Amazon has perfected one part of the sales cycle: they have made it very easy for me to give them money. Anyone selling anything should think about their models.
First, they had Amazon Prime shipping. I pay $79/year. (I think it was more like $69/year when I signed up.) In exchange, when I order a book from Amazon, I don’t pay shipping and they deliver it in two days. (And often by the next morning.) So if I want a book, I just go online, find it, hit "Buy now" and it shows up tomorrow morning. It’s easier than getting in my car and driving 10 miles to the bookstore. (And cheaper now that gas is so expensive. Cheaper once I’ve already spent that $79/year that is.) So I give my money to Amazon instead of the local (chain) bookstore, because it’s easier. I also buy more books because it’s easy. (And before you tell me to use the library … most of the time my local library doesn’t have the books I want to read and when they do, there’s always a waitlist for them. That said, I love libraries. I still go hang out in them.)
Then they introduced Subscribe & Save
Then came the Kindle
And they’ve encouraged me to tell all of you about it, because if you click through and buy any of these (very addictive) products, they’ll give me a payback. You have been warned!
(And if they listened to me, I have ideas for how they could make it even easier for me to give them money. For starters, their wishlist functionality is so bad, I use several other tools to manage my wishlists. Also, my Kindle needs to be open source so that I can get all the features I want. But even without all those they are doing a pretty good job of making it really easy for me to give them my money.)
OT:
You are on planets now.
You have to write that the diapers are for your baby or people will misunderstand :))
On topic: I only want a kindle like device that can read and display _my_ PDFs flawlessly. So it would need more processing power and a higher res.
Once such a device is built it will be another “iPod like” event: Everybody will want something like that.
( BTW: That page-turn-black-flash thing will be solved with epsons new controller chip this fall with Kindle 2.0 i guess )
“Open Source” kindle, that’s a bit of a wet dream. It is full of DRM, so technically it can’t be.
Out of curiosity, what tools do you use to manage your wishlists?
I use Paperbackswap, LibraryThing and Amazon to manage my wish lists. None of them alone is good enough and none of them do what I want them to do perfectly.
Thanks for the post.
Even in Canada where many of those services is not availble at amazon, they still make it really easy for me to give them my money:
– I don’t have to remember to walk to the bookstore on my way back from work: I can order right there when I gained interest in a book by reading about it on some blog or something,
– One click shopping. Really works,
– Ok, this is not a great point per se, but their shipping cost is high, so I always add another book to get the free shipping, and it still shows up in two days.
behdad