Know Your Readers
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 by Harry Lewis
That was the advice of a friend who forwarded to me a recommendation he had received from Amazon. These recommendation systems, drawing on vast databases of information about individuals’ purchase histories, are usually pretty reasonable in their suggestions. I would love to understand this one, though.
| Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated¬†Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Hal Abelson have also purchased¬†Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head by W. Bill Czolgosz. For this reason, you might like to know that¬†Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head is now available.¬† You can order yours for just $12.99 by following the link below.
Product Description
The dead rise. The world dies. Mankind falls and enters Death’s halls. Over 90 poems of carnage, hopelessness and despair mixed with oodles of the living dead await you. Featuring poems by W. Bill Czolgosz, Paul A. Freeman, Keith Gouveia, J.H. Hobson, Rich Ristow, Lester Smith, Steve Vernon, Zed Zefram, Zombie Zak and many others, Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes will not only melt your brain . . . it’ll tear out your jugular! |
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August 25th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I had a similar experience on Amazon: I bought a CD by
the novelty group THE THROWING TOASTERS and Amazon asked
me if I also wanted to buy— A Toaster!
Why the correlation? And might it explain the correlation
of BLOWN TO BITS and Zombies? Asking around I got the
following explanations about THROWING TOASTERS:
(1) If the number of purchases are low enough, Amazon
just does a keyword search. Unlikely for your book which
I am sure sells quite well. Maybe for the Zombie book…
(2) The FEW people who bought the Throwing Toasters CD
also bought Toasters.
Could the word BLOW TO BITS have connotations of violence
so that the Zombie book seemed to be a good match?
August 26th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Another suggestion I got was that it was an artifact of a couple of bulk purchases. Perhaps it needn’t actually have been more than one buyer in common, if that weirdo buyer bought a dozen copies of both books?
By the way, apologies to all commenters whose comments sat in the spam queue for days. For some reason, more than usual seem to have been automatically flagged as possible spam lately, and I didn’t notice that the queue was building up.