Associates range from large and small businesses to nonprofits, authors, publishers, personal home pages, and more. The popularity of the program is reflected in the range of additions to the Associates Community in the past few months: Adobe, InfoBeat, Kemper Funds, PR Newswire, Travelocity, Virtual Vineyards, and Xoom."
The program surpassed 60,000 members in June 1998.
Barnes & Noble, the giant U.S. bookseller, is the leading operator of book superstores in America, with 481 stores nationwide, in 48 states. It also operates 520 B.Dalton bookstores in shopping malls. Barnes & Noble stores offer a selection of more than 175,000 titles from more than 20,000 publishers with an emphasis on small, independent publishers and university presses. The company also publishes books under its own imprint for exclusive sale through its retail stores and nationwide mail-order catalogs.
Barnes & Noble entered the world of on-line commerce in early 1997, launching its America Online site in March 1997 - it is the exclusive bookseller to America Online (AOL)'s more than 12 million subscribers - and launching its new website, barnesandnoble.com, in May 1997. The site includes personalized content recommendations from authors and editors, and more than 630,000 titles available for immediate shipping, with deep discounts (30% off all in-stock hardcovers, 20% off all in-stock paperbacks, 40% off select titles and up to 90% off bargain books). It has exclusive partnerships with more than 12,000 websites through its Affiliate Network, including CNN Interactive, Lycos, and ZDNet.
On May 27, 1998, barnesandnoble.com launched a significantly enhanced version of its e-commerce website. The new site features Express Lane one-click ordering, a new design and navigation, improved book search capabilities and expanded product offerings - including an on-line software superstore. In the press release of the same day, Jeff Killeen, chief operating officer, stated:
"Through our first year in business we have listened intently to what our customers have asked for and believe we have delivered a vastly superior product based on those requests. […] Innovation based on customer-focus has been the hallmark of our success and we see our new site as proof-positive of our commitment to be the leader in on-line bookselling and related products. We're also extremely excited to have Intel, a leader in the technology products category, open its SoftwareForPCs.com site at barnesandnoble.com."
The opening of barnesandnoble.com sparked a fierce price war in a low-margin
business. It now competes directly with the main on-line bookstore Amazon.com.
Because of this competition, Amazon.com came to be known as "Amazon.toast". Jeff
Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, doesn't fear the competition though. In Success of
July 1998, he told journalist Lesley Hazleton:
"The gap has increased rather than decreased. We went from $60 million annualized sales revenue in May to $260 million by the end of the year, and from 340,000 customers to 1.5 million, 58 percent of them repeat customers - all that in the context of 'Amazon.toast'. We're doing more than eight times the sales of Barnes & Noble. And we're not a stationary target. We were blessed with a two-year head start, and our goal is to increase that gap."
Located in United Kingdom, Internet Bookshop (iBS) is the largest on-line bookstore in Europe. The main English bookstore Waterstone's also launched its electronic bookstore, with a catalog of 1.4 million titles.
In Fall 1998, Chapters, the main Canadian bookseller, together with the daily newspaper The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada, opened their cyberbookstore Chaptersglobe.com, "the on-line destination for Canadian book-lovers". A new on-line bookstore is also expected from Bertelsmann, one of the largest media companies in the world, with headquarters in Germany. The companies of the Bertelsmann Group employ about 60,000 employees in more than 40 different countries. The 300-plus independently operating firms are organized into five divisions within an integrated leadership structure: books, entertainment, Gruner & Jahr (publishing and printing house), industry, and multimedia.