Amazon.com owes me at least $212.82.

Amazon’s strategy to torture Hachette into reducing prices for its books has been to make the publisher suffer by imposing delivery delays on many of its most in-demand titles.



The long-running spat is starting to take a toll on customer loyalty. No one’s happy. Nine hundred-plus authors have signed an anti-Amazon petition and for customers, Amazon has reversed its promise of instant gratification.



If you want to read books by Christopher Hitchens, for instance, or James Patterson’s latest thriller, or Night Heron, a debut espionage novel by Adam Brookes, be prepared to pay full price – instead of the usual 25% to 50% Amazon discount – and to wait as long as three weeks for the hardcover version to come by mail.

Which brings me back to the $212.82.

This cat may have sought out a physical bookstore in order to escape the Amazon-Hachette feud sweeping the internet. Just a theory. Photograph: Alamy

I reached my breaking point last month when my book group decided to read Scoop by Evelyn Waugh.



Hardly a new release (it was first published in 1937), it’s still a Hachette book and subject to that shipping delay from Amazon.



Too long for me to wait to get the book and still have time to read it before our meeting – so off I ventured to a Barnes & Noble.



For the first time in perhaps six months, I walked out of a bookstore with a bag. A bag containing not just the Waugh novel, but four other books.



Because, as Amazon and every other retailer knows, when you walk into a store for one item, you usually walk out clutching several others you didn’t intend to buy at all. I figured that was simply an anomaly, however.

Not at all, as it turned out. Our next book club selection, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, turns out to have a similar one-to-three week delivery delay.



Of course, I can order a Kindle copy – but that’s not great for a book club discussion, when you want to flip to the right page in the middle of a debate. Some people also just like physical books. Besides, isn’t the core of Amazon’s promise about giving the customer what it wants?



So, back to Barnes & Noble I go.

This time, the financial damage totals $212.82, the bag is stuffed with books – including several I was eager to read but wasn’t even been aware had been published. I also emerged with a Barnes & Noble membership card, for which I had paid a further $25 – and that pretty much guarantees I’ll be spending more time and money there in future, in exchange for more discounts and – given the recent evidence – greater availability of the books I want and need to lay my hands on.

In about a month, because I couldn’t buy two paperback books from Amazon, I’ve ended up spending $400 with its rival. The first time I had to make a special trip to the bookstore might have been a fluke, but by the second time, I was irked.



An Amazon fulfillment center. No Hachette books. Photograph: Ross D Franklin/AP

I’m not blaming Amazon for my own lack of self-control in a bookstore – that’s a pre-existing condition dating back to childhood.

But I will be very curious to see, when Barnes & Noble releases its fiscal first quarter earnings early next week, just how many other frustrated book buyers nationwide may have ended up indulging in similar physical book-buying sprees as Amazon, the digital giant, proves uncooperative.



Of course, it’s not quite as straightforward as that. If it were, Amazon’s customer service gods would have put the money back in my account in seconds. “I can’t do that” probably doesn’t exist in Thor’s vocabulary.

But when you’re the world’s largest online retailer – the “everything store”, as Brad Stone dubbed it in his book of the same title – it’s about more than providing superlative customer service.

You need to give customers the best possible array of products, available instantly.



Especially when 20 million or so Amazon Prime members are paying $99 apiece each year for guaranteed two-day delivery -- that’s how much they value that instant gratification.

Between 2010 and 2013, Amazon invested a whopping $13.9bn in building “fulfillment centers” scattered across the country, so it could meet all our needs and wishes as close to instantly as possible.

Moreover, this has made me wonder whether convenience might have its limits when it comes to online shopping – especially when the online retailer in question starts to chip away at that convenience in pursuit of some other corporate goal.



Certainly, my Barnes & Noble excursion reminded me of some of the things that online retailing can’t do.

However happy I am to get hold of a book that I know I want, walking into a “real” bookstore and gazing around at all that is available made me realize the limitations of Amazon.com’s recommendation algorithms. My purchases included four hardcover books by authors whose other works I’d bought and that I coveted as soon as I realized they were available. But Amazon hadn’t even alerted me to their existence.

And in some cases -- like shopping for clothing -- the online experience can never really substitute for the real thing. You don’t know what a garment looks like -- its color, style, texture, fit, quality -- until you’ve tried it on.

Ultimately, I don’t think either party in the Hachette-Amazon spat has “right” on their side.



Both are acting in their self-interest while claiming higher moral authority. While the giant publishing companies have been slow to understand the changes to their business models, Amazon, for its part, appears reluctant to understand the value that companies like Hachette bring to the publishing world.



But the battle itself has been of unexpected value to me, simply by reminding me of how foolish it is to come to view any retailer – even the customer service supremo Amazon – as my personal “everything store”.

Maybe that’s a lesson that’s worth the $212.82. On second thought, I’ll hang on to the receipt and stick it to my bulletin board to serve as a reminder.