Aside from selling books from this web site and to walk in customers, we also list on Amazon. We sell several books every day and send them all over the country. And for every book we sell, Amazon takes a disgusting commission (seeing as how they do nothing but include our listing).

About a month ago, they decided that every morning, they would send a giant list of 20 or so books that did not go on the site for some stupid reason or another. And sometimes, they contradict themselves and we go nearly mad trying to figure out what they want us to do to list a book for them.

Here’s an example:

I want to list the following book.

Note the “Plastic Comb” binding note. So under binding in our inventory program, I put “Plastic Comb”.

In the morning, I get this error message: “The data you provided for [1408046] does not match the list of valid values.  Please select a valid value from the Data Definitions and resubmit.”

Well, after much wrestling (and because I can’t let a problem go until I get to the bottom of it), I figure out that I need to type “plastic_comb”, not “Plastic Comb” like they list on their own site.

This is just one reason why Amazon is terrible and going the way of eBay.

Bottom line, shop local!

In other news, two of our employees wrote an article (with a video) for the INDenver Times. Check it out.