(Mis)Uses of Technology

(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick




Flip Through A Book On Amazon

from the adding-more-features dept

Even as Amazon struggles a bit financially, they continue to add cool features. I'm amazed at how far behind most e-commerce sites are when it comes to personalization and other "ease-of-use" features of Amazon. The fact is, the process of shopping at Amazon.com is a lot easier than shopping at many other sites. Now, they've added a feature that will let you flip through a book. Apparently, a lot of customers have been requesting this sort of feature. Basically, they have pictures of the inside flaps, and a few pages in the book. This is especially useful for things like art books, to see the quality of the images. I wonder, though, how much of an expense it is for Amazon to scan and put all those images online.

1 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

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  • Oct 10th, 2001 @ 12:41pm

    No Subject Given

    by kai

    My friend at a book publisher says that they practically beg amazon to put this sort of material up. Publishers have noticed that more information (table of contents, excerpts, etc) lead to more people buying a particular book from amazon. So, my suspicion is that Amazon said "if you want to put this book-flip up, send us the scans" and the book publishers did. So, I suspect that Amazon's costs were fairly low in this deal.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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