There’s a recent post on Fine Books Blog about online booksellers requesting extra charges for shipping:

A bookseller copied me today on a complaint he sent to Abebooks. The gist of the problem was this. A customer ordered a book, and the dealer requested extra charges for shipping since the book was heavy. This happened over a weekend and the customer was out of email contact for a few days. Four days elapsed, and Abebooks cancelled the order automatically. The customer, thinking the book was not available, bought a copy from someone else.

I completely sympathize with the dealer’s anger at the lost sale. . . .

But I also think that the “extra charges” feature is plain bad business. We live in a world of one-click ordering online, and when book buyers place an order, they reasonably expect that they are going to get the book in the mail.

“Extra charges” is a messy solution to the equally messy question of how to set shipping rates. Online booksellers should always figure the extra cost of shipping a heavy book into its price. But the difference in postage cost between a one pound book and a four pound book is often much greater on international shipments and domestic Priority Mail shipments than on standard domestic shipments.

Listing services like AbeBooks could borrow an idea from Chrislands, a service that hosts online bookstores (including Using Books). The shipping matrix on Chrislands-hosted sites allows sellers to set a range of shipping rate levels for heavy and oversized items. (I haven’t taken advantage of this feature yet.)

Amazon Marketplace has a built in approach to the problem. Sellers can disallow international or Priority Mail orders on an item-by-item basis, which is more of a dodge than a solution. AbeBooks, Alibris, and Biblio have “request extra charges” features.

Recently announced on Amazon’s seller forums:

Over the next few weeks we will begin displaying the standard domestic shipping cost alongside the price of the item. Buyers will have the option to sort the display of listings either by item and shipping cost combined (this will be the default view) or by item price alone (this is how the page works today).

Very good. I’ll applaud all attempts to make shipping charges more transparent.

This affects Amazon’s non-media categories, where some sellers have more leeway in setting shipping rates, more than it does books, CDs, and movies. But Amazon does explicitly mention an aspect of this change that might be slightly controversial to their Marketplace sellers:

Products that are sold or fulfilled by Amazon may qualify for “Super Saver Shipping” or the “Prime” shipping subscription program; accordingly, these items will not display a shipping cost[.]

“Super Saver Shipping” is Amazon’s free shipping offer for orders of over $25. “Prime” is a program that allows customers to upgrade shipping on Amazon-filled orders for a flat annual fee. The affect of this is that listings for items that are shipped from Amazon’s warehouses will sometimes receive better placement even when the customer’s order won’t qualify for free shipping under the “Super Saver Shipping” program.

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After The New York Times’ recent profile of a happy owner of the $8,000 Complete Penguin Classics Library and the release, on Amazon, of five more economical sets of Penguin Classics (The American Collection Volumes One & Two, The Complete Greeks and Romans, The English [& Scottish] Collection: 19th-Century British Fictions, and The Children’s Library), I though it would be a good time to revisit the matter of the forgotten Classics — that is Penguin Classics that have fallen out of print and aren’t included in the 700 pound shrink-wrapped pallet of print that makes up the Complete Library.

So I’ve searched my shelves for another sampling of forgotten Classics. Parts of some of these books may be represented in titles that did make it into the Complete Library and the others are likely in print from other publishers. Whether they’re classics or not, they’re no longer Penguin Classics.

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Yesterday’s New York Times has an article on Amazon.com’s tenth anniversary. Sometime in the last ten years the press started covering Amazon as a business instead of as a novelty.

Last Sunday happened to be the fifth anniversary of my last day at Amazon, by the way.

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The AP is reporting on a May 31 court ruling that will require Borders’ online division to pay California state sales tax for internet sales that it made in 1998 and 1999.

Borders argued that it owed no tax because, though the parent company has more than 100 stores in California, its online division has no presence in there. But:

California’s 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco rejected that argument, ruling on May 31 that the Borders’ Web site and retail stores have been too intertwined to call themselves separate companies. The three-judge panel cited in-store advertising for the Web site, receipts that said “Visit us online at www.borders.com” and the ability of customers to return online merchandise at retail stores.

The article speculates on the implications for other retailers:

The decision could lead to similar rulings by the State Board of Equalization against New York-based Barnes and Noble Inc. and maybe even Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc., which handles online sales for Borders and other bricks-and-mortar affiliates, paying them a cut of the profits, said Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Association.

Barnes and Noble’s online business certainly seems at risk of receiving a big tax bill from California. Amazon seems exposed. Its Alexa and A9 divisions are both based in California.

If the same argument can be made in other states’ courts, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and other chain retailers with online sales divisions may end up owing back taxes elsewhere. Amazon only has a presence in a handful of states, so they’re likely safe unless a court rules that Amazon’s thousands of Marketplace and Zshops sellers (or Borders for that matter — their website has been managed by Amazon since 2001) can be called its “agents”.

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I notice that Amazon is jumping on the tagging bandwagon. They’re using word frequency statistics from books in their “Search Inside” program to auto-generate tags that they’re calling Statistically Improbable Phrases:

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

The phrases are listed on a given book’s Amazon detail page, just below the “Product Details” area, and they’re linked to lists of other books that use the same phrase.

For example, “Productive writer” and “tormented writer” are both used three times in If on a winter’s night a traveler. Those phrases don’t appear together in any other books in Amazon’s sampling, but they’re each used once in a handful of titles. It’s sort of funny that “productive writer” largely appears in books about writing, while “tormented writer” appears mostly in books about writers.

Word frequency statistics are further broken down on a book’s Text Stats page, which includes a chart of the books 100 most frequently used words presented in a format that seems a little familiar.

Another way to get your word count kicks: Compare statistics from different translations of the same book.

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This is the first in a series of stories about my experiences at Amazon.com, where I worked from November 1996 through July 2000.

In October 1996, I was looking for a job. I’d finished an unsatisfying six month temp job at Microsoft in September and had been getting by on occasional short term temp assignments. I gave my resume to the manager of every bookstore within a thirty minute bus ride of my neighborhood. Each of them told me that they only hired people with previous bookstore experience. I didn’t have the charisma to talk any of them into a formal interview.

There were a couple of jobs for book warehouses advertised in the Stranger’s classifieds. Reasoning that experience in another area of the book industry might qualify me for a bookstore interview in six months or a year, I called one of the numbers. One ad was for a New Age book distributor. (They went out of business a year later). The other ad was for an internet bookseller. Hiring was being handled by a temp agency that I’d worked for in the past. I called and scheduled a time for an interview and written test for the next day.

To pass an interview at a temp agency an interviewee only has to demonstrate to the interviewer that he is lucid. I passed the interview with flying colors. The written test was a simple math quiz. Within half an hour, they’d scheduled me for an interview at the warehouse the next day.

It was Halloween. I wore my interview clothes. I arrived at the Second and Lander warehouse as close to fifteen minutes early as the bus schedule allowed.

My interviewer was Beth, and if I remember correctly, she had a purple streak in her hair. This interview was more comprehensive than the temp agency interview.

Other Amazon interviewees of the day report having been asked Microsoft-style “How Many gas stations are there in Texas?” brain teaser questions (and I may have asked some of those same questions in panel interviews a couple of years later). The closest Beth’s interview got to this line of questioning was when she asked, “What drives you?”

I asked for clarification, “‘What drives me’ in which part of my life?”

“This is sort of a Zen question,” she explained.

“I see… It doesn’t matter what I answer. It matters how I answer.”

I was hired and scheduled to begin working the next Tuesday — Election Day. I was given the address of the new warehouse — they were moving their entire inventory over the weekend — but failed to write down the company’s name. I forgot it immediately.

On Tuesday morning, I rode the 174 bus from downtown, past the Kingdome and into industrial Sodo. I looked over the other passengers and tried to identify one who might be a coworker, settling on a hippy-ish girl with close-cropped hair. She got off at my stop and I followed her for the one block to the warehouse. Another new hire followed me. The building had no sign showing the company’s name. I walked in through the door marked “Employees Only” and was careful to memorize the company’s name the first time it was mentioned.

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