Exploring the Amazon
Amazon.com is one of my favourite sites to explore. Nowadays more and more when I find myself on the net with nothing else to do I wind up browsing Amazon. Not just to buy stuff (although it’s always tempting to) but there is so much interesting there. I love the way Amazon remembers me and is continually reminding me of the things I’ve recently looked at, and making suggestions of new things based on what I’ve bought and browsed before.
The community of reviewers is an invaluable way of researching a book or product before you buy it, and also for just exposing oneself to a variety of opinions and schools of thought. And then you can take the next tangent and look at all the books an individual person has reviewed or recommended – for example today I’ve just discovered Dr Robert W. Kellemen who has reviewed a range on interesting books including most recently “Introduction to Christianity” written by Joseph Ratzinger in 1967, which looks like it might be interesting (hopefully easier to read than Memory & Indentity by Pope John Paul II, which I read recently – now that was quite heavy going although I must say I was impressed by how intellligent and widely read the late Pope actually was…) Anyway back to Amazon. Another cool feature is “Listmania” where users create a list of recommended books covering a certain topic or author. To continue with the example of Kelleman (who seems to be quite the Amazon ‘power user’) he has created a bunch of lists which you can browse here, including one of books by Ratzinger, which gives a good insight into how the new Pope thinks. Another user I just discovered is Newt Gingrich, proving that even some well known people use Amazon in this way. Similar, but sightly different to ‘listmania’ Amazon also has these “So You’d Like To..” guides created by users, for example this excellent one : “So you’d like to… Explore the Works of C.S. Lewis” – have a look on the right side of that page to see a bunch of other similar guides.
What else can I say about Amazon? I just seem to keep discovering new facets to the site all the time. The “Recommendations Wizard”, the “Page You Made”, all the various “Stores” and of course the Amazon wishlist. I use mine mainly as a way of keeping track of interesting things I’ve seen which I might decide to order at some point, but of course if you wanted to buy me something off it I wouldn’t complain 
(for other gift ideas try Music Force Mandurah….)
Categories : Internet, books | 0 Comments
