Are You Willing to Boycott Amazon?
June 3, 2008 by Anne Wayman
Filed under Freelancing
You know, probably the only thing other than Angela Hoy’s lawsuit that will stop Amazon’s drive for power over publishing is if we stop buying from Amazon and if we stop linking to Amazon. Sigh.
Sigh, not only because it’s so wonderfully easy to buy books and other stuff at Amazon I hate to make my life more difficult. Admittedly, buying my books through bn.com wouldn’t be that difficult.
The truth is I’ve got probably over 100 affiliate links to Amazon, maybe more. A few are here, others are at my other websites, www.aboutfreelancewriting.com, and www.powerfullyrecovered.com. And sure enough, every month Amazon deposits a small check in my account.
Of course, bn.com has an affiliate program too. But it will take me some serious time to find and change all the links and I suspect my affiliate income will go down because people are much more familiar with Amazon. The money isn’t nearly as significant in my case as the time to make the switch is.
Truth be known, I’ve been hoping either Amazon would change its mind and drop the requirement to use BookSurge or bn.com or some other online bookstore would take the lead and organize a campaign that would include, I don’t know, a bonus for six months or a year or something like that.
Before I start switching links around, let me as you: Are you willing to boycott Amazon?
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I am certainly willing to try to boycott Amazon. I do not have affiliate links, but I will not be adding them to my site. I can certainly find other places to by Amazon’s non-book items.
However, I recently purchase a book from France that had been published within the last few months and I needed within the week. It is really hard for most booksellers to perform to that level.
What Amazon’s monopolistic behavior will do is affect the choices that I make with my own business in the future.
Hey Anne,
Since I live in Canada, it’s Chapters/Indigo all the way here anyway…
But if you do decide to switch links, it may not be as difficult as you think. Using Dreamweaver, you can do a site-wide search for any link that says “amazon.com” (for example) and just plunk in the new link. Save the files and upload — it will take seconds for each one (assuming that the link you are adding is the same for each one…)
~Graham
Jenn… did you check out bn.com for that book? And borders is now trying to do online stuff… Powells.com, which is a great used bookstore in Oregon also does online stuff well.
Mostly thinking out loud.
Graham, I actually still use frontpage… think they’ve got something similar, but each link will be different… maybe if I make a list of the new links first… in order? might work.
Yes, different links will certainly make it more challenging. And I’m not quite sure how FrontPage works (haven’t used it since version 1.0…) but assuming that it has a basic Find/Replace function that works site-wide, just look for the root of the link (i.e. “amazon.com”) and replace it with the corresponding BN link.
If you actually cut it from your list rather than copy, you’ll never lose your place either…
~Graham
thanks Graham… still pondering the best way while hoping amazon will shape up ;)
not to metion how they treat their employees. they hire people part time for 3mths than fire than, and do it all over again. they make it seem like you might be there forever, but than you are gone because you were two points below your rate!!! They fired one girl who was 8mths pregnant for being one point below!
Please boycott amazon.com and tell all of your friends and associates to do so as well!! I ignored a strong request from a professor years ago to please NOT use Amazon to buy books, and I am not finally realizing that the convenience is not worth the compromises of supporting such a terrible, monopolistic, unethical company.