[In this chapter:]
[3.1. Books: a Good Product to Sell On-line / 3.2. On-line Bookstores: Some Examples / 3.3. Digital Books]
3.1. Books: A Good Product to Sell On-Line
Many "traditional" bookstores - with booksellers, windows, books piled upon display shelves or lined up on shelves around the shop - have created on-line bookstores on the Internet - for example, Barnes & Noble (barnesandnoble.com) in the United States, Chapters (Chaptersglobe) in Canada, Waterstone's in the United Kingdom, etc. Other bookstores have no walls and no windows looking out on the street. They are "only" on-line (for example Amazon.com in the United States, Internet Bookshop in the United Kingdom). Their window is their website, and all the transactions are made through the Internet.
These on-line stores don't sell only books, but also CDs, audiobooks, DVDs, computer games, sheet music, movies on VHS, console and CD-ROM software games, etc. As we are dealing here with the relationship between the print media and the Internet, we shall focus on books only.
The book-lover searches the on-line bookstore's catalog on his screen. In most cases, searches are possible by author, title and subject. The home page of the bookstore often looks like a literary magazine, so the book-lover can be kept informed of the latest current events. For someone who does not like queuing in his favorite library on a Saturday afternoon, the Web can bring a lot of relief. He can "leaf" through short descriptions and extracts of books, order on-line the books he is interested in and pay with his credit card. The only delay encountered is the time necessary for the book to be shipped to his house. Such a person is looking forward to being equipped with a digital book, which will appear in 1999.
Jeff Bezos created Amazon.com in July 1995, after a market study which led him to conclude that books were the best products to sell on the Internet.
In Spring 1994, he drew up a list of 20 products that could be sold on the Net, from clothing to gardening tools, and then researched his top five: CDs, videos, computer hardware, computer software, and books.
"I used a whole bunch of criteria to evaluate the potential of each product, but among the main criteria was the size of the relative markets. Books, I found out, were an $82 billion market worldwide. The price point was another major criterion: I wanted a low-priced product. I reasoned that since this was the first purchase many people would make on-line, it had to be non-threatening in size. A third criterion was the range of choice: there were 3 million items in the book category and only a tenth of that in CDs, for example. This was important because the wider the choice, the more the organizing and selection capabilities of the computer could be put in good use."
However, Jeff Bezos doesn't think traditional bookstores are going to close any time soon, as quoted by Bruce Knecht in The Wall Street Journal of May 16, 1996: