A half a year ago I wrote an article about my Amazon habits. While I still keep on buying stuff from Amazon and checking recommended items now and then (probably less and less in the future), I don’t mark things “owned” anymore.

Why?

First of all, it’s a huge job. Keeping your collection at least somewhat up-to-date in Amazon takes time. The different editions in Amazon are a burden as well. Should I mark them all owned, or just keep with one edition, and which one is the right one?

Since you can’t remove any purchased items from your Amazon collection, I’ve left all my purchased items as they are, with their ratings, so I’ll still keep getting recommendations based on them. It is still clearly better and easier to work with than with a huge, 500-item, collection.

Just as a remark, I’ve bought all in all 83 items from Amazon for myself.

Getting back to what it is about

I realized that constantly looking for recommended items in Amazon is taking up my time with my music, narrowing the selection of bands I will ever get to know as well as little by little adapting me to a more mainstream selection. (Also, Amazon undeniably tries to make me buy more and more from them, or via their service.)

While the recommendation system is generally good, it just can’t deliver the genuine joy of doing elaborate research on new artists and finding a hidden gem. (To be fair, Amazon hasn’t recommended me even a tiny bit shinyish, way too popular, charcoal bits lately.)

Now that I have one obsession less, I hope to be able to focus more on things that matter. Most of all I hope that I could spend even more time away from my computer.

I’m pretty much an obsessed record collector. According to my record database, which is highly accurate, I have about 640 records in my shelf. Records are overly expensive in Finland, so I’m buying a lot of stuff from the Internet, especially Amazon.

But that’s not the complete story. I’ve rated pretty much every record, DVD and book I own, on Amazon.co.uk. That’s a few items over 500 (on Amazon.com, I have about half of that). Naturally Amazon doesn’t have all the Finnish music I’m into, which explains the ever so low number. Even that is not as far as it goes. I have about 13750 (5500 on .com) items marked as not interested. You read it correctly, that’s almost fourteen thousand.

I visit Amazon pretty much every day, and immediately mark any new items I won’t be buying, from Today’s Recommendations, All Recommendations and those Recommended by Browsing History. Usually this isn’t a big amount of clicks, but pretty much every time I add a new item to my Amazon owned list, I’m gonna do more work. And every time I browse at any item on Amazon; .co.uk or .com – I do them both. At the end of the day, I usually have at most 5 items that I’m not going to mark, which means I’ll buy them at some point. At the moment I’m recommended 1-3 items, depending a bit on the day.

Some of the Amazon recommends are still silly; why would I be interested in a coffee machine if I’ve rated a board game? Some of the recommends are pretty good, and I’m recommended almost every new record/item I’m going to buy anyway plus some records, which sometimes raise my interest. All in all, it’s a pretty useful tool for me, also considering I buy a big proportion of my music from Amazon because of their and/or the Marketplace sellers’ low prices.

Sometimes I still wonder though – am I too much into Amazon? Should one really be using the Amazon recommendation system this much? How many marked items do you have?