Gen Y's Way To Buy Books

My nieces, twenty-one and twenty-four respectively, are on their cell phones all the time. They're either talking or texting a good amount of their lives. So to find out that they now can buy books by sending a text message is just the next phase in technology.

Publisher's Weekly yesterday wrote about a Manhattan company named ShopText. The company was founded in 2006 and allows people to purchase items using SMS (Short Message Service). They've just begun to sell books.

And I know this isn't just for folks of Generation Y. All of us baby boomers who love our toys will, I'm sure, take advantage of this, too.

According to PW: Here’s how it works: a person registers at the ShopText site and provides his or her name, shipping address, credit card information, e-mail address and cell phone number. ShopText then sends the person a receipt via e-mail and text. It includes a short password, necessary to avoid ordering fraud. Then, the person sends a text with a keyword—e.g., "HARRY" for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—in the message body to ShopText. ShopText sends a message confirming the product’s price and requesting the security password. The person approves this, ShopText sends the product to the customer and the transaction is complete.

The article goes on to quote Mark Kaplan, ShopText founder and chief marketing officer: Kaplan said ShopText is looking to partner with bookstores, but has not done so yet. Ideally, a bookstore would run ShopText codes in its book advertisements, and either ShopText or the bookstore would fulfill the order. Kaplan also said he is interested in partnering with book publishers on co-op advertising. He declined to say how many copies ShopText has sold of any of book so far.

Text messaging is a wildly popular form of communication; according to the technology consultancy Forrester Research, some 35% of cellphone users send or receive text messages, and three-quarters of 18- to 24-year olds text. SMS has made its way into major enterprises; more than 63 million viewers voted for their favorite American Idol via text; and the analyst firm Gartner estimates that by 2010, the volume of text messaging will reach an estimated 2.3 trillion, which certainly puts sales of the latest Potter book into perspective.

Yikes. After I got rid of my Blackberry from the last job, I decided I didn't want to have all the bells and whistles--it's too distracting. I have a phone that's just a phone, although I guess I could text if I wanted to.

Don't want to.

What about this? Would you send a quick text message in order to make purchases?



"I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it." ~Mae West