Amazon also sold more and more ebooks. In April 2005, it bought the French company Mobipocket, specialized in ebooks and readers (software) for PDAs.
In November 2007, Amazon launched its own reading device, named Kindle, with a catalog of 80,000 ebooks on Amazon's website. 538,000 Kindle were sold in 2008. A new version of Kindle, named Kindle 2, was launched in February 2009, with a catalog of 230,000 ebooks.
= What about small bookstores?
Local bookstores have closed one after the other, or have had a hard time keeping up with the competition of Amazon.com and other online bookstores. Amazon and others are also bad news for specialist bookstores, for example the travel bookstore created in 1971 by Catherine Domain in Paris, France.
According to Catherine, Librairie Ulysse (Ulysses Bookstore) is the oldest travel bookstore in the world. Its 20,000 out-of- print or new books, maps and magazines - in a number of languages and about any country - are all packed up in a tiny space, in the heart of Paris, on Ile Saint-Louis, a small island surrounded by the Seine river.
Catherine has been a traveller since she was a child. She travels every summer - usually sailing on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic or the Pacific - while her boyfriend runs the bookstore. She is also a member of the French National Union of Antiquarian and Modern Bookstores (SLAM: Syndicat national de la librairie ancienne et moderne), the Explorers' Club (Club des explorateurs) and the International Club of Long-Distance Travelers (Club international des grands voyageurs).
Catherine visited 140 countries, and some trips were quite challenging. But her most difficult challenge was to set up a website on her own, from scratch, without knowing anything about computers. In December 1999, she wrote in an email interview: "My site is still pretty basic and under construction. Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money from it, but that doesn't worry me… I am very pessimistic though, because the internet is killing off specialist bookstores."
Some booksellers decided to run most of their business online, for example Pierre Joppen and his wife Joke Vrijenhoek, the owners of Paulus Swaen Old Maps and Prints, a bookstore founded in 1978 in the Netherlands that relocated in 1996 in Florida. The bookstore offers maps, atlases and globes ranging from the 16th to the 18th century. The maps cover all parts of the world, and were produced by renowned cartographers, such as Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu, Janssonius, Hondius, Visscher, de Wit, etc. The bookstore has also sold travel books and Medieval manuscripts. It has offered an online internet auction since November 1996, first twice a year, in March and November, and then four times a year, in March, May, September and November.
1996: THERE ARE MORE AND MORE TEXTS ONLINE
= [Overview]