ilovebooks.com ceases operations

[CityFarmer]

There is no edge over other online bookstore. I am not surprise to hear that. Anyway, good try...

ilovebooks.com ceases operations

E-bookstore, ilovebooks.com, will cease operations from today.

Pointing to tough market conditions, Mr Philip Koh, Managing Director of Convergent Media, MediaCorp, said: “The business was not commercially viable so we have decided to exit from it.”

Mr Koh also thanked MediaCorp’s e-bookstore partners for their support. The e-store was launched last May and currently has more than 700,000 titles in more than 40 categories.

http://www.todayonline.com/business/ilov...operations

[CY09]

[quote='CityFarmer' ]
"There is no edge over other online bookstore. I am not surprise to hear that. Anyway, good try... "

Nice short article that got me thinking.

What are the factors that makes a product unique/great?
Some factors offhand are that it is the first of its kind, value adding etc.

But what if it is in a market like an "ebookstall" or a market where there are many similar products competing against it. What are the factors that will make a product stand out from the rest?

[sgd]

I think one of the problem with "online" business is that you have to work and advertise to build the brand. Internet is "free" not automatic. Your market is the internet world at large but there are now millions and millions of sites and domains and potentially thousands of competitors and nobody know who you are.

Maybe had they advertised locally or tried to build do project by working with MOE or National library to try to appeal to young readers and students they could have created some kind of awareness here. I'm not sure did they do that?

But until I read this thread I didn't even know such a site existed.

[specuvestor]

But what if it is in a market like an "ebookstall" or a market where there are many similar products competing against it. What are the factors that will make a product stand out from the rest?

That's where mindshare comes in. And why during the dot com days people were pouring billions into marketing and freebies essentially to grab mindshare.

Mindshare is a valid and real concept: Think internet books, auction, email, search etc and what comes to your mind first? Mindshare is very difficult to be broken as it tends to be VERY sticky.... the few far and beyond successes includes Explorer vs Netscape, Google vs Yahoo. If Apple could execute iCloud well it would be extremely sticky... alas Jobs...

Problem in the days of dot com was the maths were too optimistic, just as 3G took almost a decade to take off rather than 3 years...