[grahamfreeman]

Hi,

Amazon is OK on occasion, but I prefer Powell's Books. Please include the option to choose Powell's instead of Amazon in the next version of DL.

Thanks,

Graham

[Delicious Monster]

Welcome to another exciting episode of Be The Developer (TM)

OK, so you only have so many hours of engineering in a day. The feature requests are piling up. People want iTunes integration, smart shelves, exporting, importing, printing, web export, sharing — and that's just to catch up to what's available in Tiger. Leopard is right around the corner.

Allowing people to use Powells instead of Amazon will mean diverting engineering resources into not only making this possible in the technical sense, but also having to secure a deal to get the rights to their data, and probably having to build them a web service so you'll be able to get the data, once its available.

What does Powell's offer over Amazon to justify that diversion, and which major feature are you going to cut to make that possible? Be specific, and use relevant examples.

You have 30 minutes.

Good luck!

[grahamfreeman]

Sounds like you need a vacation. I recommend a trip to Portland, Oregon. You can stay at the Hawthorne Hostel, pick up a book at Powell's City of Books, and read it in the Portland Rose Gardens.

Seriously, careful with the attitude - I'm just giving feedback. I'm not the developer; you are. I'm the paying customer who'll consider paying for an upgrade if it suits me. I'm telling you what's important to me. If I didn't like your product and your company, I wouldn't give you some of my time.

So, I like Powell's Books for a number of reasons. They have an excellent selection, and I can visit their stores in person. The stores are pleasant places to be, and they're in a city that I enjoy visiting. Their staff are friendly, smart, and exhibit a genuine appreciation for books. It's a family business, and "Powell" is a human's (last) name. They don't try to sell me a branded credit card, and they don't go to any great lengths to track my activities. Also, the EPIC Bookstore is hosted at Powell's.

In contrast, I've never met anyone from Amazon and they don't have a bookstore for me to visit. The entire experience with them is much more conventional, corporate, and lacking in personality. They are not human to me. They're just a web site and a box that shows up at the door - an "it". "Amazon" is not a human's name - it's just something that was chosen for its branding strength.

Right now, I have to manually add/edit the URL so that it points to Powell's when I use Delicious Library's book recommendation function. I also never even consider purchasing/gifting a book through DL because I use Amazon only as a last resort. So, whether I'm editing an email or manually searching for a book at Powells.com, I expend more effort than I should have to and a revenue stream for Delicious Monster gets a little less wet. A win-win would be for DL to give me the option to use Powell's instead, and then I'd save time and you'd get more money. It makes sense to default to Amazon, since the selection is broader and the options are greater in number, but I want to be able to use a better vendor.

BTW - I took the time to evaluate your product because you're a very small company. I bought it because it does something that makes my life more efficient. These same values are what I'm expressing with regard to Powell's vs. Amazon.

Graham

[Delicious Monster]

Hehe, sorry, whenever I try to give people a look into the decision process over here at DM Central, I come off as cranky. No offense intended, believe me.

I've been to Powell's Books. It's a neat place, but it has the same problem as the Louvre — it gives me a headache because it's so huge and contains so much stuff that I instantly don't know where to start. I just sort of stand there whimpering until I finally sit down and drink a cup of coffee then wander off to one of Portland's fine breweries.

That said, your personal preference is valid. Powell's Books is great. However, Amazon satisfies a far greater need for a far greater number of users than Powells.com ever could, and it's probably for the exact reason that makes you prefer Powell's over Amazon.

Amazon is a huge faceless corporate database of information of most of the world's media, not just books, and not just in the United States. They make that information available in a usable form for developers for free.

As a book store, Powell's may beat Amazon hands down, but as a data source, Amazon is tops. We may well one day allow any data source, including Powells.com, but please understand that as a feature request, it's far down the list of things on which we must spend our time.