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Sunday, May 16, 2010

The Paypal Wars - a Kindle book I'd not noticed


The Paypal wars
- Having joined Paypal from the beginning, I'm surprised this book got by me, but it's in Kindle version now for $2.85.

  The full title is The PayPal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, And the Rest of Planet Earth and it's by Eric M. Jackson.
  39 customer reviews with an average rating of 4.5 stars out of 5.  The paperback price is $10.85.

From the Publisher:
' ... winner of the 2005 Writers Notes Book Award for best business book, winner of the 2005 DIY Book Award for non-fiction, and runner-up in the 2004 USA Book News' Best Book Award for business.

  ... Tom Peters -- management guru and author of the classic "In Search of Excellence" -- said this book "kept me up all night reading" and declared it "the best description of 'business strategy' unfolding in a world changing at warp speed."  It's been called "an absorbing insider's story" by the Washington Times and hailed for its "engaging narrative [that] reads like a spy novel" by Reason Magazine...

  ... This candid insider's account shows firsthand how PayPal launched its online payment service and set out to revolutionize the world's currency markets.  But when the startup's plucky entrepreneurs found themselves confronting eBay (their #1 source of customers!) as well as organized crime rings, money-grubbing lawyers, and even regulation-happy NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the entire venture takes a turn for the worse. '
For more details, see the description from the book's "inside flap."

The author was director of Paypal's marketing program, so this will be from that perspective.  Other online reviews mention that the book explains some of Paypal's bad reputation in the past and there are still strong complaints online, though I've personally had no problem with it.
 As most will know, Paypal became a fully-owned subsdiary of eBay in 2002, 3 years before this book was released.



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3 comments:

  1. There's a certain irony that if I want to download this to my Kindle, I CAN'T pay using my PayPal account! As a new Kindle owner, it is a little irritating to find that the folks at Amazon can be so short sighted as to NOT want to take my money!! To use my PayPal to pay for a book, I have to transfer funds from PP to my checking account and then us the checking account to pay Amazon.

    ReplyDelete
  2. thewordguy,
    I guess Amazon and Paypal couldn't come to terms on it or Amazon's very complex system would be made a bit more complex than they like.

    Remember that Amazon is commercial and Paypal would charge them for each transaction and I don't think Amazon wants to lose about 4% on each sale when they have their own purchasing mechanisms tied to order-records and shipping ones, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Speaking of great Kindle books. I read "Contracts" by James Snyder and it is way awesome but nobody seems to check it out. I am shocked. It is one of the best works of fiction i ever read.

    ReplyDelete

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