Caveat Emptor, Amazon-style

Okay, this is the third weird thing I've seen recently dealing with Amazon's software that suggests things for you.

The first, in March, was a bulletin alerting me to Chris Mooney's new book - The Missing. Unfortunately, it's not the same Chris Mooney whose other books I had bought from them. I wondered if the other one's fans would get a bulletin for Storm World - it sort of sounds like a thriller, doesn't it? Maybe he'll get some extra sales?

The second, at the beginning of August, was an inexplicable recommendation to me, as someone who has purchased Anthony Trollope books, of a work on container ships and oil tankers...

And today, as someone has "purchased or rated Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett" a recommendation to "buy Darwin: The Indelible Stamp by James D. Watson." No, that's not the weird thing - that actually makes some sense. This is the weird thing:


Better Together

Buy this book with From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books (Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals) by Charles Darwin today!

And why is this weird, you may ask? Because just what is The Indelible Stamp? Why, an anthology edited by Watson:

Included in this anthology are On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important scientific work of the nineteenth century; Voyage of the Beagle, a captivating travelogue richly stocked with observations that helped guide the young Darwin through his evolutionary world view; The Descent of Man, which explored the origins of humans and their history; and The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals, which explored the origin and nature of the mind. Darwin stated that "man with all his noble qualities . . . still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

So it's "Better Together" with... another version of it?

Granted, this last example's not the same thing, but ... c'mon, Amazon. Get your act together.