Hack 6 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/
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