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| Electronic Commerce 2008 (Electronic Commerce) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Efraim Turban, Jae Kyu Lee, Dave King, Judy Mckay, Peter Marshall
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Category: Book
List Price: $165.33
Buy New: $92.00
You Save: $73.33 (44%)
Buy New/Used from $92.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  (2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 20071
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1008
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.7
Dimensions (in): 11 x 8.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0132243318
Dewey Decimal Number: 658
EAN: 9780132243315
ASIN: 0132243318
Publication Date: October 19, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This text describes the essentials of electronic commerce?how it is being conducted and managed as well as assessing its major opportunities, limitations, issues, and risks. It is a clear, simple, well-organized book, and provides all the basic definitions as well as logical support. Using extensive, vivid examples from large corporations, small businesses, government and not-for-profit agencies from all over the world, it makes the concepts presented come alive for readers. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction to E-commerce, the book explores internet marketing, B2B and C-commerce, E-marketplaces and internet consumerism, E-government, mobile commerce, auctions, security, electronic payment systems, and strategy and implementation to launch a successful E-commerce business. Written by experienced authors who are well-versed in real-world practices, this book will prove invaluable for managers and professional people in any functional area of business; as well as those in government, education, health services, and other areas that can benefit from a knowledge of e-commerce.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Electronic Commerce 2008 April 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Electronic Commerce 2008 (Electronic Commerce)
This book is good if you are doing a business degree like me.
It is very detailed and contain relevant information. If anything, it is a little too detailed and could have been more concised.
 A Really Poor Textbook March 13, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The style of the book is reminiscent of certain government procurement specifications: massive, poorly organized, compressing the least amount of explanation into the most amount of words, and with a large surfeit of references which seem to be there, at least in part, to make up for the lack of explanatory power of the text itself.
Key concepts are explained poorly, or not dealt with at all. For example, Product Life Cycle Management (PLM), addressed on pages 337-338, is a key management concept poorly explained. Here is the first sentence of that section: "Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) is a business strategy that enables manufactures to control and share product-related data as part of product design and development efforts and in support of supply chain operations (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Lifecycle_Mangement, IBM.com 2007)." The text then trudges on in this vein. Most folk with a smattering of business ed. will recognize this as a sadly deficient explanation of PLM. For those who might not be familiar with PLM, it's a strategy that aims to take advantage of understanding the natural life cycles of products so that resources are geared appropriately to the different life cycle stages (which are essentially: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline). With an understanding of PLM, there are all kinds of clever things that businesses can do, such as early market share gains at the beginning, and life-cycle extension strategies toward the end. The book fails to describe the management concept, and consequently fails to do an adequate job of exploring eCommerce management issues.
The treatment of PLM is just one example of failing to explain a key concept, and not the worst. At the same time, relatively less important information is often belabored in the text. The unevenness and sense of disorganization is made worse when the same information, be it important or not, is repeated in several chapters in slightly different styles.
Meeting the needs of students is a low priority. This is evidenced in many and various ways, however, for the sake of brevity, let's look at how the book handles acronyms. Acronyms are frequently introduced throughout the book but often are not explained until pages later, if they're explained at all. Basically this is poor writing, but especially unforgivable in a textbook; the reader has no clue what the text is talking about. But wait there's a glossary! Don't bother... many of the acronyms are not included. But what about the acronyms that are included? Not good. Instead of handling acronyms in a logical way they're usually embedded at the end of the phrases they stand for, e.g. "wireless wide area network (WWAN)" so they're not easy to find. In a few cases, where the acronym is actually shown first in the glossary entry, it's listed in the alphabetical order of the first word of the acronym, e.g. "SMEs small-to-medium enterprises" is listed between "smartphone" and "sniping"; so that readers, who don't happen to know that the "S" stands for "small", have to go through all the "Ss" to catch sight of the "SME".
In addition to the copious reference citings within the body of the text, at the end of each chapter there are two or three pages that simply list references. These pages of references are useless for most students, so the majority of these could be put on the book's website, lightening the book by some 40 to 50 pages. Would this leave room for a list of acronyms perhaps?
The book has 910 pages, and the website contains an enormous amount of extra material. All this, taken together with the thousands of references, makes for a confusing, overwhelming, disheartening experience that's entirely at odds with inspiring students to understand and perhaps love their subject.
It seems to deserve one star, but it gets two stars because I'm probably more annoyed by this book's weaknesses than I should be, and therefore suspect that I'm missing giving appropriate credit to its good points, such as guiding the reader to numerous exciting websites, and including several interesting but gushingly written case studies.
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