i-sako.com

I’ve suddenly discovered that I’m losing my faith in Amazon.co.jp as a source of delightful and inexpensive reading material. Amazon has long been my one-stop shopping destination for nearly all the books I buy, but I’m now putting out feelers for other booksellers that can offer comparable service, selection, and prices.

Why, you ask? Well, it all started a couple of weeks ago when I noticed a comment MJ made over at Cerebral Soup. Her post about her ”tracking obsession” planted the first seed of doubt in my mind about Amazon’s reliability. In it, she mentioned that one of her orders had been canceled. Before she mentioned it, I had never heard of anyone’s order being canceled. Not once, not ever! I thought it utterly ridiculous for a bookseller to arbitrarily decide not to sell someone a book. Apparently, it is not so ridiculous to Amazon.co.jp. Both UltraBob and Kristen made similar comments in a recent discussion.

But then something really strange happened with one of my orders. I mentioned a while ago that I was looking forward to Joe Conason’s Big Lies and Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling, both of which have been released recently. I had initially ordered these two books together to save on the shipping cost, but the books didn’t ship earlier this week as I had expected. Upon checking the status of my order, I found out that the Krugman book would not be shipped until late November! I didn’t feel like waiting that long for both books, so I canceled the Krugman title in order to get the Conason book sooner (which, to Amazon’s credit, I now have). Then, upon re-ordering the Krugman title, I was informed that the book would now not be shipped until mid-December! For a book that was supposedly released last Monday, this is an unacceptable delay.

Then, when my copy of Big Lies finally did arrive, I noticed something really strange about the packaging. In a poor attempt at English, the package bore the following note in several prominent locations:

Caution:

This package internal face is adhensive [sic] to prevent from the product damaging.

Please open this from the edge of the package. Thank you.

Nowhere in the English-speaking world would this be accepted as correct, but that doesn’t seem to bother the Japanese, who seem to regard English as little more than decoration anyway. As someone who produces English translations of Japanese marketing and technical material for a living, this kind of childish sloppiness really offends me. If you are going to go to the trouble of using English for the benefit of your English-speaking customers, make sure you get it right! It’s not as if Amazon doesn’t have native English speakers on staff who could check this kind of thing. Heck, even running a simple spell checking tool would reveal one significant error. But no. Here in Japan, “package internal face” and “prevent from the product damaging” is apparently the best we can expect.

Don’t these people realize that such carelessness damages the brand image that Amazon has worked so hard to build?

These things, when taken together, have got me looking for alternatives to Amazon. I used to really like its service, but these days it just isn’t making the grade.

(Yes, I know that the book links above point to Amazon.com instead of Amazon.co.jp. Until the latter gets its act together, I will continue to point people to the former—which, as far as I know, isn’t having these problems.)