Go ahead and think me persnickety. I don’t care. I’m pretty certain the issue I have with reading samples on Amazon is a bellwether for a larger issue that affects many other people elsewhere in their online experience. You, maybe? Get it off your chest. Let me know.

For me, one of the appeals of browsing for books on Amazon has been the opportunity to read a (usually) brief excerpt from a book that seems interesting. I remember times in the past, when money was a little tighter, when “Look Inside” (now “Read Sample”) was a mainstay of my reading diet. What luxury, to savor a representative chapter of first one title and then another!

Today, I can no longer count on that experience: Too often, the “sample” in question turns out to be nothing more than the book’s front matter. The sample leaves me no firsthand experience of the writer’s thinking or voice. A case in point: I’m interested in the book Tropisms by the Russian-French author Nathalie Sarraute. When I click on “Read Sample,” Amazon serves up a listing of the chapters together with the author’s foreword. That’s it. The foreword is worth a read, to be sure. But without being able to get a feel for the main text, reading it is beside the point. 

I try to imagine what’s going on at Amazon to result in such sloppiness. Is the effort to properly support this functionality such a cost center? Is this the work of low-level people who are either too rushed to care or who don’t know the difference? Or maybe the function of a book sampling algorithm so low-priority that nobody has bothered to tune it? Either way, my greatest aspersion doesn’t rest on the mild inconvenience of my unsatisfied curiosity. No, I save that for the corporate machine that apparently doesn’t give a hang about quality behind such a poorly supported feature.