Remember that easily-scammed new feature over at Amazon.com?

The one where people could recommend not only books "in addition to" or "instead of" other books, but CDs instead of books, DVD players instead of books, and sofas instead of DVD players...

Well, good riddance to bad rubbish! The feature quietly disappeared over the weekend!

Unfortunately, I think the publicity for this scam has opened a Pandora's box that isn't so easily closed. It has exposed Amazon as an exploitable system of technologies to a worldwide community of desperate authors. At least some of them will continue poking around for other ways to scam the Amazon systems, even if this feature never returns.

As I said before, the bigger problem here had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the ability of writers to behave ethically.

So yes, the king is dead! Le roi est mort!

Mais, vive le roi aussi.