What a clever way to market this book. Colm Liddy emailed me today asking for a Fluffy link for this but it’s worthy of a full post.
About the book:
It’s a humourous account of married couples, all across the planet, throughout the course of history, having rows about everything that couples have rows about
Buy the book here.
Wow! Ingenious!
Brilliant. Rhyming Ulysses and Marian Keyes is inspired.
Or buy the book here, here, here, here, here, here….
I’m a little tired of Irish web users being directed to foreign sites to buy Irish books. We have irish book shops, on the high street and online. They support Irish publishers and Irish authors (Dubray launched this book) and provide Irish jobs and somewhere to handle a book outside a library. Amazon don’t need your support Damien.
I really love this misguided patriotism bullshit. Irish jobs, haha. I think people are entitled to buy the book from whatever retailer they want, Irish or not. You might also note that Amazon directly employ a lot of Irish people and there are a load of indirect jobs as a result of 1000s of Amazon packages coming in here. Should we only buy from bookstores where the people have an Irish heritage going back a few generations too?
Perhaps you should contact the publisher and author and ask them to stop wholesaleing to Amazon? Oh and maybe ask Cowen to run a referendum and remove us from the EU and block all free trade?
I assume you don’t ever fly outside of Ireland, instead you spend your money only inside this country? Local holidays too yeah?
Of the ‘Irish’ alternatives mentioned, only Dubray even *has* the book online. and, of course, it’s €5 more expensive.
Also: The publishers and the authors get paid either way.
I think we should look to the legislators to ban this sort of thing. We could call it the Patriot Act and use it to block foreign websites (I’m sure Eircom would oblige – they’re good at that sort of thing), a customs swoop on groceries in Sainsburys bags at the border, and a bit of waterboarding too, while we’re at it.
BTW, did you pay for this advert?
Reality check – It’s a hell of a lot cheaper to buy books from non-Irish online retailers. It would be great if that wasn’t the case, but it is.
Deal with it
I wanted to point out there are a variety of retailers. There’s what I regard as a lazy tendency on the web to send all link traffic to amazon which is damaging. It annoys me as much as it would if radio stations suggested their listeners bought from one retailer (large or small, Irish or not) or if recipes in a newspaper always finished by directing their readers to buy everything in Dunnes.
There are beneficial outcomes generated from buying from of any of those outlets above and many many more that don’t accrue from buying from Amazon. Irish publishing always struggle to avoid being subsumed completely under British publishing, those shops, even ones owned by HMV such as Hogges Figgis and Waterstones are very valuable in a way that Amazon.co.uk never can be. Try even talking to human being at the other end of the line at Amazon never mind seeking their advice on Irish books, publications, events etc. It isn’t as simple as buying your Rice Krispies at the cheapest price. Sure Amazon make a contribution to the Irish economy and yes it’s nearly impossible for anyone other than Play to compete on price but that’s not what I worry about, I worry about not being able to go into a book shop or when Sterling regains value being left with paltry domestic options, or niche interests losing the support of interested bookshops, eg poetry, queer lit, crime and mystery writing, etc.
I’m not moralising about price differences and patriotic purchasing Damien, I’m talking about preserving parts of Irish book culture that have no support as they do in other countries (witness the Irish Writers Centre’s funding beng junked). Even disregarding any worry about Irish bookshops, or supporting Irish business and all that jazz, do you not think at the very least you’d be doing your readers a service by linking to a few options, and not just sending them to Amazon? Play.com stock it, abebooks.co.uk stock it, Penguin sell it from their own site, Dubray sell it online… It would seem like good blogging practice to me.
“I think people are entitled to buy the book from whatever retailer they want, Irish or not. “ A few more links so?
Also the hectoring tone of the arguments ad absurdum are pretty dispiriting. I can’t afford to take a frickin’ holiday abroad, the furtherest I’ve been in the past two years is London to see my sibling. And I’ll try buying a book here before online. I went lookign for Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair on a very very rainy Tuesday this week in four retailers around Grafton St, none of whom had it and I ended up ordering online form abebooks. Engage the argument no the proponent of it people.
Unlike you, I think my “readers” are able to use the Internet (they use it to read this blog!) and choose where to buy a book. It’d be a disservice as you call it to treat them like 4 year olds and expect them to only spend their money on Internet properties that I link to.
I also find it curious that you exercised more energy on your moral outrage at who I didn’t link to instead of leaving a comment with a link to those alternative places where the book could be purchased.
The initial comment was because on my journey around the shops on Tuesday Dubray were launching this book, the glasses were out, wine was being uncorked etc, and I was curious when I saw you’d posted on it and it annoyed me that shops that were going through the trouble of celebrating book launches, readings etc and you link straight to Amazon. I’ve worked in a bookshop and I know people who work in bookshops, these are not happy times for them.
It’s nothing to do with my perceptions of your audience’s intelligence (are they not readers?), I’m pretty sure you attract an engaging and intelligent bunch, and I know they’re not ignorant, but this is the link economy as Jeff Jarvis calls it, and your linking does have value. Irish bookshops certainly need to innovate online, I admit I’ve been conflating two arguments, that bookshops have added value over online retailers, and that linking to one online retailer amongst many is poor form. For that I’m sorry. I still think there’s merit to both the arguments though.
And there’s still space to link. My blog posts don’t end at my fullstop. They keep going and being added to in the comments, so link to the alternatives!
When it was announced that independent record store Road Records was to close down, many people, including Road’s owners, attributed its closure at least partly to downloading (legal and illegal) and to online purchasing from major websites. I think Major Alfonso is perhaps just making the same point: if you want to have local places where you can have face-to-face encounters with staff who know their stuff, then you need to support those businesses.
However, it seems that many people don’t want or value those things; they primarily want convenience and affordability. I for one am the first to put my hand up and I say I regularly buy CDs and books online, for just those reasons. But now that Road is closing I will miss it. Perhaps we will miss the independent bookstores too?
I only buy fairtrade books.