Morning Coffee – 10 July 2019
Here are a few stories to read this Wednesday morning.
- Did you know HP Lovecraft was a ghost writer for Harry Houdini?
- The animals in illustrated manuscripts in the Middle Ages weren’t just decoration; they also symbolized virtues or vices.
- PW’s open letter to Jame Daunt somehow manages to be both condescending and self-righteous.
- The EFF’s 3-year-old lawsuit over DRM and the DMCA can move forward.
- Amazon billed a student $3,800 for a textbook that was returned late. I think they charged her the "used" price.
Comments
Karena Andrusyshyn July 10, 2019 um 3:00 am
Ijust uninstalled Chrome on all my machines and will not reinstall unless and until the followinf is fixed. I was busy teaching via video conferencing four elementary students in China and was showinfg them something to augment what was in the reader when I noted an ad popping up on my screen that was porn. It was digital porn, but oporn none-the-less. It was an avatar of a younf female showing her genitalia. I think the briowsers need to consider what these ads are worth!
Richard Hershberger July 10, 2019 um 9:44 am
The textbook story is an interesting example of how Amazon is too big to actually communicate. Having someone with actual authority costs money–you don’t give actual authority to a sub-minimum wage worker in some south Asian country. Being unwilling to invest in actual customer service, they instead have cheap, crappy customer service.
My guess is that the father’s calls did in fact lead to the refund. The problem was kicked upstairs until it reached someone with the authority to fix the problem. But that person had far too much on his plate to spend the time to communicate with the customer, too. Or even to instruct a flunky to do this. So while the underlying problem eventually got fixed, they still managed to have a pissed off customer.
It is fascinating watching Amazon enter into the stage of being too big to make routine judgments requiring a human. They are too big to make sure they are sending you the genuine item, much less to police their third party merchants. It is early, but I think we are seeing the limits of trying to be the single marketplace for everything.