A few weeks ago I looked again for the Bill Stewart records that are out of print (mentioned previously). Lo and behold, Telepathy and Think Before You Think are available from Amazon. I ordered both right away, and received them today. These CDs were not available anywhere, as far as I knew, so this was a very happy discovery.
I wasn’t as happy when I opened Telepathy, though. The print quality of the artwork is substandard, kind of blurry. The CD itself is a burned CD-R — the print quality on the disc itself was also not great. For the moment, I’m giving Amazon the benefit of the doubt that the most important part, the music content itself, is untarnished. Listening on my computer speakers, I can’t tell, and without an original to compare to, it’s hard to say, but I’ll be giving this a careful listen on a better system to find out.
Looking closely at the bar code, I saw “Manufactured by Amazon.com kydc Lexington, KY”, which was interesting. Giving the page a second look as I was writing to them, I noticed that halfway down the substantial page, under Editorial Reviews of all places, they include this note:
This product is manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media, when sold by Amazon.com. Amazon.com’s standard return policy will apply.
This is not noted at the top of the page with the summary info, nor under Product Details, both of which would be sensible places. I’m not so cynical that I think they’re hiding this information to try to trick people, but I also don’t think they’re being as up front about this as they should.
I paid the price of a full CD, and I expected to get the real deal. I’ve emailed Amazon about this to find out what the story is, because there was nothing in the product description warning me that I was buying this cheap stuff. If Amazon writes back to me, I’ll update this post.
That seems rather sketchy and, although hopefully not, potentially illegal. However, I doubt Amazon would risk copyright infringement or anything like that, but who knows with the huge amount of money they rake in! Whatever the case, that's pretty lame. I'd like to know what Bill Stewart or the record company think.
Posted by Isaac at June 13, 2008 9:53 PM