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Amazon.com Becomes Self-Aware, Self-Sustaining Entity

Well, not exactly.  The Guardian has a riveting story about the announcement and sale by Amazon of Useless America by Jim Crace, a book the author claims never to have written:

Now we are in the world of guesswork. When the book was "announced" all those years ago, someone at Penguin couldn't type, possibly, or someone at Amazon was hard of hearing. "Used to" became "Useless", an amusing error. But an error with a life of its own. The Amazon computer sucked the information in, fleshed it out, nurtured it, gave it provenance.

Spooky, eh?  For the record, Amazon is no longer carrying the phantom novel, the Kafkaesque product of its own twisted bureaucracy.

Posted on Monday, October 30, 2006 at 01:31PM by Registered CommenterMark Leahy, Web Editor in | CommentsPost a Comment

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