The current rivalry between Apple and Amazon, and the price war that‘s brewing is just plain bizarre. Amazon claims to currently sell most e-books for $9.99 (though prices vary widely above and below this price point), which in the opinion of most consumers is a somewhat fair price for a digital commodity. What Amazon does is buy the books at wholesale prices from publishers and sell it at $9.99, which is often at a loss. The advantage for Amazon is that this helps develop a market for its Kindle and helps popularize e-books. The publishers on the other hand are paid the wholesale price, which is quite often much higher than $9.99. And lastly the consumers gain by getting e-books at a cheap and wallet friendly price. Looks like everyone’s a winner right? Well not exactly. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Amazon’
The weird price wars
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Amazon Wish Lists in Wordpress
Monday, August 3rd, 2009Recently Bhooshan contacted me for help in translating his ideas for a re-design of his existing blog. One of the features he had in mind was the display of his Amazon Wishlist on his blog. Now, I understand that there are several plug-ins that let you do that, so I thought that this should be easy as pie. It turns out that it wasn’t.
I first installed one of the most popular plug-ins called AVH-Amazon. This is one of the most extensive plug-ins available for Wordpress, so I figured that it ought to do the job. However, after installation I learned that due to a change in Amazon policy I would need to register at Amazon Web services and get a secret API key. The plug-in author didn’t provide one, as the key was going to be used by Amazon to monitor API usage and bill customers for use of those parts of its API that it charged a service fee for. Naturally the plug-in author didn’t want to risk it with his own API key, due to potential for misuse.
So faced with this roadblock and not wanting to go the extra mile and get an API key, I started looking for alternatives. I remembered that Amazon provided a RSS feed for a users Wishlist items. So I thought, what if I managed to extract the information from the feed itself ? As it is, I just wanted the item title, image and link to the item page, all of which were there in feed. Some tinkering in PHP and a few minutes later, I managed to parse the feed and show the items from the Wishlist. Voilà !! Instant Wishlist. 
While I am happy with the result so far, I was wondering if there are any other good plug-ins that would let me do this a bit more efficiently. Any ideas ?
I'm Elroy Serrao, a technologist, photographer, and part time blogger from India.
I love to design web sites, program in php and rails in my free time and of course go trekking and clicking pictures in the great outdoors.
I'm from Mumbai, and am an alumnus of Mumbai University and NMIMS.