News You Can Bruise for 2005 November 29

Marc Hedlund complains about major problems with Amazon wish lists. The first comment is from an ex-Amazon employee complaining about Amazon's top-down management style that means features never get implemented. I believe it.

Fortunately you can get around some of the problems by hacking together stuff using the web service APIs. They don't do nearly as much as I'd like, but Amazon wish lists with all their problems are still the only online book tracker that provides any web service API at all. Another comment in that weblog entry is the inevitable "we're doing it better with Rails and we need beta testers", which is worth a shot; as is (still) LibraryThing if you just want something that works. The Z39.50 gateway is looking better to me all the time; the software equivalent of beer goggles.

Book update: files chapter basically done.