Quick Addendum and Blood Oath

I was just on Amazon's site and I forgot a biggie for my list of Books I Will Not Read: ANY BOOK that comes up as a "Sponsored" book when you do a search on a particular writer. That's a disgusting practice of Amazon's, especially when they list their sponsored books first, ahead of the author you're actually trying to look up.

And they have the effect of squeezing my own stuff out of what should be my own list, which is long thanks to the many introductory essays I've written in addition to my own books. When a certain former President declared certain companies "too big to fail," I thought that was full of crap. Amazon, however, may be too big to fail because there is simply nothing to replace it unless they really, really transgress.

Sadly, they made their bones as a bookseller but now they treat books with the same reverence as bird food and you don't want to know how many books I return because they simply have a robot drop them in an envelope and let the post office swallow it up. It's actually luck if a book arrives undamaged and it becomes a question of damage tolerance and "return fatigue" when I get book shipments. Yes, there are alternatives, and I use them, but the fact is that if I used them for everything I couldn't buy as many books.

And I still need to get bird food from somewhere.