The Powell’s Books Kiada

 

In the brave new modern digital world you simply can’t let things stay as they are. You have to continue to do something if, for no other reason than to justify jobs anthropologist David Graeber might call bullshit jobs if he were still alive. I learned this lesson again recently thanks to Powell’s Books of Portland, Oregon.

I have been shopping at Powell’s for years. And while the Powell’s web page may not have been aesthetically pleasing to me it did what it was supposed to do. You could search for the used book you wanted. Find that book if Powell’s had it in stock. Put it in your save for later queue if you wanted. Put it in your buy queue if you wanted. And you could buy it if you wanted, something that was relatively easy to do.

There were, of course, as there always are with everything, hiccoughs and annoyances. Putting items in the save for later queue required the extra step of creating that queue in the first place and clicking on add to the queue when you put something new in it. This was hardly a labour of Herakles, however.

Recently, Powell’s decided to change their webpage. They did not warn us customers that they were doing this by email, however, so we were unawares of the changes and it meant that we could not take action in order to preserve the items we had placed in the to be bought queue and the to be saved for later queue should something go wrong. 

And, of course, something did go wrong. Powell’s assured us when we logged into the new site, something that required a password change to do (ah, the joyous extra step), that all would be well with our saved items world. It wasn’t. I lost everything in my to be purchased queue and my saved for later queue. And while the webpage may look better, though this is in the eye of the beholder, of course, personally I am not blown away by it, I am not happy that all the items I had in my queue are lost in the hyperether of the webverse. Moreover, I find it much more difficult to find used items in this supposedly new and improved webpage.

Will I purchase items from Powell’s in the future? I don’t know. This experience has left a very sour taste in my mouth both hyper and real.