REVIEW: Electronic Payment Systems for E-Commerce

Internet Business News, August 7, 2002

INTERNET BUSINESS NEWS-(C)1995-2002 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

This book is the second edition of Electronic Payment Systems for E-Commerce, the first being published in 1997. This updated version aims to include all of the advancements in e-commerce that have occurred in the past five years as well as a brief section from the authors on where they think the market is going and which new technologies could have an impact on the sector.

One of the best points of this book is that it tries to cover all aspects of electronic payment, including a large section at the front on traditional payment methods and how they are carried out. This does provide quite a bit of useful information for the reader but I did find myself wondering how relevant this would be to the average person that picks up this book and how useful they would find it.

The book itself is divided neatly up into concise sections with each covering one topic or aspect of e-commerce and electronic payments. This is ideal if this book is to be used as a reference for someone that already has a good grounding in the subject but would like a backup for where his knowledge fails. For all those that are new to the subject, however, I am sure that they can just start at page one and go through without too much hassle and learn a great deal.

One of the things that I am dubious about in this book is its relevance to the industry at the moment. Sure, there is a great section about micropayment systems and another on credit card-based systems but I would have thought the main reason that anyone would buy this book is if they are attempting to either find out about or consolidate their knowledge on e-commerce using the Internet (or possibly m-commerce using mobile devices). Quite a few times I found myself wondering: "and how would this be used to take payments over the Internet?". I expect that this is simply a throwback to the first edition of the book when the Internet was not as commonplace as it is today.

As a final word, I have to state how easy this book was to read. The subject that the authors write about is clearly not the simplest in the world yet at no point did I get stuck with terminology or fail to understand a section. The fact that O'Mahoney, Peirce and Tewari have - in my opinion - managed to make this book accessible to most people, regardless of intellect or education level, is an achievement all in itself.

CONCLUSION:If you are wanting to extend your knowledge of electronic payment systems to a much more thorough level then this is indeed the book for you. If, however, you are simply wanting knowledge on how to run the e-commerce operations of a web site then I know that there are a great many books out there that are a lot more specialised and are likely to be more to your liking.

Title: Electronic Payment Systems for E-Commerce Author: Donal O'Mahoney, Michael Peirce and Hitesh Tewari Published by: Artech House Publishers ISBN: 1-58053-268-3 Price: USD75 Reviewer: Ian Sanderson

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