ronbailey says:

Because Amazon has a strong affiliate program, and the linker gets a small cut of the sale when someone purchases the linked title. I used to do it all the time!

Andrew says:

I think that’s true in a handful of cases, but not all that many. Take the blog entry at http://www.salas.com/2008/06/29/devil-in-the-white-city-is-now-an-archeaological-dig/

It just links to the book — no affiliate code. I think that’s the majority of cases. Need a link, go to Amazon, cut and paste. But I may be wrong.

gnomic says:

Because as Ronbailey points out, Amazon has a great business model that rewards referrals. Which is exactly what you would expect in a market-driven economy. Of course it raises prices slightly, but volumn helps bring that down. Sure, some nitche firms can compete - but even then its cheapest to do that through the amazon marketplace infrastructure. The irony is that amazon makes its affiliate compete on price head-to-head, driving down thier margins and effectively destroying thier competitors. Its an absolutly brillient long term competitive marketing model - the the competitors pay them for the privledge.

I’m not knocking it - I’m admiring it.

Andrew says:

But you only get a referral reward if you’ve signed up for the program, which a majority of sites (including the one I posted) don’t. You can tell a referral because the URL includes information about it.

I think the referral program is a great idea, and any site that’s making money off it should obviously point to Amazon. But for those many other sites that just need a book pointer, I think it would be good to ’spread the wealth’ as it were, among other sites.

gnomic says:

Amazon has one of the highest brand recognition rates of all brands, something like 99/100, which is better than ebay and walmart. Its the dominant player in its niche.

Barnes & Noble actually used Amazon for 6 years and only reverted to using its own site in the last 2 years.

And Amazon isn’t a bad company to deal with - they have driven the costs of books down considerably and have some innovative services.

Trae says:

I’d have to agree with gnomic, it’s about brand recognition. In the same way someone that make a post about MP3 players will always include an iPod. People just go to their tried and true–and recognized–brands.

Andrew says:

I know! I know! My point was that the only way these other stores are going to get some better brand recognition is if people start to link to them as an alternative. That’s all.

I know Amazon is the Big Gun. I just think it would be nice if — all things being equal — people started linking to some of the other stores once in a while.

gnomic says:

But Andrew, why should we?

This is the natural outcome of business competition. The other book companies should respond with marketing and incentives - yet they haven’t.

I’d argue that we shouldn’t take action - let the book market decide. Maybe a few company failures and some of these companies would get the message and quit acting like GM and Ford.

If we start acting irrationally, we will become like macboys.

Randy says:

I know that I link to Amazon on my (yes, currently inactive) site whenever I can use my affiliate link, but if I don’t use the link, I’m pointing to Bookpool. I prefer shopping at Bookpool anyway, but will use Amazon when I can get a payback from it (earned a whopping $1.34 so far!).