Amazon.com has been displaying a letter from its founder/CEO Jeff Besoz on its homepage touting Kindle. In case you don’t know, Kindle is Amazon's ebook gadget. After users buy the book-sized device, they can download and read various books and publications from amazon for a fee.
Apparently Amazon underestimated demand on initial release, but now it has caught up and that's what Bozos' homepage letter is trying to convey.
What's interesting about this letter is that it is entirely a PNG image, not HTML text and tags as one might expect. An image map is used to activate a few hyperlinks in the letter.
I can't figure out why this letter needed to be an image. At first I though that perhaps its content is being protected from search engines, but then I noticed that the entire letter content was stuffed into the alt parameter of the <img> tag, something search engines can easily read. The images is served from the host "g-ecx.images-amazon.com." Interestingly entering this URL in the browser redirects the page to "www.imdb.com", an Amazon company.
Surely most people wouldn’t even notice the format and the ones who do will have a who-cares reaction. In my case I like to understand why things are done in a certain way. I've seen amateurish sites constructing Web pages from images. Amazon is a technology powerhouse. There had to be a reason this homepage letter was not in standard HTML, but that reason escapes me. Someone must know.
