Tag: amazon

The Satisfaction Paradox

a future where amazon and others sell the recommendations as a service but the actuals goods are free.

While it may be a long while before every adult is sharing art or innovations on a global scale, we can already see the abundance of good stuff piling up. Netflix has more great movies a click away — after I filter out the dross — than I can watch in my lifetime. What do I watch next? Spotify and other music streaming services will have more fantastic, I-am-in-heaven music available everywhere all the time than I can ever listen to. What do I listen to next? Google will have every book ever published only 125ms away, and collaborative filtering, friends recommendations and a better Amazon engine, will narrow down those stacks to the best 10K books for me. So what do I read next?

I believe that answering this question is what outfits like Amazon will be selling in the future. For the price of a subscription you will subscribe to Amazon and have access to all the books in the world at a set price. (An individual book you want to read will be as if it was free, because it won’t cost you extra.) The same will be true of movies (Netflix), or music (iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody.) You won’t be purchasing individual works.

Kindle Singles

Before the advent of digital reading, writers often had to choose between making their work short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the “heft” required for book marketing and distribution. 3 months ago, Amazon made a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Kindle in making a new kind of content available to readers–Kindle Singles. Typically between 5K and 30K words, each Kindle Single is intended to allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length.

the reign of the padded book because you can sell a 30 page paperback is over. yay!

Amazon Reviews Design

Since the initial release of the helpfulness question, Amazon’s team has played with many variations, some of which have become mainstays of the design. One of the first enhancements was to use Ajax instead of a page refresh when the user pressed the Yes or No button. This simple change of removing the page refresh dramatically increased the likelihood a user would vote on more reviews. To make more room on the product page, Amazon reduced the number of reviews they initially display. Now, when they have helpful reviews, they appear separate from the rest. On the most popular products, only the most helpful reviews show up.

the magic behind amazon the reviews of reviews brought in an additional 2.7b of revenue.

Amazon fails at REST

Designing in side-effects to GET requests is a fundamental mistake of web development that people who don’t understand the web/http tend to make. It’s less common now than it used to be, but I’m suprised to see it in a web API from one the biggest web properties and doubly surprised to see it called “REST”.

what is it with amazons infatuation with SOAP? how can they be a web company yet develop such lousy “API”s?

Kindle is boring

When Amazon came to talk to me about being included on the reader a long long time ago, I said sure, but. The but is that I wanted my books to be free and included in every reader, and my blog, too. And the people willing to buy the device are exactly the sort of people that an author like me wants to reach. No harm, no foul, all 3 of us win. If there were 1m of these machines out there and an author had a chance to have her next book show up automatically on all of them, few among us would say, “no thanks to that exposure.”

This is a disruptive approach, the sort of thing only a market leader could pull off. It changes the world in a serious way. I wanted to be part of that. I was unpersuasive. Sorry.

too little too late. instead of creatively destroying the publishing industry, amazon opted for lame middleman.