Legal Research

Amazon and Zappos

Someone asked me to comment on the Amazon Zappos merger.

OK.

My favourite tweet - within minutes and viral very quickly - was David Lee King asking if Amazon was now going to come into his home and take his shoes. Of course, they just want to upgrade what the washing machine already does to my socks!

Seriously though, since libraries are fanboys of the various strategies from Google, Amazon and NetFlix maybe now we'll see a long discussion of the role of shoe retailing in libraries. Librarians as shoe recommenders and collectors. It makes me smile.

Seriously Google is the world's most successful advertiser. There are better search systems for us to evaluate. Amazon always said they wanted to be a great online retailer, hence they're not called Books.com. They do crowdsourced recommendations really well and we can learn from that. Netflix does home delivery well from a huge stock. We don't. We could learn from that too. Many ILS systems support book delivery. It's great to watch those libraries that are trying to implement these strategies rather than just watching other succeed and have fun trying.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on July 25, 2009 (boomark / email).