I’m seriously in two minds about this. According to Lucy Orbach of BooksPrice, I rate a notification that their service just got better. On the one hand, it’s spam [ok, no it's not.]. On the other hand, it’s personalised and polite and damn it I think I probably do want to use their site.
I can’t help wondering, though, how many thousands of copies of that email went out with a name and blog title filled into the template… (“I will appreciate it if you can post a comment at your blog”…)
Anyway. BooksPrice is a price comparison site for bookshopping, I haven’t used it yet but it looks like it might be a good replacement for BookBurro (which died after a Firefox update a while ago, and which I never bothered to fix).
Apparently I should be buying my books from Wal-Mart, which neatly illustrates the biggest disadvantage to this sort of scheme. I don’t want to buy from Wal-Mart, or from Amazon, or from anyone big enough to offer really cheap prices. So I don’t know how much business BooksPrice is going to get from me, but I applaud their marketing.
And if any publishing houses feel like sending me review copies of anything, well, it looks like I’m for sale.
Update: I bite my tongue. This wasn’t spam: unsolicited, but not mailed in bulk –Lucy chimes in in the comments– and sent to me because I’m likely to be interested. In fact, it’s the sort of commercial mailing I should be encouraging, not shying away from. (Which doesn’t make it any less weird to get asked by a stranger to endorse their website, but keeping a blog does make you a public figure, in a ridiculously minor fashion. Just something to get used to.) My reservations about using the service haven’t changed: price just isn’t that important to me most of the time, compared to a bunch of other factors. Rank your hits by how pleasant the staff are when your order goes astray, or how dusty-and-Victorian the store is to visit, and you’d be guaranteed my business…
Update #2: Ask and ye shall receive. Lucy has extended their book offer (see Brendan’s comment below) to me (“just because we like you”). So I still don’t really know how good the service is, but my guess is they’d be delighted if you told ‘em how to make it better. After all, that intensive marketing effort should give some sort of payback, no?
3 Comments
I took them up on a similar offer last year, and there was some interesting discussion of the ethics involved at BookFinder.
Hi kiwi, (hi Brendan) This is Lucy from Booksprice. Thanks for taking your time in visiting our site. The intention of our campaign is to let book-lovers know about us. I spend my day looking for bloggers that write about books, or how much they like to read, etc. And believe it or not, I do read every single blog I am reaching (I actually have to control myself on this) in order to choose the ones I will mail. Since all this work is done in a personal matter the numbers we are reaching are far less than thousands, or even hundreds…I wish! We are asking for a post because – besides wanting to spread the word about us – we want to hear, actually to read, your comments and suggestions. We are constantly developing our site and many of our new features or recommended stores have come from users just like you. For example, the “exclude” button at the chart price, which help you select the stores that you are not interested. Well, Kiwi, I can continue to write so many things about our site but I don’t want to fill your blog. I am glad that we reach you and I hope that you will keep us in mind and maybe use our service in the future. Feel free to write to me, you have my details on the mail. Thanks again – and thanks for the “polite” remark -.
Awww, I didn’t get offered books! (Kidding, kidding…)
I’m on the side of taking review copies of books, I’d be a bit less sure about accepting the offer Brendan did but I’d probably end up going for it.
What had me wavering about this one was the suspicion that this was spamming in the sense of scattershot bulk-mail (instead of the sense of it being unsolicited, which it obviously is). After Lucy’s comment I’m convinced there’s a human behind it all, and a keen one at that ^_^
I’ll be sure to put up a real plug if I use the service.