Everything I've read about the book (there's a thorough review in the April Locus) suggests that Amazon is on crack.

Rick Kleffel thinks so too.

I guess if it's a "Zones of Thought" book then presumably it's not because it has any "Zones" in it and stuff but because it's meant to be a prequel of sorts, set very much earlier in the same universe. Doesn't sound completely implausible...

Amazon's on crack, yes. One of the gags in the book is that there are sort of VR fan clubs organized around popular literary universes (so Rowling and Pratchett are popular), and there's a nice meta self-deprecating line about how nobody bothers to organize such clubs around the Tines or the Zones of Thought. So it's unlikely that it can even be construed as a prequel to those books.

Amazon is confused. They've been told they're confused. For whatever reason they haven't managed to correct it.

Yep, they are confused, though I initially thought that they'd spelled the title wrong too--or omitted the apostrophe anyway. As it turns out though, no apostrophe is correct; it's just RAINBOWS END. There's even a chapter in the book that's called something like "The Missing Apostrophe."

Thanks, Patrick. Figures.

JJA, I missed that. Now I’m wondering if it’s a statement of theme, kind of like Hal Duncan summing up his worldview as “People die.”