A Bookstore in SecondLife

There's a place in SecondLife which bills itself as 'The only real bookstore in SecondLife'. It never made much sense to me, so I decided to go check it out. After all, I read a lot of books and I do purchase books through Amazon.com. For the life of me, I couldn't think of why I would want to purchase a book within SecondLife when Amazon.com's website is so informative.

So I went to the two locations I could find - one on Info Island (Info Island 83,226,33) and one in Discordia¹ (Discordia 165,57,250). There were prims that looked like books floating around with Amazon.co.uk prices over them. Clicking one to see what would happen, it added it to my 'cart'. There's a search facility too, but I found that it was more of a curiosity than anything else.

I'm sorry. That really doesn't impress me. Having heard a few people talk about how great it would be for Amazon Affiliates to have stores in SecondLife, I wasn't too impressed and now having seen it I am not impressed at all. I honestly can't see people logging in to SecondLife to walk around and click on books to purchase; people who read books tend to be literate and can find their way around Amazon.com themselves very easily. It's not hard. Why would I log in to SecondLife to subscribe to a magazine? This, too, I do not know.

When I looked at the bookstores, I concluded that it was cool that someone had set it up; I imagine it was quite fun to set up the scripts to get it to work. But was it worth the effort? I don't know, but considering the traffic in the main store was very low (40), I suppose maybe people are voting with their feet. Or their browsers.

Some things are really cool in SecondLife. But I don't see a bookstore like that being a success. It doesn't add any value to a book shopping experience on the internet, in my opinion.

¹The Discordia sim is apparently in transition.