Textbook Buyback Service From Amazon

Amazon.com seems to have started their own textbook buyback service. Not exactly sure when they started it but I was not aware till this morning when I received this email:



Though I was not exactly in a mood to sell one of my most prized possessions (Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik), I was intrigued by the email and decided to explore further.

The process looks pretty simple. You search the books using ISBN, title or author, print a shipping label, package and send it across and get an Amazon gift card in return.

But I also wanted to check if there are other players in the market that provide the same service and guess what - there are lots of them. So how do you make sure that Amazon is offering the best price. With a little research I found bigwords.com which compares the buyback prices for quite a few buyback merchants. It seems that Amazon offers a pretty decent price as compared to other players.

You can use this service if you want to earn some money while disposing off your old books or you can make use of a book swapping service to get a new book in return. Either ways it's a win-win :)

5 Things Online Ads Should Not Do

Banner ads on the website are a great way of earning revenue in fact they are a blessing, especially for the non e-commerce sites. But some people just overdo it “killing the goose for the golden egg”. Here are five examples of such bad ads which can be used as perfect examples of what not to do. I wanted to cut and paste all these live examples but am curbing the temptation. I’ll not name any websites but these are all real life examples from well reputed websites and you may very well relate to them as you read on.

Don't intrude - Customer is the King!!

On one of the most visited and reputed News website in India, there pops up a banner ad on the homepage hiding the main headlines and that too just on page load, no clicks, no hovering required - it just shows up uninvited on the homepage as soon as it loads. How annoying?? How much effort does it take to realize that a visitor would come to a news website to check the latest headlines and not the latest banner ad. It is an excellent way of getting more impressions/views on the ad but an equally good way of leaving the visitors annoyed. Remember that the revenue from the ads is a byproduct of the content on the websites and users come to the website for content and not to give you impressions.

Learning: So make the ads less intrusive, keep them visible but separate from the content- which the core of your website. That will leave you happy customers and more revenue.

Keep it Consumer friendly

So this one is from a popular website which displays Cricket updates, I am a big fan of the cricket game and visit this website often to check the latest match scores. This, by the way, is a very nice website with very good and knowledgeable commentators who just don’t puke stats but actually tell them interestingly adding a personality of their own to the commentary. But here also somebody decided that they could get a lot of impressions and what better time to do that than during the IPL – Indian Premier League. So they placed the ad right over the score updates and placed other banner ad besides the site logo which hides the close button of the ad covering the score updates. The visitor is left with no option to close the banner ad and tries to click at the corner of the ad only to taken to a new page altogether. Very Very Frustrating!! It took me some time to figure out that if you scroll down the ad will move down with the scroll and then you can see the close button and close it. Why on earth do you want your users to go through all that pain? I was able to figure the way out the hard way yet decided to persist because I knew the content is good. But what about hundreds of new users who might be visiting your website for the first time, I bet they’ll leave in frustration never to come back again.

Learning: Don’t cramp too many ads into a small place, they won’t get you more revenue but only leave you frustrated users.

Give an Option to Opt-out
This is another example on yet another top news website. The ad in question is an excellent piece of creative work and I love it!! It’s sort of a green creeper/climber that grows leaf by leaf goes inside the computer screen tearing where the main news article is and then again appearing from another part of the article. Excellent graphic and extremely innovative but frankly I would have preferred it on a gaming website or on a website dealing with graphics, animations or something of that sort. But to have it on news website is a bad idea and then having it intrude on the content -the news article - is outrageous. Add to that that there is no ‘close’ button option so the visitor has to sit through the whole while - the graphic completes itself and disappears.

Learning: Give the visitors a break, respect their time. A user might have seen the ad before and he may not be interested in watching it again, give an option for him to skip it. And if the ads could be more contextual to the content on the website, nothing like it!!

Be persuasive, don't hound
Being persuasive is good but don’t hound the customer. This is related to a web hosting company’s ad. The ad first appeared on my own blog and I clicked it out of curiosity. I did what I wanted to do, checked for various webhosting options, their prices etc and then decided that I didn’t need one for now and came off the website. Every single day from that day onwards; the same ad hounds me on every third website I visit. It seems that when I visited that website it saved some kind of cookie on my browser and ever since then has been serving me customized ads (as they would like to believe!). Although this is just a guess, they might have used some other technique but what concerns me and puts me off is the constant hounding.

Learning: Remind the customer once a while maybe a month or a week but everyday is bit too much.

Appeal, don't shout

The last one is something you all might have faced, you are searching for a tutorial on advanced skills in Excel, you visit a link and suddenly you realize that a weight loss video has started playing automatically and what is worst that you didn’t have the mute on and you are in office and now everybody around you is staring at you . Video ads are great and provide a great opportunity to get the message across than static text ads but let the user be the judge if he is interested in your weight loss program. Why autoplay?? And even if you want to play the video, do some thing like what youtube does play the video without sound giving an option to the user to “Replay it with sound”. At least it would avoid the viewer some embarrassing moments.

Learning: Respect the user. Give him space and let him decide if he wants to view your ad or not.

Got some examples of annoying ads that you would like to share? Comments? Criticism?

Google renamed Topeka

Ha...Ha...Ha another April fools day prank from Google...they have renamed themselves "Topeka".

Not only that it offers a weird explaination as well..Read it and have fun :)

Found some more...Google Search Results are showing up in strange units :) 

Google Maps has a link where they claim that Google researchers have discovered a New dimension ..

And finally you can upload anything to google docs :)

5 reasons why we love the "web"

Of late I have been spending a lot of time on the web... not just on Gmail, Facebook and Orkut.... but much more on exploring the web. The more time I spend the more intrigued I get. They say that the US used to be the Land of Opportunities - Anybody could do whatever they wanted and make it big. While it is still true to some extent but US is slowly being displaced by a virtual landscape - the internet..the landscape here is virtual but all the more important. The recent nomination of the "internet" or the "web" for the Nobel Prize underlines the growing importance.


So I began thinking what makes the internet so indispensable ..what has lead to its enormous growth. Here are 5 things which I believe make the internet or the web what it is today:

1. Democratic/Equalitarian in nature

An equal opportunities platform, it does not care who you are - what age, sex, region, religion, economic strata you belong to :) You can choose what you want to be - the one who openly declares what they are and propagate and standby whatever their beliefs are. Or the one who stays anonymous because of whatever reasons..but the important thing is everybody gets a voice, a platform.


2. Based on Ideas/Innovation

The world they say is driven by ideas and so is internet... which is what makes it so powerful. The freedom and ease with which an idea can be implemented with minimal support from others has resulted in explosive growth for the internet. And as in life here in the virtual world also one idea powers the other. Need to share yours thoughts with world - Blogger is here. Can't wait to reach home..want to share info on the go..anyways you just have a short message..here's Twitter. Oh damn ..the 140 character limit..want to share this great link but it's too long..url shortner is there..and so the chain of innovations goes on...



3. Almost free...OK..Cheap!!

As most other things, this luxury is not the prerogative of the rich and the elite, it's darn cheap..almost free!! In fact with more and more public Wi-Fi zones being established it's becoming more and more accessible.



4. Far, Wide, Deep

Even the farthest corners of the earth are within reach. I can connect to my dear ones anywhere in the world anytime I want... Look for information on any damn topic in the world, I have it on my tips..Thanks to Google Search [ I know many other and better search engines are available..but I am a fan of Google :) ] Human nature is inquisitive ..the quest for knowledge is never ending but so is the depth of knowledge available on the web..start on any topic and you can delve as deep as you want and explore as much as you want.



5. It Connects

Humans are social and they need to express..the web provides ample opportunities for both..look at hundreds of social networking sites available and the ways every other site wants you to share what you are doing or thinking..



In my upcoming posts I am planning to share some amazing sites that I have come across.. the ones I think are both innovative and provide a greater meaning to the existence of the web. Hope you will like them. For this post lemme know what your thoughts are..agree..disagree..anything??

Ankit International Sports

Thought of dedicating a blog to Ankit International whom I support.

Ankit International was established in 1993 and has ever since been into creation and marketing of sports and lifestyle products. They are committed to creating products that reflect the desire to constantly bring out the best in everyone. Based out of Meerut, the Sports City of India, Ankit International manufactures and supplies a huge assortment of quality Sports goods and equipments for a wide range of sports including but not limited to cricket, football, volleyball, basketball, tennis, badminton etc

Ankit international has more than 17 years of experience in the Sports Goods industry. They manufacture and supply a large range of sports and lifestyle products and accessories with the best quality. They offer the best services for their customers at very reasonable and competitive prices.

Go to http://www.ankitinternational.net/ to learn more about them :) 

The site is still being worked upon and these guys are adding stuff gradually but basic idea is in place. Do let me know if you like the website or not. If it sucks let me know where? If you like it..tell me what's cool about it??.. Brickbats or bouquets..all kind of feedback is welcome :)