So I was poking around Amazon looking at books by Walker Percy, considered by some to be one of the great novelist and essayists of the 20th century. I stumbled upon The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other, a book of essays about language and culture. Surprisingly it had 797 reviews. Wow, and for Walker Percy. So I started looking at the reviews and wonder of wonder if they all weren't about Nicholas Sparks' trashy romance novel Message in the Bottle.
So being the good little retired librarian I am, that offended me and I thought it would be an easy matter to report the error to Amazon. I first tried chat but clearly there was no human on the other end as the responses were completely silly and unrelated to my query. So I clicked on the call me button. After going through a list of potential concerns (endless) I found one that sort of indicated "none-of-the-above." Entered my phone number and was called back instantly by customer service (kudos for that.) When I explained the problem to the very nice fellow on the other end, he didn't get it. He was sure I wanted to order the book and was having problems. Finally got through and he referred me to the Kindle division where another nice guy after I gave him the ASIN number and he read some of the reviews realized the problem. He submitted the error report, but to my amusement and perhaps dismay never got the incredible irony of mixing up the reviews for these two books, something I found very funny.
Oh well, not for nothing did I get the Illinois cerebral humor award. I do wish they had an easier way of submitting error reports. Goodreads (owned by Amazon and linked to their database) had the reviews correct, thank goodness. Then again correcting errors there is really easy.
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