sold goods on Amazon worldwide, and Amazon handles the payments itself, something eBay does not. The success of its online outsourcing initiative MTurk is less clear, and the A9 search engine never took off either.

On goods it ships itself Amazon.co.uk offers 24 hour delivery at a small premium, as well as free delivery on all orders of over £15, although this option will generally take several working days. I have always found this service reliable. They use a variety of freight companies in my experience, and sometimes independent contractors who do a few small deliveries, or royal mail. It is possible to track your order during shipping and their returns and refunds policy is agreeable. I did once receive a slightly damaged copy of an American history book and they agreed to give me a discount when I asked, or rather before I asked, I only had to mention it. Be prepared to deal with them through email though, because you won't find a telephone number very easily, if ever.

Amazon is often able to offer extremely low prices. Consumers may have mixed feelings on this if they feel it may undermine the long-term prospects for high-street booksellers and independent booksellers alike, although the affiliate scheme may go some way to counter this, and of course everybody likes the low prices. Well, almost everybody. Another concern has been that Amazon tends to resist the unionising of its distribution staff. Lastly, there has been some concern within the publishing industry itself with regards to Amazon's discounting practices and how this affects the strength of the book market in general, but this seems to be a matter of details which will get worked out, because any service that makes practically any book available to the public has got to be applauded, and Amazon deserves to have become so well established in such a short space of time as the market leader, in a new form of both large and small-scale book distribution. Waterstones, Blackwells and WHSmith have followed Amazon into this territory with lesser results, and even Tesco has failed to make as much of an impression in this market by comparison.

Pricing concerns aside, Amazon seems like the antidote to the stultification of the bestsellers lists on high street shelves dominated by product placement more than literary merit. The power of an empty search engine bar is not to be underestimated. If there is a battle looming ahead, it may be over how devices like Kindle plan to combat a growth in piracy to match that which the MP3 market has lived in parallel with. Already it's possible to find an awful lot of PDF files online if you know where to look, or torrents of audio books, but if reading on a screen does become more popular beyond surfing web pages, then the text files are only going to become more readily available to those who want them without paying at all. Amazon has already digitised texts to allow searching inside, but has security features in place to prevent reading the whole manuscript. But the landscape is changing. Radio certainly survived tape recorders, and television VHS, despite the fear mongers of their day, but precisely how an equivalent technology will affect books remains a little unclear.

It will be interesting to watch how Google's digitisation of university copyright libraries proceeds, as that is a project that outstrips anything Amazon can do. Many are fearful of the economic ramifications of allowing such a database into the public domain, although perhaps more writers and artists would just become like salaried academics, and technological innovation is nothing new in this field, even if this could rival Johannes Gutenberg, so publishers will have to adapt in order to justify their continued presence as middlemen. Google say they are predominantly interested for now in using the wealth of data for the purposes of their revolutionary language translation projects, which need unfathomably gargantuan reams of raw stimuli to perfect their algorithms, but it remains to be seen whether one day we won't have something akin to an internet public library with full search capacity, and that really would be the dawn of a new information age.

Research is also currently underway to develop a relatively compact machine similar to a photocopier, but which would be able to bind any book from such a central database on site. So perhaps the digitisation of books won't even necessarily mean the end of the bookshop. Or, perhaps, in a couple of decades, we'll all be able to print our own books in the comfort our own homes.

Whatever the future holds, Amazon is a fantastic service right now. As I've said, I love roaming round huge bookshops, but even there, I frequently fail to find what I want if I go looking for something specific, so these days I rarely try. If like me you've constructed fairly obscure personal bibliographies of hundreds of doorstop books you're gradually working your way through, Amazon is your best guarantee of finding what you want. And if, like me, you enjoy reading popular fiction, you'll find that too, at the cheapest price and delivered to your door.

Summary: Best bookseller in the UK