On my addiction to Amazon Prime
June 10th, 2010 at 12:55 am ET
The image at left is what greeted me when I arrived at my desk this morning, and it’s nothing out of the ordinary. You see, I have a problem: I’m addicted to Amazon Prime, the free-2-day-shipping membership plan at Amazon.com. For a flat $79 a year, almost every regular-stock book, and a ton of other Amazon merchandise is delivered in two days for free. In New York City, where Amazon has courier delivery, this often amounts to free overnight shipping; sometimes I order something in the evening after I leave work and it’s on my desk before I get in in the morning.
I’ve always been a big bookbuyer, but with some guilt. (And to keep the guilt down, I steer many of my purchases to Half.com, now an eBay service, and to Amazon Marketplace, where I can buy for less and often benefit a smaller business.) After all, I have like a zillion books already — there’s a whole wall of them right behind me — and something like 70 percent of them I haven’t read all the way through.
Well, it turns out Amazon Prime’s free shipping has eliminated much of the residual resistance I had to buying books I wasn’t sure I’d get around to reading. For a few months I’ve been trying out a policy of “if you think you want to read it, just order it at the first inkling; don’t worry about the price,” just to see what it did to my spending; I have ended up spending more on books than I did otherwise, but I’ve also gotten more satisfaction, and the increased spending is at a level I can live with — in fact, I don’t think it’s the most I’ve ever spent on books.
Since I have everything shipped to the office, between Amazon and Half.com the books tend to pile up. So yesterday I packed a sack full of the most recent acquisitions and hauled them home. (Bonus plug: join the Arts Action Fund, a project of Americans for the Arts. It’s free!)
And when I unpacked, here’s what I had:
I’ll gloss all these books tomorrow — for now, let’s just revel in the awesome absurdity of that photo and the pitiful addiction it makes manifest…
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
