Freaky amazon wishlist synergies
Les Orchard over on 0xDECAFBAD has started a series on Amazon wishlists and programmatically placing purchases on a monthly basis.
Freaky timing as I’ve been playing with a wishlist calculator. Ever been to an iTunes Music Store playlist like this. One of the cool features is “Buy all songs” option with the price of the entire list.
I would love to see a running total on my amazon wishlist. I would love to see a columnar comparison between the price of my wishlist if purchased from Amazon vs purchased used/new from an Amazon reseller.
Whenever I evaluate something from my wishlist, I go through a multi-step process:
- Does my local library have the book - use Jon Udell’s quite excellent Libary Lookup
- Does the book exceed my built-in cost threshold? If so goto step 5
- Does amazon have access to a “good quality” or “new with remainder mark” copy of the book for $5.00 or less under the cost of amazon retail offering. Affiliate sales typically result in a $3.95 shipping charge. If it’s close, I’ll stick to going for free super shipping
- Buy from amazon retail ensuring that I can get free shipping
- If the book is “unavailable” from amazon, I tend to look at Alibris, eBay, Froogle or sometimes Google to try and find the right supplier.
I would suggest that my book purchasing has been cut in half at least by #1 alone. #3 typically results in a two for one cost benefit. I get two books in general for the price of one from Amazon retail. #5 helps avoid getting gouged on rare and out-of-print books.
Other wishlist items for my wishlist would include “Move item to Listmania List” - I tend to keep records of books read by adding them to a listmania list.
It will be interesting to see where Les goes with his Amazon Wishometer.