I’m seriously in two minds about this. According to Lucy Orbach of BooksPrice, I rate a notification that their service just got better. On the one hand, it’s spam [ok, no it’s not.]. On the other hand, it’s personalised and polite and damn it I think I probably do want to use their site.

I can’t help wondering, though, how many thousands of copies of that email went out with a name and blog title filled into the template… (“I will appreciate it if you can post a comment at your blog”…)

Anyway. BooksPrice is a price comparison site for bookshopping, I haven’t used it yet but it looks like it might be a good replacement for BookBurro (which died after a Firefox update a while ago, and which I never bothered to fix).

Apparently I should be buying my books from Wal-Mart, which neatly illustrates the biggest disadvantage to this sort of scheme. I don’t want to buy from Wal-Mart, or from Amazon, or from anyone big enough to offer really cheap prices. So I don’t know how much business BooksPrice is going to get from me, but I applaud their marketing.

And if any publishing houses feel like sending me review copies of anything, well, it looks like I’m for sale.

Update: I bite my tongue. This wasn’t spam: unsolicited, but not mailed in bulk –Lucy chimes in in the comments– and sent to me because I’m likely to be interested. In fact, it’s the sort of commercial mailing I should be encouraging, not shying away from. (Which doesn’t make it any less weird to get asked by a stranger to endorse their website, but keeping a blog does make you a public figure, in a ridiculously minor fashion. Just something to get used to.) My reservations about using the service haven’t changed: price just isn’t that important to me most of the time, compared to a bunch of other factors. Rank your hits by how pleasant the staff are when your order goes astray, or how dusty-and-Victorian the store is to visit, and you’d be guaranteed my business…

Update #2: Ask and ye shall receive. Lucy has extended their book offer (see Brendan’s comment below) to me (“just because we like you”). So I still don’t really know how good the service is, but my guess is they’d be delighted if you told ’em how to make it better. After all, that intensive marketing effort should give some sort of payback, no?