Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO announced this week that they are seeing rapid growth in Kindle, Amazon web services, third-party sales and retail. He added, "In the last 12 months, customers around the world have ordered more than $1 billion of products from Amazon using a mobile device."This process must frustrate bookstores or maybe not. I guess any used book store can choose to sell books on Amazon - they could be the one making money from the Amazon iPhone application.
I wonder how Amazon's mobile applications change the way a used bookstore operates? I saw an example of some changes that I suspect have come about because of Amazon and mobile applications. I was recently in the Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon. As I was browsing the many rooms and floors of books (the store is enormous and a favorite destination of ours), I noticed that Powell's had covered all of the original ISBN numbers and barcodes on the books with a proprietary Powell's sticker and barcode. Why would they do that? It makes it far more difficult to look up the book on an Amazon iPhone application or scan the barcode with your iPhone RedLaser application.
Very interesting indeed!
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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
CEO/Principal Consultant, Netcentric Strategies LLC
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
