I’ve had subscription fulfillment systems on my mind recently. It’s gotten so bad that last night I dreamt about it. I was visiting a fulfillment bureau I used to work with and happened to bump into Jeff Bezos at the coffee pot. I told him that Amazon simply doesn’t understand the subscription publishing business.

They’re not alone in that. Over the years I’ve known several programmers who’ve become so frustrated with fulfillment systems that they’ve toyed with the idea of writing one themselves. I’ve always warned against it. These things are absurdly complicated and do processes behind the scenes that most programmers wouldn’t think about.

They have to earn revenue by issue, and regulate entitlements. They have to deal with different prices and offers on different efforts. They back start and future start subscriptions, pause them when people go on vacation, and send the magazine up north in the summer and down south in the winter. They have to keep people in different renewal pools, and assign them to those pools according to various criteria.

I’m barely scratching the surface of the strange things these systems have to address. The deeper you dig, the more complex they become. Trust me. I’ve been living it for months.

But why are they so complex?

A programmer I know likes to blame marketing. Computers, he says, are very good at doing one thing a million times. Marketers, on the other hand, want to do a million things one time.

There’s some justice to his complaint. Marketers are always trying new things, and they rarely have the technical knowledge to understand how their ideas influence back-end processes. Often they don’t care. In fact, not caring is sometimes touted as a virtue.

“Just make it work. We can’t have the back end running the front end.”

Think of what that implies for a system that has to accommodate thousands of marketers in hundreds of companies. We want 12 issues per year, but not one a month. Wait, we need to save money so we’re moving to 10 issues a year. But only for these subscribers. And this other publication is a weekly, except for these two weeks. Oh, we still have to have 52 issues, so we’ll double up on these two, and they won’t always be the same two.

If you sat down for a day with a pencil and paper and tried to come up with all the variations a fulfillment system has to deal with, you’d miss half of them. I promise.

These things preserve the accumulated “wisdom” of decades of marketers — tinkering, wondering, testing, imagining, “Why not?”-ing.

Jeff Bezos simply decided it didn’t have to be that way. Amazon doesn’t have to have a million different options when they sell toasters, so they don’t need them for magazines either.

To a publishing geek, this is madness. It’s the arrogance of the internet generation. They think everything’s different now.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, Jeff,” I told him. “Publishing simply isn’t like that. It’s complicated.”

But every once in a while it’s important for somebody to poke the sacred cow. We can’t keep doing things simply because they’ve always been done that way.