So, as I mentioned on here last time, I have recently started to dabble in the selling Graphic Novels on amazon game and have been successful enough at it to pay for my comic book hobby/addiction. (yay me!)
Along these lines, I was recently browsing google to see what would come up if I searched out the subject of “how to sell books on amazon”, and of course I came across the expected number of self-styled ‘amazon book seller gurus’. What I found interesting was the fact that they all claimed that if you are going to make any real money selling books online then you need to subscribe to a service that lets you submit ISBN numbers through your cellphone’s mobile browser for a monthly fee. Basicly, this service – each version of it since there was more than one supplier offering the same kind of service – would let you submit a book’s ISBN and then send you the price info for the book from amazon and any other site that you included if they support it on mobile browsers. Now maybe this is a very useful service for the sellers that are checking out books at their local Salvation Army or Value Village or other thrifty store. In fact, I could see myself using this kind of tactic at a local comic shop or a comic show, but I thought about it and figured, hey, couldn’t I just use my cell to browse amazon directly and get the same price info? And if these guys are pushing amazon as the way to sell books for profit, then how important is it to get price info from lesser book selling sites, anyway?
Really when you think about it, what is the real benefit in paying a monthly fee for a service that does not really save you much (if any) time in looking up something on your cellphone by retrieving info from a mobile version of a site that you could access yourself? Especially when you consider that on top of any monthly fees, you are still on the hook for any data transmissions which you have to cover the cost of regardless of how they are used – browser data is browser data regardless of the service used. Of course many of you likely have some kind of data plan with your cellphone or smart phone these days, right?
I guess I consider such a service to be akin to someone offering a rental service for a toilet paper cutter that could be attached to the toilet roll holder in your bathroom, all for a low monthly fee: sure it might be handy, and sure it might save you a few precious seconds now and then, but really in the end (sorry) would it save you from going through the motions (or at least the important ones)?
Find the site, bookmark it, and then access as needed kind of works for a mobile Luddite like me.