The question is can some platform (Walmart?) get people who prefer text and like to read get people to sign up for text notifications for deals on books or new releases by favorite authors to be notified on their phone? Will that become the next generation email newsletter promo thingy?
Are any other types of businesses doing this? I wouldn't know. I go to great pains not to give out my cellphone number. Ten years ago, more, my friend put my number in some service that texted me any time she walked into a CVS or Target. I was pissed. Managed to ask nicely to get her to take me off the list. She was getting points for it or something.
I think that would be a problem too. I mean, there is more or less a finite number of phone numbers. That is, you can't just make one up. And, if you change numbers, odds are you'll get a number someone else used previously and end up getting a lot of junk calls directed at them. For example, at the office, we switched phone providers a number of years ago and what they did was map our numbers to new numbers so we could keep our numbers. But, those numbers our numbers mapped/forwarded to were numbers previously used by someone else. So, for years, there were collection calls for people that never worked here and it seems no matter what you do you cannot get those collection agencies to stop calling. And then the debt gets sold and different collection agencies start calling. Those calls stopped when we switched phone providers again a year or so ago. Finally.
With eMail, on the other hand, the potential combinations are infinite. So, if you start getting too much junk eMail at one address, you can change your eMail to something else. Now, with phone numbers, since there is a finite number of them, junk callers can guess your number. With eMail, spammers use dictionary attacks where they will use common words and proper names to guess at eMail addresses. If you avoid such combinations, and use something like author2371@whatever.dom, it's darned near impossible for them to guess it and they would likely only obtain it if you used it somewhere that was hacked or sold or if they scraped it from a site you'd posted on using it.
Bottom line is that it's easier to filter junk and spam from eMail than from phone numbers.
Maybe one day, someone will create the best of both worlds, like an eMail address that can be used for eMail, texting and phone calls, similar to how a phone number can be used for texts and calls.
