Amazon Hacks

Switch to a Text-Only Amazon

Make the Amazon.com web site leaner and meaner by taking away the images.

Now that you know some of the secrets behind Amazon image URLs, you can make those images go away! Why in the world would anyone want to do that? Well, if you’re one of those unfortunate souls who still use a modem to connect to the Web, eliminating images can mean a big boost in speed. It’s also handy if you’re scraping Amazon with a script. Fewer images means less HTML and fewer bytes transferred.

There are two methods for going all-text. The first involves a little URL customization. Adding a /t/ after any product ID [Hack #1], Wish List ID [Hack #18], or List ID [Hack #41] gives you the text-only version of the page:

http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0596004478/t/

From there, any links you follow will be in text-only mode. If you’d rather start from the home page, you can use this URL, also with the trailing /t/:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html/t/

Or, to go extremely minimalist, you could use the version intended for Pocket PCs in a standard browser, as shown in Figure 1-12:

http://www.amazon.com/pocketpc/

Figure 1-12. Amazon PocketPC version in a standard web browser