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Amazon’s TextBuyIt: Shopping for books and other items on your mobile phone with text messaging
April 3, 2008 | 10:06 am
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By David Rothman
Ironic, isn’t it?
Amazon’s bestseller pricing favors Kindle books over those at the Mobipocket Store in the Mobi format—which can run on certain mobile phones and a variety of other devices.
But meanwhile Jeff Bezos and company are laudably recognizing the importance of mobile phones with a new, cellphone-based service to let you order books and items via text messaging.
Will the Kindle itself soon be turned into an order-taker for much more than books?
Related: TextBuyIt page on Amazon, the new service’s FAQ, Publishers Weekly story and the rival, book-oriented ShopText service.
And a reminder to Jeff and friends: The world has many more cellphones than dedicated e-book readers. In your place I’d hope mightily that Google doesn’t catch on to the potential of the Android cellphone platform for e-book software able to display .epub books. Time to get more serious about .epub?
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Comments:
David asks:
“Will the Kindle itself soon be turned into an order-taker for much more than books?”
Using the Kindle’s web browser one has always had the ability to use the amazon website to buy anything available on the site.
The only flaw is that I have not been able to turn on one-click ordering and use my Prime member status which makes it a little more tedious to buy things and I can’t get free shipping for orders less than $25.
My guess is that if Kindle sales do actually amount to much that amazon will make tweaks to their site and Kindle browser to make use of their site via the browser more convenient.