The Goldfish Chronicles

I’m a big O’Reilly book fan and I’ve lusted after the CJKV [asian language i18n] ever since I got into the concept in Jeffrey Friedl’s first edition of Mastering Regular Expressions. A few weeks ago, I saw that Amazon had 1 copy left in stock and had it up for sale for 30 dollars. Usually it retails at 60 dollars, and as it was over 25 dollars I got free shipping. I leapt on it.

After a while of waiting, I received an email telling me they were unable to ship the book to me. Well, I wasn’t too bothered. I figured the 1 copy turned out to be a ghost and was just a glitch, which I can accept happens.

For a week I forgot about it, until I happened to be on Amazon today and wondered if they’d adjusted the stock level down to 0. I searched for CJKV, and lo and behold, Amazon have it on sale again at 65 dollars, with a full stock [I assume].

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1565922247/qid=1050729813/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6853393-9144945?v=glance&s=books

It’s obvious that what has happened is that Amazon’s bulk-cheap distributor have come up empty on the book, so they’ve switched back to their normal price distributor for the book, but as that is so far removed from me that it feels ruder.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2003 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.