Damn it! Tentacled monster

I abandoned Amazon recently, because I didn't like quite a lot of the things they were doing, including pulling Wikileaks from their servers. They're not unionised either, so I assume their warehouses are sweatshop hellholes. I cancelled a £900 camera purchase, and moved book purchases to The Book Depository (fine views from the second-floor windows of their Texas branch): not such a good website but cheap, efficient and slightly less evil.

Now Amazon's bought that too. They're not content with owning ABE, the wonderful global network of second-hand bookshops. So I'm screwed: I've got to deal with evil if I ever want to buy a book again.


I could go to my local bookshop, you might whinge. Well, not really. It's Waterstone's, which is very poor, and if I restricted my second-hand purchases to the local charity shops, I'd soon be churning out academic papers on the Collected Works of Jeremy Clarkson and Catherine Cookson, because that's all they stock.

There are a couple of places left unstrangled by Amazon:
Housmans - the socialist and peace bookshop, which is thoroughly unionised.
Left on the Shelf - for all your used leftwing requirements.

But for anything else? You pay Amazon, whether you like it or not.