WARNING: This is an angry rant, and probably should not be read by anyone who is easily offended or dislikes swearing. You have been warned.

In the “things that really annoy me” category, I have to add Amazon.com’s draconian data-handling policies to the list. Here’s what fired this rant off:

I was trying to put a widget up on the blog that listed the books I have rated, and thier ratings, in chronological order so it would be easy to see what the latest things I’ve read are for anyone who might be interested. Since Amazon.com already has all of this information (like many other things in my life, I am almost obsessive about rating books), I figured it would be easy to add this info. WRONG!

First, I looked for an official Amazon widget to do this. Nope, no dice. They have all kinds of widgets that are essentially poorly disguised ads for stuff, but I have no fucking idea why you would ever want to deface your shit with that.

So next, I looked for something third party, and this I did find, in the guise of Shelfari and LibraryThing. They even have an import feature to get your junk out of Amazon’s “Auschwitz for Data”(TM). Unfortunately, their import features only work with HTTP addresses, and do not work with secure (HTTPS) sites, so they won’t work for your “rated items” page, only for your wishlists. Now, I have NO GODDAMN IDEA why you would want to import a fucking WISHLIST into a book rating engine, but there you go.

Sigh…

Anyhow, I do manage to find the media library, which has all of the books I’ve listed as “I own it”, and has a nice little “share this list” feature. Now, the “I own it” list does not contain every book I’ve rated, but it does contain 190 of the 240 that I have rated, so it’s close enough for government work. However, Amazon (again) only allows you to get to it via HTTPS, whcih is evidently something they just changed, and I can’t help but think that it was to keep you from doing the EXACT THING I am trying to do here. ARRRRRRRGHHHHHH!!!!

Deep breath…

So now I am forced to go into the source of every individual page of my “rated items” list and paste this source into LibraryThing and let it’s unbelievably slow queueing system retrieve the data from the source and put it into my library, then import this library into Shelfari.

This is an absolutley eggregious pain in the ass, but I AM GOING TO FUCKING DO IT!!!

YOU HEAR THAT AMAZON, YOU GODDAMN COCKSUCKERS?!!? IT’S MY GODDAMN DATA AND I AM GOING TO GET IT OUT OF YOU, YOU FUCKERS, AND THEN, I SWEAR TO CHRIST, I WILL NEVER, EVER, USE YOUR PIECE OF SHIT SITE FOR ANYTHING AGAIN. EVER.

Fucking Bastards.

That’s the worst part of it, I guess, is that I have to jump through about 7000 hoops to get data from a site that is MY DATA to begin with. I rated the damn books. I added them to the list. The list is, ultimately, my IP. But Amazon, being a typical American corporation, wants to sink it’s greedy little claws into all of the IP it can and never give it up. Well, fuck you guys. That attitude will be your downfall. I’m out.

All I originally wanted to do was place a book list on my blog. Then I found Shelfari and LibraryThing and I thought, “Hey, here’s a chance to see if someone has built a better proverbial book recommendations mousetrap”. Of course, the BUYING part would have still been Amazon. But now? Fuck that. I’ll get my books used from BookBuyers and rent them from Booksfree.com. Amazon can burn to the ground for all I care.