I have had an amazon account for many years dating all the way back to 2007. My early days perhaps of online ordering. I remember being amazed at how cheap books were compared to book prices in Australia. It reminded me a little of my overseas trips in 1999 and 2000 from each of which I came home with lots of books. Indeed I have old recollections of book reviewers noting in their articles of trips to the UK being a chance to buy lots of books, some of which were never available here, and all much cheaper there than here.

For a long time the Australian book market was something of a closed shop with high prices charged which you only realised if you were lucky enough to be afford a trip overseas. The opening of online sites for purchasing books overseas changed things and I think ultimately has meant book prices here have dropped significantly. Scary times for a while with local bookshops closing.

Trawling back through my blog to that year of 2007, I found an account of my desire to purchase the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. At the time, given a favourable exchange rate (about 86 cents to the AUD) I was able to purchase the leatherbound edition from Amazon for about AUD$270 altogether. It was selling locally for $1,000. I don’t say this to single out oxford as many publishers seemed to be doing the same thing. I think the Shorter did drop to around $3-400 locally some years later.

I don’t buy much from Amazon these days, and while I like to check booko for comparison pricing, both new and secondhand, for new stuff at least, I tend to buy locally from Booktopia. Pre-lockdown I would also buy books in person from the likes of Better Read Than Dead and Abbey’s.

My wishlist on Amazon remains, and has around 170 or so entries, dating all the way back to 2007. Entries have disappeared as I’ve purchased them either from Amazon or elsewhere. One thing I liked about Amazon’s system is that it would remind me if I had already purchased a book – this was important as I didn’t always remember and there was a period of some years when most of my books were in boxes and I couldn’t easily tell if I had a title or not. If I purchased a book elsewhere I would eventually get round to manually removing it from Amazon.

I don’t intend to list every book I listed as I suspect that would be a little dull so I will try and do something of a potted selection. Onward to 2007 when Library 2.0 was in full swing and the oldest book in my list was:

• Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication, and Community Online by Meredith Farkas – I think I have this now though it might be on desk at work.
• Teaching Web Search Skills: Techniques And Strategies Of Top Trainers – Greg Notess – I vaguely recall reading posts of his but never got round to getting the book
• Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web by Tara Calishain
• The Origins of Modern Science by Herbert Butterfield – I have a secondhand copy of his work “The Whig Interpretation of History” which I read when I was studying for my HPS major. When I did my library Master’s, I created an index for it.
• Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts by Latour and Woolgar – more HPS stuff
• A History of Natural Philosophy: From The Ancient World To The Nineteenth Century – Edward Grant – a strong writer in the field
• On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe, Science, and Culture in the Sixteenth Century by John Robert Christianson – never did get round to buying this though I studied quite a bit on Brahe.
• Cellarius Atlas (Harmonia Macrocosmica of 1660) by Robert van Gent – I had a bit of a fixation with atlases at the time, also listed for 2007 is the Atlas Maior
• A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary by Donna Lee Berg – that entry was added to the list a couple of weeks after I purchased the Shorter Oxford

The wishlist for 2007 was a mix of my interests at my time: Library 2.0, History & Philosophy of Science, and dictionaries, 23 books listed in all.