Bought a few books from Amazon.com today. After completing the order, I surfed through a couple of the “you might also like these” suggestions. You know, just browsing the shelves. As you do when you’re at the bookshop or library.
At the foot of one page, an unfamiliar subheading caught my eye:
A literary Wikipedia, perhaps? Reviews, commentary, bibliographic tools, information about collecting incunabula? Naturally, I clicked.
I chose the “featured articles” link, expecting this to show me a representative sample of interesting stuff. It took me to the Amapedia home page. The introductory blurb says Amapedia.com is
“a community for sharing information about the products you like the most. Amapedia is the next generation of Amazon.com’s product wiki feature…”
Sounds pretty cool. I’m a bookish kind of person; people like me tend to like participating in online communities that have something to do with the books we love.
Further down the home page are an image and a description of a USB memory stick.
Thus far, not particularly enticing. This doesn’t really scream “community.”
Let’s try clicking the “random page” link at the top of the page. Wikipedia’s “random page” link often leads me into fascinating anabranches of knowledge and ideas; Amapedia’s might do the same.
The next web page loads. It’s titled “Bible Wisdom for Modern Times.” In a somewhat dauntingly dense slab of text, the author starts by defining wisdom (as a person of the female persuasion) using quotes from the Book of Wisdom, aka the Wisdom of Solomon. Ominously, the author then promises to produce a series of books that will translate and explain wisdom-related extracts from various versions of the Bible. No thanks.
Third time lucky? Hit the “random article” link again. Jackpot! The third article is titled “Porn Jobs: How to Get Into Porn as a Porn Star and Break Into the Business In 60 Days! How to Start Your Own Adult Website.” Hmm. I don’t think there are many job openings in that industry for a portly 43-year-old bluestocking.
OK, one last try. Click.
Oh, joy. Here we have an image of a book cover: “Mastering Time Travel: Voyages Through Time. Anecdotes, Experiences, Opinions, Comments.” Scroll down the page and there’s a table of contents. From this we learn that God created the “Akashic Records.” Apparently these are stored in a “Memory disk on every astral” and the book gives instructions about how to retrieve the memory disk from a human.
I might visit Amapedia again — in a year or two, when I’ve forgotten its name and am not sure what to find via that intriguing link that appeared randomly on an Amazon page. Until then, this ‘community’ can do its own thing with nae bother from me. Sometimes the long tail is just a bit too full of rubbish.
Oh, the books I bought? They’re all available from Australian public and university libraries:
- “A Humument: a treated Victorian novel” by Tom Phillips
- “Woman’s World: a novel” by Graham Rawle
- and “Urgent 2nd Class: creating curious collage, dubious documents, and other art from ephemera” by Nick Bantock.
Two books created from collage and one about the why and how of making that kind of art.
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