amazon

Sitting on my sofa this evening, reading through some tips and tricks for selling photos for use in magazines, calendars, postcards and the like, my Photos That Sell book made a number of references to the Freelance Photographer's Market Handbook which gives details of publishers and publications that are on the lookout for photos to use.

Curious to find out more about the different ways to crack into the freelance photography market, I reached for my iPod touch and tapped out the address for Amazon into its Safari browser. Amazon had detected I was on an iPod (well, it thought it was an iPhone) and gave me a nice mobile interface to work with.

I found the book with ease and added it to my basket. Wondering what the minimum order was for free shipping, I went into their help section to try and find out. It was then that I noticed that they punish people for using their new mobile interface, stating 'All items ordered from your mobile device will be shipped standard shipping, unless you are an Amazon Prime customer.'

Why make it easier for customers to buy products from you but then not give them the shipping option that must have attracted them so more customers over the years? Admittedly, they do give the option to use their full site instead, but it's not as convenient on a mobile device.

In the end I resorted to using the laptop, so Amazon didn't lose the custom, but it would be nice if they'd give the free shipping option as part of their iPhone/iPod beta site.

Amazon has quietly introduced an innovative use of their book data - the complete text of many of the books they sell through their website - showing the frequency of the top 100 words inside the book.

Their Concordance functionality is using a technique which has been demonstrated previously on popular tagging-based (or 'folksonomy') sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati that shows the relative frequency of each word by varying the font size used to display it. Until now this had only been seen on sites which allow people to categorize things using a number of tags of their choosing, this being the first I am aware of that takes whole texts and picks out keywords in this way.

(via Waxy)