My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos... ruined dreams... this wasted land. But most of all, I remember Amazon Books. To understand what it was, you have to go back to another time... when the world was powered by the black fuel... and the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now... swept away.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to Amazon Books.
Today Amazon Books opened in my town. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
One morning, when Gregor Bezos woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible bookstore.
Technically any amount of time can be measure in any unit. It's how science has worked for seconds now.
After the big waves of bookstore closures, the remaining new bookstores I've visited in the past few years have all been pretty busy. I don't know how the used bookstores are doing.
Wait, what I meant to say is retail stores are all alike; Amazon's is alike in its own way.
-Amazon Books...? in a voice that rustled.
I went down yesterday to the Amazon Bookstore with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing.
Wait that would clearly be superior as:
I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the opening of Amazon Books, which was a new thing.
Print-on-Demand. It's a thing. There's a machine at the campus bookstore.
There's a 3D printer at our local library. My kids want a T-Rex.
I like to believe that this is Amazon's parting (and delayed) "HAHAHA FUCK YOU" to Borders/Waldenbooks. "Oh, you went out of business because online book buying ate your lunch? Well guess what we're doing now!"
liquidlucre, past EC2 and AWS, from stream of show to band of broad, brings us by a compendious vertical integration back to Amazon Books.
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front reder and baut a papr book it parbly ben the las papr book on the Puget Sound any how there hadn't ben none for a long time befor it nor I aint looking to see none agen.
Oh lovely lovely lovely neb stormcrow et al!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single e-commerce behemoth in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a bookstore.
My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos... ruined dreams... this wasted land.
This is lovely, evocative, though perhaps a tad pessimistic? You really shouldn't give this to amazon, nor to any of its competitors.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Bezos, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Amazon Books, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
Very often, when a man says "I am going to go to Amazon Books", we should say that this was an expression of intention.
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through Amazon Books. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond Biographies & Memoirs."
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Bezos son of Jorgensen, that brought countless ills upon the bookstores. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Amazon Books, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jobs fulfilled from the day on which the son of Gates, king of men, and great Bezos, first fell out with one another.
A screaming comes across the Amazon Bookstore.
It has happened before but there is nothing to compare it to now.
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in Amazon Books.
On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a book at Amazon Books, was wending his way home.
And that's just about all there is to it.
Hwaet! We Bec-Dena in becdagum
TheodCEOinga thrym gefrunon
Hu tha Amazonigas ellen fremedon.
Hectic, wispy Jeff Bezos came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
--Laborare. Have fun. Fac history.
Last night I dreamed I went to Waldenbooks again.
A spectre is haunting Seattle: the spectre of communism.
And for me, as a customer, that worked. It was a relief not to have to browse through dozens of books, looking at different summaries and trying to decide which one I would purchase -- my typical method online.
So, a bookstore for people who hate browsing. What?
It was somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the Amazon Books began to take hold. Suddenly there was a terrible roaring and what looked like huge Bezos were swooping and screaming around the car, which was going a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.
I was cleaning my gun when the dame walked in. She had long legs, red lipstick, and a shopping bag from Amazon Books.
The bookstore fled across the desert and Amazon followed.
Jeff Bezos was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a bookshop.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the empire of Amazon comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and one physical bookstore in Seattle.
For sale: baby shoes, free shipping through Amazon Prime.
Upon waking, the bookstore was till there.
...at just this moment it had been announced that Amazon was not after all at war with the bookstore. Amazon was at war with Eastasia. The bookstore was an ally.
(with apologies to 23, which made me think of it)
So I've mentioned the fight to save our neighborhood park. A couple weeks ago was the Planning Commission hearing to approve a zoning change for the developer's parcel and the park*, and the developer's architects spoke. They're a big deal DC firm--they did the Walmart in Tyson's Crossing, so you know they're good urbanists--and the guy actually said, "we invented mixed use development in DC 25 years ago." Which is the most staggeringly arrogant and ignorant statement I can imagine a design professional making. I'm pretty sure I snorted audibly.
*we lost the vote, but seem to have won the battle; later that week, the mayor's chief of staff came out to meet AB and the leader of the fight in the park and to discuss the future, and he said very clearly and emphatically that they don't, in fact, intend to sell the park, and that they're using the park for leverage over the development. Semi-trust but verify, but this is the best news we've had since the news broke. We had 2 hours of passionate testimony, not a single citizen speaking in favor of the development, and I think the administration realized they misjudged the politics of the deal.
These are all wonderful, but 42 made me laugh hardest.
I think my letter to Corey made all the difference.
Amazon Books, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to ignore the circumfusion of bankrupt bookstores that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
Brother Francis Gerard of Seattle might never have discovered the blessed Amazon Books, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert.
I have that book right here. I think I got as far as when we started his trip.
DEAR BOSIE,--After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single Prime box from you, or any mp3 or ebook even, except such as gave me pain.
In my younger and more vulnerable years Jeff Bezos gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the chance to visit Amazon Books."
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Self-Published E-Books.
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that Jeff Bezos had come to see me.
The sky over the Amazon bookstore was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the Archbishop had come to see me. He must have finished early at the bookstore.
[Disappointed as we are to see that Barry still has the strength to type, albeit, I hope, with trembling fingers]
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where this lousy bookstore is, and what my lousy pre-bookstore online business was, and how my Bezos were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside the Amazon Bookstore at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering.
Well, Prince, so Bookstores are now just outposts of Amazon. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist....
The bookshop didn't even have a name. It had no human staff because the team of Wharton MBAs which constructed it had been evacuated long ago.
All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in Amazon Bookstores; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all else the Seattle location.
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was shelved at Amazon's new bookstore.
In the great green bookstore, there was a telephone, and a red balloon. And a picture of Jeff Bezos jumping over the moon.
EMERGENCY QUESTION! Sorry to interrupt this charming thread. Better half just arrived in London without a daily rx, and apparently the fastest I can send it to him is 2-3 days because customs. What is the fastest and cheapest way for him to get his very inexpensive but needs daily meds? He's a UK citizen. Apparently local boots said he'd have to pay a 40 pound "conversion" fee plus cost of rx, seems absurdly gougy.
MANY THANKS IN ADVANCE!
Whatever the UK equivalent of an emergency room is? If you show up at one in the US claiming that your chest hurts and your arm is tingling and also you need a couple days worth of some prescription or other the triage nurses will usually get to you really quickly, though you may need to decline a bunch of other tests and stuff if you don't want to spend a few hours there.
Whatever the UK equivalent of an emergency room is?
A Laurie.
All this happened, more or less. The fulfillment center parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot for delivering a teapot a day late. Beff Jezos really did threaten to have his older engineers killed by hired gunmen after the move to exposing all data solely through a microservices architecture. And so on. I've changed all their names.
This whole thread is great (other than DQ's emergency question, which will hopefully be answered).
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in
the Amazon bookshop in Seattle.
re: 68
The official NHS website has this to say, on prescriptions while away from home:
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Pharmacy/Pages/Medicinesoutofhours.aspx
The NHS walk-in centres may be an option. Lots of hospitals have urgent care centres where you can be seen without an appointment and where they can treat minor injuries and dispense medicines. But, if a non-UK/EU resident, there may be a charge.
If it was me, I'd probably try an ordinary high street dispensing chemist, and plead. A British accent may stop them even asking about residency.
Thanks! His accent is faded from several decades in California, makes some members of his family fall about laughing when he talks.
You could go to the à&e of a large hospital if you don't mind waiting and explain your problem. I have done this in addenbrookes on a Sunday when I needed pills in a hurry.
But this depend how much you value your time. Too late for most chemists now, though there will always be one later night duty chemist in a big enough place.
I suspect he's at the usual Wigmore Hall concert at the moment.
There was once a man called Jeff Bezos, and he almost deserved it.
How did 72 go unheralded? It's so good.
When I saw essear's name in the Latest Comments sidebar I assumed 82 would be something from Ada or Pale Fire.
83: 7 was already a garbled Ada reference.
But it's true, you did identify the only two books I've ever actually read.
86: well, those and the novelizations of Veronica Mars and The Good Wife.
Bezos. Jeff Bezos.
The scent and smoke and sweat of a bookstore are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by shopping - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.
87: Yes? The opening line of Ada is
"All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike," says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor 3.05 Ltd., 1880).
That doesn't establish that it was a garbled Ada reference rather than a garbled Anna Karenina reference.
If only authorial intent were a thing that existed.
Will it ruin the thread if I mention that I was actually referring to the late, lamented Amazon Books in Minneapolis, model for Madwimmin Books in Dykes To Watch Out For, and which received a mid-six figure settlement from Bezos & Co. for the rights to online naming and no future legal action?
It was the best of bookstores, it was the worst of bookstores, it was the bookstore of wisdom, it was the bookstore of foolishness, it was the bookstore of belief, it was the bookstore of incredulity, it was the bookstore of Light, it was the bookstore of Darkness, it was the bookstore of hope, it was the bookstore of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the bookstore was so far like the present bookstore, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
92: good thing it is, and too bad that decades (literally decades!) of shoddy literary instruction have given aid and comfort to glib dismissals like that.
Literary instruction killed the author.
91: Sorry for the confusion. There is a very loud Amazon bookstore right in front of my present lodgings.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down into the Amazon bookstore and this moocow that was coming down into the Amazon bookstore met a nicens little boy named baby Bezos.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they got me my birthday present at Amazon Books.
Imagine that you have the chance to become Amazon Books.
One must imagine Amazon Books happy.
I was expecting AWB to get to 101 eventually.
The first time I laid eyes on Jeff Bezos he was being held up by a delivery drone outside the entrance to the Amazon bookstore.
Renowned etailer Jeff Bezos staggered through the revolving doors of Amazon's first bookstore.
You know how hot the nights can get in New York in August, when everybody suffers—like the vagrants in the doorways along Third Avenue without any ice for their muscatel? Or all the needy, underprivileged call girls with no fresh-air fund to get them away from the city streets for the summer?
I'd taken a cold shower at one o'clock. Since then I'd recited the line-ups of six out of the eight National League baseball teams from the early thirties, I'd tried twice to make a mental list of every woman I'd ever known carnally, and now I was running through the parts and nomenclature of common American hand weapons. I'd even had the light on and read for half an hour, but it was no good. It was still steaming. I was still awake. I was still thinking about Amazon Books.
Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring forth into a Seattle street found and suffused the peach pate of Jeff Bezos, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his niece to the tone of his thing.
The first indication that Jeff had been seeing something more than heebie-jeebies for all those years came a few weeks before the end, when the old guy leaned over to Amazon on the front porch of an autumn evening and said, distinctly, "Bookstore."
Seattle... shit; I'm still only in Seattle...
...
Every minute I stay in this bookstore, I get weaker, and every minute Bezos sells via the web, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around the bookshelves moved in a little tighter.
In the week before their departure to Seattle, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old business idea came to visit the mother of the boy, Jeff
It was inevitable: the scent of packing peanuts always reminded Jeff of the fate of unrequited love.
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the Amazon mood organ beside his bed awakened Jeff Bezos.
I think that 19 is my favourite of all, but, damn, there are some good ones in here.
amazon riverrun, past Kurt and Courtney's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Space Needle and Environs.
Bezos. He's more machine now than man. Twisted and evil.
Ai Ai Ai
Amazon!
Amazon!
Ai Ai Ai
Amazon!
Ai Ai Ai
Amazon!
Digital Monsters!
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Delivery drones on fire off the shoulder of the 405. I watched halibut glitter in the dark near the fish market. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears...in...rain. Time to go to Amazon Books.
The universe (which others call the Amazon Bookstore) is composed of an indefinite,
perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
OF Amazon's First Shop, and the Fruit
Of that Unbidden Place, whose mortal tast
Brought Browsing into Seattle, and all our woe
* * *
And justifie the ways of Bezos to Men.
An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or crowdfunded treat, but rather as one who keeps an Amazon storefront, at which all persons are welcome for their money.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Amazon is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Here I pause, having carried you, reader, from bookstore to bookstore - from the shelved and dust-shrouded bookstore of our necropolis to this bookstore with its curling wisps of data, this bookstore which is perhaps the largest in existence, perhaps the largest ever to exist. It was by entering that first bookstore that I set my feet upon the road that brought me to this second bookstore. And surely when I entered this second bookstore, I began again to walk a new road. From that great bookstore forward, for a long time, it was to lie outside the City Imperishable and among the forests and grasslands, mountains and Bezos of Seattle.
Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I cannot blame you. It is no easy road.
No one saw him disembook in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo Kindle sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the Barnes and Noble has not been contaminated by the Nook and where e-commerce is infrequent.
Books that belong to Bill Gates
Embalmed books
Books that are trained
Suckling books
Merbooks
Fabulous books
Stray books
Books that are included in this classification
Books that tremble as if they were mad
Innumerable books
Books written with a very fine camel hair brush
Et cetera
Books that have just broken the flower vase
Books that, at a distance, resemble Kindles
Books that belong to Bill Gates
The codex?