Category: Business

Things are getting cheaper.  From food to clothes to housing.  If you don’t agree (and most people don’t initially) – I’d argue that you aren’t comparing apples to apples.  Food in the grocery store is cheaper now than it was 20 years ago.  You spend more on food now than 20 years ago because you probably eat out more, not because it’s more expensive.  (And don’t forget to take into account inflation.  A $1 20 years ago is more than a $1 now.)

Kevin Kelly has an excellent article on how things are getting cheaper, why, what it means and how it affects technology and business.  He explains how some some things are getting cheaper (like copper) and some things are becoming free because you pay for others (Rynair airfare is cheap because you pay for food, luggage, etc).  And lots more.  It’s an excellent article if you’ve ever wondered why things are getting cheaper and how some things can just be free.   Here it is: Technology Wants to be Free.

Here are the top nine things that Amazon could do to expand their business model and make book readers’ lives perfect.

1. Electronic copies of the books in your library. One of the things that’s keeping me from buying a Kindle is the fact that I have two shelves of books that I haven’t read yet. If I bought a Kindle, I would want to read those books on my Kindle. Amazon should allow Kindle users to scan all their books ISBN numbers and get an electronic copy of the book in their Kindle library. Unfortunately, there’s no information in the barcode that uniquely identifies that book, so it would be too easy for people to scan their library and all their friends’ libraries, somewhat like they do with music CDs today. An alternative would be to have kiosks where you could take your books, they would note which ones you had, give you electronic copies in your Kindle and stamp the inside of the book noting that it had been electronic copied once.
2. Acquire Paperbackswap. I hate to mention this one because I love Paperbackswap just the way it is. However, it is the one non-Amazon place where I do significant book related things. I used to sell all my used books on Amazon but now I use Paperbackswap almost exclusively. Why? Because selling used books on Amazon is not easy. Just telling the buyer that I shipped the books takes six clicks plus typing a short message, and that’s if I know where to go.
   
3. Automatic postage. If Amazon doesn’t acquire Paperbackswap, they should at least figure out how to do postage for used books as well as Paperbackswap.  When I sell a book on Paperbackswap they use the fact that they know how much the book weighs, where’s it going and what my address is to print out a very nice label that includes postage! It takes two clicks and all I have to do is tape the label to the envelope. With Amazon I have to print their shipping label (multiple clicks since it’s not direct linked from the email notification), weigh the book, figure out postage, tape on the buyer’s address, put my address sticker on and then put real stamps on. Real stamps on any book weighing over 13 ounces means I can’t drop the book in the mailbox but now I have to go to my local post office, walk inside and hand it to a post office employee. If Paperbackswap can do it, Amazon should be able to!
4. Manage my own data. Amazon has a lot of data about my books. They have ratings, reviews, books I own, books I’ve looked at, etc. I’d love to be able to look at those lists, edit them, export them, save them, and so on. Because Amazon doesn’t allow me to do this, I double enter a lot of information into LibraryThing. What a pain! I’d love to spend that time on Amazon.
5. Publish my data easily. I’d like to keep a recently read list on my blog with my ratings and reviews. Ideally with my associate-id embedded in it. Right now I have to create a widget and manually enter each book. (After I enter my rating and review into Amazon central.) There’s no way to sort chronologically and it adds new books to the end, so if I want to show the most recently read books at the top I have to manually drag the book up the list a few steps at a time. It’s too much of a pain so the widget at the right is now randomly sorted – not exactly the information I wanted to share but as close as I could (somewhat) easily provide.
6. Spell checking in the search box! When I use Google search, I know if I
   misspell a word or don’t know an author’s name, it will say "Did you
   really mean …" and in one click I can fix it. In Amazon it just doesn’t find what you are looking for. Surely they can figure out that when
   I type "lois mcmaster bujould" I really meant "lois mcmaster bujold."
   Google figured it out.  Amazon told me "Your search "lois mcmaster
   bujould" did not match any products." The problem for Amazon (and me)
   is that if you use Google, Amazon is not even in the top 5 results.
   They are in the business of connecting customers to books and they are
   losing business.
7. Navigation. In addition to their website being visually cluttered, I find it really hard to find things like: "who just bought that book they said I sold?" and "when is my next shipment of diapers coming?" I can find those now but I had to learn where to look – it wasn’t intuitive.
8. Related books. Amazon does a really good job of pointing me at similar books that I might also enjoy. However, if I’m looking at a book in a series, if the book itself isn’t numbered, the only way I’ve found to figure out which book is first is to either compare all the published dates (assuming they went in order) or look for a user generated Listmania that lists them in order. Either Amazon needs to make those lists easier to find or they need to provide the data themselves. That would make it easier for customers to buy the next book in the series.
9. User-weighted recommendations. I love Amazon’s recommendation feature – I use it a lot to find books that I really enjoy. It would be even better if I could remove or change the weighting of some topics. Once I’ve looked for barbecue and smoking books for Frank for Christmas, I’m done with that topic. Unless he really enjoys them and asks for more, I’m never going to look at cooking books again. Now I have to manually tell Amazon that I’m not interested in cooking books – again and again for each cooking book they recommend to me.

I like Amazon. I love books and they make it easy for me to find and buy books I enjoy. If they did all the things on this list, not only would I love them more, but their business would get even better!

I read an opinion piece yesterday that speculated that Google should buy the New York Times.  My first thought was outrage that a newspaper would have an agenda.  My second thought was wow, I’m naive, newspapers are businesses and businesses can be companies and companies can be bought.  (Strangely enough though a company can’t own a newspaper and a television station in the same market.)  My third thought was would it be cool if Google owned the New York Times, what could they do?  My fourth thought was why not Amazon?

Google and Amazon may be in different businesses but there’s a lot of overlap.

	Amazon	Google
Why you use them	buy books, store data	look for information
Looking in books	look inside books you are interested in	search inside books for information that you are looking for
Search	search for books that have information or stories you want	search for information
Publishing	publishes author’s blogs pushes news content and books to Kindle shows indexes and chapters	serves up all sorts of content, mostly summarized publishes your documents and email
User data	allows you store your own data and search it (S3 storage business) stores your ratings, reviews and wish lists	allows you to search your data that you’ve stored stored on the web or on your computer stores your email, contacts, and documents
How they make money	makes money from selling things (like books) and content (like newspaper feeds)	makes money from selling things (like books) and content (like newspaper feeds)
How they allow users to make money	gives referral fees for book sales	gives ad money for selling ads on user content pages

So what would owning the New York Times buy them?  They’d be buying a brand.  People respect the New York Times and trust the news it brings them (some people trust it more than others) – it also has a dedicated readership, so they’d be buying readers.  So they’d buy brand, trust, influence and readers. 

What would Amazon do with that?  What would Google do with that?  The scary thing they could do is influence the news and therefore what we know, think and believe, but they already do that.  Getting past that, what cool new things could a Google or Amazon do if they owned the New York Times?  Both could do cool things with old content. Speaking of which, somebody should put all the New York Times photos on Flickr like the Library of Congress photos.  That would be cool.  I think Google would be more likely to do something like that than Amazon. 

What else could they do with it?  They both could help me find news stories I’m interested in but Google already does that and I have my own cool ways of doing that (primarily del.icio.us.)  I keep getting back to seeing Amazon as a content seller so they’d just be investing in the content they sell (not a business they are in) whereas Google is an information finder so they’d have more information for you to find but I feel like I’m missing something bigger. 

There’s an a-hah, big opportunity moment waiting for the person that sees it …

Did you know that there are islands of floating trash in the Pacific Ocean that are bigger than the state of Texas?  There are.

Did you know that birds in Hawaii and the North Sea are routinely found with over a pound of garbage in their stomaches?  There are and it kills them.

The solution to this problem is given as reuse, recycle.  While I think reuse and recycling are important, I think that’s trying to put a band aid on the problem.  We need to invest in figuring out what to do with our trash.  When you throw a plastic bag in the trash, you should feel confident that the right thing is done with it and it doesn’t end up as litter in the ocean.  (Right now you should not feel confident of that!)  We need better garbage disposal, better laws and regulations around garbage and ultimately better technology that can create biodegradable waste instead of the plastics we currently use.

So do your part: reuse, recycle, vote and invest in the right technologies.

It looks like Blockbuster is finally losing to Netflix. Based on my personal experience I would have predicted this a long time ago – I’ve been a happy Netflix customer for 5 years now and I haven’t been to Blockbuster in at least 5 years.  Three reasons I think Netflix rules over Blockbuster:

• No late fees.  It wasn’t convenient for me to return my movies to Blockbuster as it was out of my regular way so I always paid a day or two of late fees.
• Convenience.  Movies just show up in my mailbox with Netflix and they come with a return envelope with postage already attached.  I just drop it in the mailbox the morning after I watch it.  I always have a good movie or two at home to watch.
• Ratings.  I can shop for movies on Netflix and see the ratings so I know if they are good or not.  At the Blockbuster store I have to guess if the movie is good or not.  (I have the same problem with bookstores now – I have to look up every book on Amazon.com on my phone to make sure it’s good before I buy it.  And the I see that it’s cheaper on Amazon …)

And just to make the problem worse … movies aren’t like books – I don’t need to see them and hold them and read the back to know if I’ll really like them or not.  (Although even with books, I find that I’m more and more comfortable with Amazon.com.)

I signed up for Amazon Subscriptions a couple of days ago and today we got our first shipment – a big box of diapers and a big box of toilet paper delivered free to the door.  Free shipping, 15% off and they will send us diapers on a regular schedule!  I signed up for diapers once a month and toilet paper every three months (they have all of the non-spoilable grocery type stuff available) – their website and email reminders make it really easy to change how often you want to get things, add a shipment or skip a shipment whenever you need to.  You get the 15% off and free shipping every time. Hopefully once I get it set up we’ll never have to think about diapers again … except when we are changing a particularly stinky one that is!  Now that’s my kind of shopping.

Thanks to ParentHacks for telling me about Amazon Subscribe & Save.