Recently I got into a book-buying spree. Just last week, I must have spent over three hundred dollars at various online bookstores. This uncontrollable and irrational obsession with purchasing books that I most likely will not read (at least till years later) is a personal weakness that I have by now accepted. After all, there are far worse things to waste money on. This time, however, things got a bit more complicated.
Last Wednesday while I was hunting for deals on the AMS Bookstore, the book “Automorphic Forms and Applications” caught my attention. It has some solid articles on areas of automorphic forms that I was keen to know more about (such as the Langlands-Shahidi method of constructing L-functions). The book was selling for $60 to members of the AMS, but only for $54 at Barnes and Noble. For me, however, a meager $6 in savings is not enough; so I searched for coupon codes to use at Barnes and Noble. Imagine how pleased I was when I found out there is a 20% discount coupon at B&N for signing up for a new user account! Without any hesitation, I ordered the book at the discounted cost of $42.
Yet there are is free lunch in this world. It has been two weeks now since I placed an order of two books through the SpringerLink MyCopy service, the shipment still has not arrived. I could not withstand the anxiety any longer and decided to check up on the order. Turns out the order did not register at Springer, despite the fact that a transaction of $49.90 did show up on my credit card statement. As of now, Springer is still looking into the problem.
Although I do not believe in fate, it did make me wonder whether this tit-for-tat is some cruel prank planned by a malefactor on my poor soul. Perhaps I did get too greedy and lost self-control on my book-buying spree, perhaps it is just karma. I abide.
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