How I Save Money (and new mobile-friendly Amazon.com!)

I was out with the family at a mall, finding refuge the only place I really enjoy in a mall: the bookstore (well, the only place I enjoy if that the mall doesn’t have an Apple Store). I go across various sections to see what is on display in the new pop psychology/self-help sections, I checkout what they have in their “religion” section (which is often close to the pop psychology/self-help stuff), and of course I inevitably wander over to the computer books section.

Anyone who has ever bought a computer related book knows one thing for sure: they’re bleepity expensive. Sure enough, the book I was looking at was $35. Now whenever I am buying a computer book I have to weigh two factors: “How much is the book?” vs "How long would it take me to learn this stuff with a decent Internet connection and Google?” The Internet is free, of course, but takes more time. My father taught me to always value my time and pay myself a decent wage for the time I spend doing something, so it really comes down to this: if it takes me 20 hours to learn about something on the Internet (sifting through the good information vs the bad, reading the same introductory stuff over and over again) vs 5 hours to sit down with a well written, edited, fact-checked, “I put my name on this so it had better be right” book, I may have saved some money, but I have spent an excess amount of time, which is much more finite than money is.

The kicker is that the people who write the books aren’t even making that much money off of them. The whole book publishing “machine” is so large that they are lucky to break even.

Now one would think that eBooks would be a possible solution to this, because without the whole “machine” to support they could be less expensive. But they aren’t. Publishers are protecting their revenue model, sure, but they are also making sure that it is possible to keep printing dead-tree books (which some people, like me, actually prefer).

So there I was, with an expensive dead-tree book in my hand which I had decided that wanted to use versus the time it would take me to learn about it online. But what about the price? How much could I find it for on Amazon.com?

To find the answer, I found a place to sit down and fired up Blazer (aka “Web”) and tried to use Amazon’s website. Have you tried that? It isn’t easy. In fact it’s downright painful. I switched over to Opera Mini and had a much better time of it. I found the same book for much less (about $12 off a $35 book) and ordered it right over my Treo. I didn’t need the book right away (after all I had only found it by accident wandering through the mall) so it was a good deal for me.

p.s. if you have made it this far, here’s a bonus for you: while checking this out I discovered that Amazon.com has a new mobile-friendly site which you can find at http://www.amazon.com/access. They’ve also done a good job at making this the first thing that you see when you goto their website. How well does it work? Well, my gold test for “mobile friendly” websites is whether or not they work in Lynx on my dialup connection. Amazon.com/access passes that test. The only missing feature I see is the ability to add something to your wishlist although I would probably just use the “Add to Cart” and then move it to my wishlist when I got home.