Category Archives: Shopping

Amazon.com has a new promotion out to offer free two-day shipping to college students who have a .edu address and can supply the name of their college and their major. (They're also going to market to you incessantly, but that's what filters are for.)

According to the Amazon Student Terms & Conditions:

To sign up for and use Amazon Student, you must (1) have an Amazon.com account, (2) be a college student actively enrolled in at least one course at a college geographically located in one of the 50 United States or the District of Columbia, (3) be able to provide proof of enrollment upon request and (4) have a valid e-mail address that contains the domain suffix .edu. We may accept or refuse membership in our sole discretion. We may ask you to furnish documentation supporting your eligibility. If you do not provide documentation indicating that you meet the eligibility requirements above, you may be required to reimburse us for benefits you received as a result of your Amazon Student membership. The Amazon Student membership is for personal use only and not for the purpose of resale. You may not transfer or assign your Amazon Student membership or the benefits associated with an Amazon Student membership.

Does this offer of a free year of Amazon Prime include law students? Sadly, I have to think that as worded it does not: law students (except those few in a free-standing law school) are in a University, but only the undergraduates are in the “college.”

Join me in calling on Amazon to extend this promotion to graduate and professional students — they need books too!

(Spotted via Lifehacker)

UPDATE — Good news: Commentator Keith reports that when he went to sign up,

The two drop-down menus (one for level and one for field of study) contained explicit options for graduate students, specifically including law students.

So, law students, you're in! (I still have to pay $79/year.)

Via Cheerfully Demented, details of auctions in which winners get the right to be “Tuckerized” in novels by Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, Nalo Hopkinson, David Brin, Elizabeth Bear, Julie Czerneda and Mary Robinette Kowal.

Tuckerizing is the inclusion of a real person's name in a fictional piece (according to boingboing). Apparently the norm is to get a minor character who dies a horrible gruesome death.

The auctions benefit charity, which is nice, although the particular charity, The Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF) — which funds a delegate(s) from North America to Europe or from Europe to N. America, to attend a science fiction convention — would probably not be in my personal top 100 choices for charitable giving, even though it is certainly appropriate for this auction.

Borders is having a bad time in the US – $39M Loss in Q3 – and seems to be going broke in the UK.

Which is a shame, as I find their book stores a lot nicer than Barnes & Noble, which always seem cloned and unfriendly. But I can't say I'm surprised: we used to go to the local Borders on US 1 in Kendall a couple times a month. Oddly, no matter what we bought, the bill was just about the same — and fairly high. (Then we looked to run out of wall space for bookcases.) In time, we started making aggressive use of the excellent Miami library system, filling in the gaps with Amazon. And Borders lost a lot of business.

So it's probably our fault.

The Houseguest points me to the customer reviews at Amazon for the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk: Electronics.

Many creative uses.