Amazong October 5, 2007

It’s been a while since my last post.  It’s also been a while since I visited the Amazon web site.  So I was taken aback by some of the great stuff that has cropped up there, without my knowing.  To cut an already very short story even shorter, I was thinking of buying this book.  On the product page I was able to watch a video of the author talking about the book in a ‘related videos’ section.  Needless to say, it was great and made me want to buy the book even more.  Great example of providing additional product information to potential customers in a convenient and engaging way.  I like.

It struck me that although much has been made in some quarters about the danger of the internet to publishers of text, in fact it is book publishers who are some of the most innovative users of online marketing gubbins.

Only a few books seem to have the amazon video service, and most are American – but I wonder how long it’ll take for other product types/regions to catch up.  I noticed there’s also a new ‘customer discussions’ function too, which (incredibly) allows customers to not just write a review of the book, but have an interactive discussion about it.

In other news, yesterday I saw a man in a bowler hat, which pleased me greatly.  I also saw an (apparently fully loaded) Apache helicopter hovering over the Thames, which pleased me slightly less but was still pretty cool.  And on Monday I saw a man in a three piece suit with ‘Diana, I love you’ written on his face in permanent marker.  He had a very high-pitched voice.