People could search Amazon’s online catalog by author, title, subject, date or ISBN. The website offered excerpts from books, book reviews, customer reviews, and author interviews. People could "leaf" through extracts and reviews, order some books online, and pay with their credit card. Books arrived within a week at their doorstep. As an online retailer, Amazon could offer lower prices than local bookstores, a larger selection, and a wealth of product information. Customers could subscribe to a mailing list to get reviews of new books by their favorite authors, or new books in their favorite topics, with 44 topics to choose from. In 1998, Amazon was also selling CDs, DVDs, audio books and computer games, with 3 million clients in 160 countries.
Amazon’s main competitor was the online bookstore of Barnes & Noble, a major bookseller with 481 stores nationwide in 1997, in 48 states out of 50, as well as 520 B. Dalton stores in shopping malls. Barnes & Noble first launched its America OnLine (AOL) website in March 1997, as the exclusive bookseller for the 12 million AOL customers, before launching its own website barnesandnoble.com in May 1997 in partnership with Bertelsmann (Barnes & Noble bought Bertelsmann’s portion (36,8%) back for 164 million dollars in July 2003).
Barnes & Noble’s site offered significant discounts: 30% off all in- stock hardcovers, 20% off all in-stock paperbacks, 40% off select titles, and up to 90% off bargain books. Its Affiliate Network spread quickly, with 12,000 affiliate websites in May 1998, including CNN Interactive, Lycos and ZDNet. One year later, Barnes & Noble.com launched a revamped website with a better design, an Express Lane one- click ordering, improved book search capabilities, and a new software "superstore". A fierce price war began with Amazon for the best book discounts, and Amazon.com came to be known as Amazon.toast, which didn’t last. With a two-year head start, Amazon stayed ahead in the competition.
Amazon launched its eBookStore in November 2000, three months after Barnes & Noble, after partnering in August 2000 with Microsoft to sell ebooks for the Microsoft Reader, and with Adobe to offer ebooks for the Acrobat Reader and the Glassbook Reader — Adobe had just bought Glassbook, its reader and its digital bookstore. In April 2001, Amazon.com partnered again with Adobe to include 2,000 copyrighted books for the Acrobat eBook Reader, mainly titles from major publishers, travel guides and children books.
In November 2000, Amazon had 7,500 employees, a catalog of 28 million items, 23 million clients worldwide and four subsidiaries in United Kingdom (launched in August 1998), Germany (August 1998), France (August 2000) and Japan (November 2000). A fifth subsidiary opened in Canada in June 2002, and a sixth subsidiary, named Joyo, opened in China in September 2004. In July 2005, for its 10th anniversary, Amazon had 9,000 employees and 41 million clients.
1996 > THE INTERNET ARCHIVE, FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
[Summary] Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle in San Francisco, California, the Internet Archive wanted to offer a permanent access of the web “through the ages” to present and future generations. In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for internet users throughout the world to be able to surf the archive of a given website by date. In 2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were 65 billion webpages (from 50 million websites) in 2006, 85 billion webpages in 2008, and 150 billion webpages in March 2010. The Internet Archive has also defined itself as "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge", building up an online library of text, audio, software, image and video content. In October 2005, it launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with a number of partner organizations to build a universal digital library of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.
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Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive wanted to offer permanent access of the web “through the ages” to present and future generations.
As explained on the website at the time, throughout history, societies have sought to preserve their culture and heritage for present and future generations, and libraries have been created to preserve the paper trail of that culture and legacy, and to facilitate its access to the general public and researchers. Therefore it seems essential to extend their mission to new technology. Paradoxically this was done poorly in the early 20th century. Many movies were recycled — and thus lost forever — to retrieve the silver layer. Many radio or TV programs were not saved. It is important not to repeat the same mistakes for the internet, especially for the web, a new medium the extent of which is still unknown in 1996. This is the raison d’être of the Internet Archive, that has defined itself as "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge."