The tricky part is this:
"Driving traffic back to Amazon must be the primary purpose for all
applications using Amazon Associates Web Service."
It's both clear and wiggly. It's clear to me that Amazon encourages
authors to use AWS to link to their books on Amazon, but nobody would
say that the "primary purpose" of an author site was to drive traffic
to Amazon—far from it. Amazon's AWS newsletter has spotlighted many
sites that could not accurately be described as meeting these terms.
Anyway, it's strange that Amazon would be willing to lose traffic from
libraries—even if the traffic was not "primarily" to drive sales it
still certainly drives sales!—just as Google has opened itself to
them. In my opinion, Amazon's Web Services and Associates program have
central to Amazon's dominance of bookland online. They're losing that
edge now, bit-by-bit.
Tim
Received on Thu Mar 20 2008 - 09:36:50 EDT