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Let Us Now Praise Amazon

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The Best Source for English-Language Books in Italy

Enrico and I read a lot (Rossella, alas, does not). Our house is stuffed with books, many of which we have read several times over – if I don’t expect to want to read a particular book ever again, I give it away.

Obtaining books was a problem when we first moved to Italy. I do read in Italian, but prefer to read books in their original language when I can. The exception is mysteries, which I read in Italian because my mother-in-law has a huge collection, and I consider it a waste to buy them since I will read most of them only once.

There is one mid-sized foreign-language bookstore in Milan, but it’s expensive, as all the books are imported. So I had to depend on trips to the US or England, from which I would return loaded with books. I learned a little-known secret of the US postal service, the M bag: you pack up books in boxes and they stuff the boxes into a big canvas bag, which can be shipped surface mail for a special low rate. It’s so little-known that, in some post offices, I had to explain it to the counter clerk.

I first heard about Amazon around 1995. “An online bookstore? What a fantastic idea!” But sending books all the way from the US was a problem. I tried every option. FedEx was tremendously expensive, and airmail not much cheaper. Surface mail was tremendously slow. But I had to feed my book habit.

I was saved by the opening of Amazon UK. Packages can be sent fairly cheaply by ordinary British Royal Mail, and arrive within days. I was worried at first that non-couriered packages would simply disappear into the maw of the Italian postal service, as so many packages do. But Amazon was prepared to deal with that. The first time it happened, I emailed customer service, and a replacement package was sent immediately, this time by courier, for no extra charge. I became a fanatically loyal customer at that moment. The original package never did turn up; Amazon didn’t mind.

Later, I wrote to them when a large and expensive shipment of books (computer stuff) had not arrived after three weeks. “This could be the usual summer slowdown, so I’m willing to wait longer,” I said. They sent a replacement anyway and, sure enough, the original package arrived a few days after the replacement. “What should I do with these duplicate copies?” I asked. “Donate them to a school,” said Amazon, so I took them to Woodstock on my next visit.

This has happened several more times, but I’ve only been asked to send back DVDs. Books and DVDs that have gone permanently missing have been replaced without a murmur. The most recent example is the Firefly DVD set, which I ordered from Amazon US as soon as it was released, December 9th, along with a book for my Woodstock history research. I chose ordinary airmail – much cheaper than courier. The two items were shipped separately, the DVDs a few days earlier than the book. The book arrived on Dec 22nd, the DVDs still haven’t shown up. On December 30th I wrote to Amazon, again saying that I was willing to wait a bit longer and see if it had simply got lost in the holiday rush. Within two hours, I had a response: they were sending replacement DVDs. Now that’s customer service.

I wish other companies worked as well. Lands’ End opened a UK branch a few years ago, great news for me as I depend on them for turtlenecks and fleece jackets. (I hate shopping. Once I find something I like, I stick to it forever.) The prices were high: they decided that a 10-dollar item would cost 10 pounds, when the pound was actually worth about 30% more (now that the dollar has devalued further against the pound, there has finally been some price adjustment). But they have an overstocks section on the UK site, so I can often pick up items I like very cheaply. Sometimes I save on shipping by having things mailed to my dad’s house in the UK when I’m going there on a visit (which also means I can bring less clothing with me).

So, before my October visit to my dad, I browsed the overstocks section and picked out ten turtlenecks, each of them under 6 pounds. When the package arrived, it contained 11 items – one was a duplicate that I had not been charged for. I could have just kept it, but, scrupulously honest creature that I am, I decided to let them know what had happened. I emailed customer service, fully expecting them to say: “Just keep it, thanks for letting us know.” They didn’t. They wanted it back, which would involve a trip to the post office, although they offered to refund the postage. This for an item from their overstock section that cost about 5 pounds. Sheesh. Get a clue from Amazon, folks.

Feb 2, 2004

The lost Firefly DVDs turned up, almost two months after the original order was placed. I wrote to Amazon to ask what they wanted me to do. “As the cost of return shipping is prohibitively expensive in this case, we ask that you keep the duplicate order with our compliments. Perhaps you can donate it to a school or library in your area.”

As you have probably noticed, I am also an Amazon “associate”, meaning that, if you click from my site to Amazon and end up buying something, I get a percentage. In the third quarter of last year I finally made enough money this way to actually get a gift certificate: $18. Thanks to those who you who clicked through and bought!

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Computer Viruses 2

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I recently received an email message, purportedly from Microsoft. It was nicely laid out with Microsoft typefaces and logos, just like the Microsoft website, and claimed to be a new service: “We’re now emailing operating system updates directly to the customer. Just click on the attached file to install your update…”

However, my virus scanner software added a message at the bottom: “This attachment contains a virus.” Which I had instantly suspected, since I know that Microsoft doesn’t mail out updates.

Y’all be careful out there. The virus-mongers are always looking for new ways to make you do something nasty to yourself. NEVER NEVER NEVER open or run an email attachment that you receive unexpectedly, no matter who it’s from (even people you know). Always scan attachments with virus software before you do anything with them – and make sure your virus software is up to date.

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bio, technology

Pirating Music

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“When I was a kid, we used to tape music off the radio. You never heard of record companies suing people for that.” New York Times, Sept 10, 2003

Okay, I admit it: I’ve been pirating music for a long time.

The earliest copyright infringement I can recall perpetrating myself occurred in Bangladesh. I was 14 years old, and loved music as much as any normal teenager does, although my tastes were probably a bit more eclectic than most. It wasn’t possible to buy records or tapes of western music in Dacca at that time, so we of the foreign community all borrowed from each other. But how to make a copy so I could keep it? I had one of those old-style tape cassette players that was long and flat with a tray that opened up on top, and one small speaker. It could also be used to record, through an incorporated mic. I would position that in front of our higher-end early-model JVC boombox, and record from speaker to mic. Very low fi indeed, but I didn’t care about quality – I was just hungry for the music.

In India it was possible to buy cassettes of western music, but, on our boarding school allowances, who could afford it? And the selection was always months to years behind what was current in the US. Some kids brought record or tape collections with them, and we copied each other’s tapes, using the speaker-to-mic method. My roommate’s mother would sometimes send tapes made from the radio during her US trips, which gave us a chance to catch up on current music, though it was distinctly weird to sit in a dorm room in Mussoorie and hear news and advertising from a town in Massachusetts.

VCRs weren’t around then. An Indian classmate returned from four or five years in San Francisco a raving Trekkie, a passion I somewhat shared. In desperation, before leaving the States he had recorded the soundtracks of Star Trek reruns from his TV, and we used to listen to those together. So I have heard the celebrated “Trouble with Tribbles” episode, but to this day have never seen it!

When my dad and stepmom moved to Thailand, I discovered a whole new way to get music. In Bangkok you could go to a record shop where they didn’t actually sell any records. You would go through their (huge) selection and pick out the music you liked; they would record it onto cassette tapes for you, complete with hand-typed song lists. This was very cheap and efficient – you could get two whole albums onto a 90-minute cassette. If there was space left over, they would sometimes fill it with random stuff, giving you a chance to discover something new.

Back in the US, it was common to go through a friend’s record collection and ask them to tape stuff for you, although this was a lot to ask, LP-to-tape recording being rather a pain. By then I had a fancy tape deck purchased in Hong Kong, with a feature that would fast-forward to the next silence on the tape, so you could easily skip a song you didn’t like. High tech, for those days.

I bought a few commercially-recorded cassette tapes in the US, but they were expensive, and not very durable – they tended to stretch after only a few months: built-in obsolescence? The tapes I had made in Thailand are still fine 20 years later.

In 1984, while visiting my dad in Indonesia, I learned that Indonesia had never signed the International Copyright Convention. You could get anything on tape there, very cheaply, mass-produced with printed labels. Sometimes the label would have a photograph of the original album cover cut out and pasted on to add authenticity. I bought dozens of tapes, though I knew that, technically, it was illegal to take them back to the US. Having music available at such low prices encouraged me to explore new artists and genres; I could pick up something on impulse, and if I didn’t like it, so what?

These tapes, too, have proved durable, and also had their delightful surprises. Like the Thais, the Indonesians couldn’t stand to leave a minute of tape empty. They would record right to the end of Side A, and if a song got cut off in the middle, would re-start it on Side B. Then they’d fill the space left at the end of Side B with whatever came to hand, sometimes by the same artist, sometimes not. In one or two cases I loved some of these extras, and went crazy trying to figure out what they were so I could get more by whoever that was – the track lists weren’t always complete with artist and album names.

Some of cassette producers added value by including lyrics in a small booklet, but they didn’t always have the original lyrics to work from. I bought the soundtrack of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” where evidently someone who was not fluent in English tried to get the lyrics down by ear. Apparently he or she was inspired by the title to hear lyrics far more dirty than actually exist in the film! (I still have this tape somewhere, will have to dig it out and give some examples.)

…I was going to go off here into a diatribe about the RIAA, but will leave that for another time, or maybe never. There’s been plenty said on that topic, too, by wiser heads than mine.

Two weeks after I posted the above, the New York Times caught up with an article about similar practices elsewhere in the world, notably Indonesia. (“U.S. Is Only the Tip of Pirated Music Iceberg”, By MARK LANDLER, September 26, 2003). The head of a German music industry association is quoted as saying: “Housewives, who should be cooking, are burning [CDs].”

The article went on: “Mr. Gebhardt hopes the German music industry will bring its first lawsuit against a file sharer in a few months. In the meantime, it is trying to win back the public through sympathy rather than subpoenas.”

Mr. Gebhardt probably thought he was being cute, but his “housewives” remark certainly lost my sympathy.

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DVD Players: Good, Bad, and Multi-Region

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A few years ago, I bought (via a friend, from the UK) an expensive DVD player that played almost everything. But now the reading laser in it appears to be dying; it’s increasingly fussy about playing anything at all. The other day we stumbled onto the perfect replacement, on sale in an electronics superstore. For only 89 euros, it does everything the old one did, and then some.

Since this model is made in China, I was fairly sure that it could be made to ignore DVD region coding, though the floor guy in the store couldn’t answer the question: he didn’t even know what a DVD region was. So, as soon as I had set it up and seen that all the basics were working, I jumped onto www.dvdrhelp.com, a very useful site containing, among other things, a database of reviews of DVD players from people all over the world. Turns out that this model is selling well all over Europe, because the number of features for the price is extraordinary. There is indeed a hack to make it play DVDs from any region, an easy one that you can perform by entering numbers into the player’s remote control.

This number combination is too complex for anyone to stumble upon by accident – it would be like trying to crack a safe without even knowing how many numbers you have to set – so I assume that the information was leaked by the manufacturers. Multi-region DVD players are sort of illegal, but the feature is a big selling point in many parts of the world; Hollywood has thus lost the battle for control of DVD release dates.

Many people in the US don’t even realize that DVDs are region-coded. Most movies are released on DVD there first, anyway (which is part of the reason people outside the US want to be able to play US [region 1] discs). DVDs are often cheaper in the US than Europe, especially if you happen to be travelling there and can carry them home yourself. (Amazon US will happily ship them to you, but overseas shipping costs are high.) Some region 1 versions have more and better special features than their region 2 counterparts.

But there are a few reasons why Americans also want to be able to play discs from other regions. Buffy fans, for example: the Buffy DVD publishing schedule is years ahead in the UK; Buffy season 1 was released on DVD in the US only last year.

My new Daytek DVD player now plays DVDs from any region, as well as Video CDs and Super Video CDs. But I no longer even have to go to the trouble of recording MPEG 1 and 2 videos in the special Video CD and Super Video CD formats: put in a CD or DVD in a simple data format, and the Daytek will play just about any video, photo, or MP3 file it finds there. A directory full of images automatically runs as a slideshow. The only thing I can’t get it to play are MPEG 4 (DivX) video files – which is reasonable, since that would require extra decoding circuitry.

August 30, 2003

Unfortunately, it didn’t keep on working. By mid-August, this player has given up the ghost: I press Eject, the panel says “Open,” but it doesn’t open – doesn’t even try. And of course I lost the receipt in the house move and can’t get it fixed or replaced under warranty…

Jan, 2004

I ended up buying a Daewoo DVD player, modified to be multiregion, from Amazon UK. They don’t ship these outside the UK, but, since I was going to visit my dad in October, I had it shipped to him and picked it up there. He had recently purchased the identical model and was happy with it.

When it arrived, the player worked fine, but the remote control did not. I tested my player with my dad’s remote, and that worked, so it was easy to pinpoint the problem. I wrote to Amazon customer support, and was disconcerted not to hear from them within a day – not my usual experience with Amazon. Running out of time, and fearing I would have to return the player and go home empty-handed, I wrote again. A few hours later, the mail arrived, with a replacement remote control. Everything worked perfectly. I put the player into my suitcase, and came home.

So far, it’s working fine. It did start to display reluctance to open the drawer, but I realized that, sitting right on top of the amplifier, it was getting awfully hot. I rearranged things so that the DVD player now sits on top of the (rarely used) VCR, and that seems to have solved the problem. The player also deals happily with VCDs and SVCDs, just like the previous ones.

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Computer Viruses

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I’ve received a number of emails lately from friends and family, apologizing for possibly infecting me with a virus. So far, it’s never been true – they have all been the victims of hoaxes. This is a “psychological” virus, spread by your desire to help your friends and prevent computer tragedy; there is no real virus involved. Unfortunately, these hoaxes can sometimes result in real damage to your system, if you follow the instructions and delete whatever file they tell you is a virus.

Whenever you receive an email of this type, before you do anything else, go toSymantec or McAfee and look up a keyword in the message (such as the name of the .exe file you are advised to delete) using the site’s search feature. This will tell you whether the danger is real or (far more likely) a hoax. If it’s a hoax, no further action is needed – you haven’t infected anybody, so long as you don’t pass on the hoax email!

NB: I have also received plenty of real viruses, but these are disabled upon arrival in my mailbox. DO make sure that you have anti-virus software installed, and update it at least weekly. There’s a good one available that’s completely free, AVG Free Edition from Grisoft.

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