9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Really Poor Textbook, March 12, 2008
This review is from: Electronic Commerce 2008 (Electronic Commerce) (Hardcover)
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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