So the other weekend I cashed in all my loose change. I had three coffee containers full – which ended up working out to be a little over $300! I used a coin sorting machine that gave me an Amazon gift certificate, and that’s now led to the following:
That’s 17 books so I think I’m good from now to the end of the year (if only because I’ll be trying to figure out how any publisher can make money when I can get this many books delivered to me via UPS for so little).
In case you’re looking for a book to read, here’s what’s on the list (from top to bottom):
The Soul of a New Machine – Tracy Kidder
Divided Kingdom – Rupert Thomson
No Longer Human – Osamu Dazai
Life and Fate – Vassily Grossman
Perdido Street Station – China Mieville
Demonic Males – Wrangham & Peterson
All God’s Children – Fox Butterfield
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases – Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky
The Machine that Changed the World – Womack, Jones & Roos
Empires of Light – Jill Jonnes
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
RESTful Web Services – Richardson & Ruby
The Forever War – Dexter Filkins
Right Hand Left Hand – Chris McManus
The Box – Marc Levinson
Empire City – Jackson & Dunbar
On a related note, this shopping experience completely confirmed why Amazon is the platform for buying things. Every single one of these books was part of my wishlist (some for a few years). Amazon never asked me to update my wishlist, rather just kept it there for the day when I was finally ready.
Also, now that I’ve bought the books they don’t appear in my wishlist and if I go to the page for any of the books there’s a gentle reminder that I’ve already bought it:
If that’s not the ultimate retail experience, then I don’t know what is.