Amazon Store Beta

Every time you buy a book on Amazon through a link on this website, we get paid for referring you—it's a program called "Amazon Associates." Amazon is now trying a new way to leverage sales, allowing individual Associates to construct their own virtual "stores." The project is currently in beta.

Frankly, it's of very limited usefulness to us as it stands, for two reasons. First, because, for the time being, each "store" can have only nine items in it. The only way I would see this as being useful to TOP readers is if it were to function as a sort of permanent but ever-changing list of endorsed products—chiefly, books—but naturally there would need to be a functionally unlimited number of slots available in order for that to work. Certainly more than nine, at least. A second problem is that not all of the products I've endorsed on TOP, or want to endorse, are available through Amazon at all, although I suppose Amazon can't be blamed for that.

I don't think that this is anything we're very likely to continue, but if you'd like to see the interface and a few of the "recommended" products I've chosen so far, you can either click on the "TOP Store" link in the left-hand column or go here.

Let me know what you think—if, that is, you care at all. (I know, a lot of people won't.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON