Baskerville's "Taken into Custody" Available Again on Amazon.com

>A good reminder I guess about jumping to conclusions!

Aren't we sooooo lucky to now have Matt as our mommy! Or is he now vying for the position as our second wife. He sure is starting to sound like mine.

Amazon.com DID stop selling the book. If they had been selling it all along but just ran out, they would have given everyone the option to backorder it until more were received. Many books, under similar circumstances, have the label saying that the book will be shipped in 2-4 weeks. At Buy.com, the book has been given the label "temporarily out".

In this case, there was no longer an option to order the book, meaning they stopped selling it. And when one of us emailed Amazon.com, they didn't reply by saying that the book was only temporarily out. It is never to a bookseller's advantage to stop taking orders for a book, even when on backorder, because people like me will go elsewhere to buy it, like I did. I ordered mine yesterday from Overstock.com where they said they only had 5 copies left. I generally buy all my books from Amazon.com or Buy.com but Buy.com was also out.

So you expect us to be smarter than the persons who are taught by and work for Amazon.com? I guess instead of emailing Amazon.com for a response, we should have emailed Matt.

By the way, Chuck7 posted under his original post the fact that the book is back in stock at Amazon.com and being sold again... yesterday.

Sorry, Dear, we were wrong.

As dittohd said, they stopped selling the book. Here are some examples of outdated books Amazon.com has stopped selling (nothing real specific, just examples).

Book 1

Book 2

These books will never see the light of day again. "Taken Into Custody" was listed JUST like this. I have been on Amazon long enough to see that they will say when they are getting more of an out of stock book. That was not the case here.

I'm not trying to stir things up. I am simply trying to set the record straight. We are all on the same side here.

If either of you had bothered to read the responses you would have seen that Amazon didn't know if or when they would be receiving more copies of the book. Yes, some books will say 'more arrivei n X days/week', but those are for books Amazon has on order and is just waiting for. If a publisher, whether a real publishing house or a self-publisher, don't notify Amazon of when they'll receive more copies, Amazon lists the book as not available. They don't take orders for books if they have no reason to believe they'll get more copies in.

This book was published a little over 5 weeks ago. What could possibly have caused Amazon.com to think that they were not going to receive anymore books? And if they ran out of stock after only 5 weeks? Wow!

I still stand by the statement that it is never to Amazon.com's advantage to not take backorders as long as they haven't been told by the publisher that the book is out of print. Amazon.com isn't stupid. In fact, based on their website, they are a very smart company in many ways in my opinion. It is better business sense to take back orders, holding potential customers on the line rather than encouraging them to buy elsewhere, while their computers automatically follow-up with the publisher for more copies. If, in the end, no more copies are received after a certain amount of time, they can notify the customer, giving them the option to continue waiting, or cancel, then apologize and blame it all on the publisher.

I saw a book I wanted a few weeks ago and found on Amazon.com that an updated edition was coming out in about 4 weeks. They were taking advance orders for it, though, and promised shipment on publication day.

Lastly, I don't believe that persons at Amazon.com didn't know that they were getting more books. I think someone there screwed up and the minimum wage earners in India who answered our email just looked at the web page for the book (maybe) and shot off a canned response. So, someone at Amazon.com screwed up concerning the book's web page and then without checking, someone else there compounded the problem by not taking the time to check its actual status. If they had done that, they would probably have been criticized by management for wasting too much time on one problem. I also bet that had they done that, they wouldn't have had the power to fix anything anyway. But at least we would have known the truth and they wouldn't have lost my business (and possibly many others) when I/we ordered the book elsewhere.

Thanks for the comment, Matt.

Not everyone appreciates me, for sure, though. I got into a little tiff with a different men's site publisher a few weeks ago and he changed my name in his replies to me to dickhd and soon afterward got up on his high horse and permanently ended the comment thread altogether. (I hate it when management deletes my comments after I spend a good amount of time creating and typing and retyping and tweaking them to get them just right. So when I type something I think might upset someone higher up and that might be eligible for the management delete button, I copy what I've typed into my word processor. He got really angry, I guess, when he deleted one of my comments and I followed up soon afterward with the entire post back up word for word!)

Ha! ha!

Dittohd,

Thanks for mentioning that what happened in response to our e-mails about Baskerville's book consisted mostly of a few "canned" replies from an off-shore "Help" center in India, probably.

I did not paste the entire reply that I received because the grammar and typos from the amazon.com staffer were embarassing.

Even the templated replies seem like a poor elementary school English translation.

I have always gone out of my way to compliment on-line and telephone "Help" employees when they do a great job -- which is most of the time in my experience.

It always freaks out the East Indians when you ask them if they are in Bangalore or Dehli! (I've learned to detect the regional accents.) They're always shocked that an American can find India on a world map...

Hi Roy,

I started getting repeated calls from an offshore telemarketer for Bank of America several months ago. I kept telling them no and they would keep calling back, sometimes the same day, sometimes the next or second day afterward.

After asking, I found out these calls were coming from the Philippines! What a surprise!

I had to ask for a supervisor and give her a piece of my mind before the calls finally stopped. After that, I changed my telephone number on my Bank of America account to my cell phone number. I use my cell phone only for outgoing calls so it's turned off 99.9% of the time.

The times I've gotten calls from India, I asked and they seemed surprised that I could tell they were calling from India. I saw a segment on one of the TV magazine shows once about these Indian telemarketers being taught in classes to lose their Indian accents.

Ha! ha! I haven't lived in New Yawk for over 39 yeaas and people can still tell I'm from New Yawk, as haad as I try not to tawk like I used to.

Faaget abaaaat it! Ha! ha!