Success magazine of July 1998 wrote "that Amazon.com is the universal model for successful Internet retailing (a.k.a. 'e-tailing')." Computer Weekly of July 24, 1997, defined it as "undoubtedly the most quoted example of go-ahead electronic commerce and still the showcase for Internet trading" and PC World of July 1997 stated: "In the summer of 1995, Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, decided to risk it all on the Internet. They opened a cyberstore named Amazon.com [...].

Two years later [...] it's one of the World Wide Web's most successful small businesses. Few who have braved the wilds of the Web have achieved Amazon.com-style success."

Such success is explained by Jeff Bezos in Amazon.com's press kit:

"Our leadership position comes from our obsessive focus on customers. [...]

Customers want selection, ease of use, and the lowest prices. These are the elements we work hard to provide. We continued to improve our customer experience during the quarter [the second quarter 1998] with the opening of our music store, our easier-to-navigate store layout, and our expansion into the local U.K. and German book markets. These initiatives will continue to require aggressive investment and entail significant execution challenges."

Amazon.com's press release of June 8, 1998, gives some information about its a.s.sociates Program:

"The Amazon.com a.s.sociates Program allows web-site owners to easily partic.i.p.ate in ha.s.sle-free electronic commerce by recommending books on their site and referring visitors to Amazon.com. In return, partic.i.p.ants earn referral fees of up to 15 percent of the sales they generate. Amazon.com handles the secure on-line ordering, customer service, and shipping and sends weekly e-mail sales reports. Enrollment in the program is free, and partic.i.p.ants can be up and running the same day.

a.s.sociates 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 a.s.sociates Community in the past few months: Adobe, InfoBeat, Kemper Funds, PR Newswire, Travelocity, Virtual Vineyards, and Xoom."

The program surpa.s.sed 60,000 members in June 1998.

Barnes & n.o.ble, 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 & n.o.ble stores offer a selection of more than 175,000 t.i.tles 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 & n.o.ble 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, barnesandn.o.ble.com, in May 1997. The site includes personalized content recommendations from authors and editors, and more than 630,000 t.i.tles available for immediate shipping, with deep discounts (30% off all in-stock hardcovers, 20% off all in-stock paperbacks, 40% off select t.i.tles 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, barnesandn.o.ble.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 barnesandn.o.ble.com."

The opening of barnesandn.o.ble.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 compet.i.tion, Amazon.com came to be known as "Amazon.toast". Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, doesn't fear the compet.i.tion 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 & n.o.ble. 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 t.i.tles.

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.

There are also international suppliers of books and periodicals - like the two Anglo-American companies Blackwell and Dawson - who work exclusively for libraries and doc.u.mentation services. Thanks to them, these organizations can now avoid multiple orders and invoices, and they can also order foreign books and periodicals without the complications related to ordering of doc.u.ments outside a country.

Based in Oxford (United Kingdom), Portland, Oregon, and New Jersey, Blackwell's Book Services specialize in the supply of books and value added bibliographic products and services to over 15,000 academic, research and special libraries in over 120 countries around the world.

Dawson Information Services Group is Europe's largest journal subscription agent and corporate and academic book supplier. It is also a main information services group, providing resource acquisition and management services to libraries and corporate research centers around the globe.

Old books are now being sold through the Web. For example, Paulus Swaen Old Maps and Prints, run by Pierre Joppen and his wife Joke Vrijenhoek, specializes in maps, atlases and globes from the 16th-18th century. The stock of maps of all parts of the world is produced by renowned cartographers, such as Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu, Janssonius, Hondius, Visscher, de Wit, etc. The company also sells atlases, globes, travel books, Medieval ma.n.u.scripts and playing cards.

Since November 1996, it offers an on-line Internet auction - twice per year, in March and November - for old maps, prints, globes, travel books and medieval ma.n.u.scripts.

3.3. Digital Books

When he buys through an on-line bookstore, the customer can almost instantly select, order and pay for the books he is interested in. The only delay is the shipping of the books to his house, which can take anywhere from one week to much longer.

The problem of delay - as well as the problem of weight - should be solved soon with digital books - or eBooks. A digital book is a book-sized electronic reader that can store many texts at once. Some pioneer companies have created digital books which will be available in 1999 - such as the Rocket eBook (created by NuvoMedia), the Everybook (EB) (created by Everybook), the SoftBook (created by SoftBook Press) and the Millennium EBook (created by Librius.com).

Rocket eBook was set up by NuvoMedia, Palo Alto, California, founded in 1997, and is dedicated to becoming *the* electronic book distribution solution by providing a networking infrastructure for publishers, retailers and end users to publish, distribute, purchase and read electronic content securely and efficiently over the Web. Investors of NuvoMedia are Barnes & n.o.ble and Bertelsmann. The connection between the Rocket eBook and the PC or the Macintosh is made through the RocketEbook Cradle, which provides external power through a wall transformer, and connects to the PC with a serial cable.

Everybook is "a living library in a single book". The Everybook (EB)'s ma.s.s electronic storage is one removable disk cartridge which can hold 80-100 college textbooks, or 500 to 1,000 novels. The EB uses a hidden modem to dial into the Everybook Store, where it is possible to browse, purchase, and receive entire publications, including cover art. Books, magazines, menus, sheet music all appear as they would in their printed form.

Softbook Press is creating SoftBook, along with the SoftBook Network, an Internet-based content delivery service, which provided a completely paperless reading system. Professionals and students can easily, quickly and securely download a wide selection of corporate doc.u.ments, books, and periodicals using its built-in Internet connection. Unlike a computer, the SoftBook is ergonomically designed for reading long doc.u.ments and books. Its publishing partners are Random House and Simon & Schuster.

Librius is a full-service, e-commerce company. It delivers digital copies of books to consumers via the Internet from its World Bookstore. The digital books are stored and read by the consumer in a small, low-cost reading device, called the Millennium EBook. Librius customers can obtain everything that they need to become "digital readers" directly from the Librius Web site, including EBook devices, thousands of book t.i.tles, and full customer support.

Digital books will not replace books, at least not in the very near future. They will be a new support for publishers to deliver the books through the Internet and for readers to store many texts in one digital support to be taken with everywhere.

In our technological society, some people are attached to books whatever happens, like Robert Downs who wrote in Books in My Life: "My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry."

For some other people, being convinced about how much can be brought by electronic texts doesn't prevent them from loving books. In an article published in the Swiss magazine Informatique-Informations of February 1996, Pierre Perroud, founder of the digital library Athena, explained that "electronic texts represent an encouragement to reading and a convivial partic.i.p.ation to culture dissemination", particularly for textual research and text study. These texts are "a good complement to the paper book, which remains irreplaceable when what we are talking about is reading".

Pierre Perroud is convinced of the necessity to be kept closely informed of the technological developments to adapt print media and education. Nevertheless the book remains "a mysteriously holy companion with profound symbolism for us: we grip it in our hands, we hold it against our bodies, we look at it with admiration; its small size comforts us and its content impresses us; its fragility contains a density we are fascinated by; like man it fears water and fire, but it has the power to shelter man's thoughts from Time."

4. PUBLISHERS ON THE WEB

[In this chapter:]

[4.1. Publishers: Examples and Directories / 4.2. Do Authors Still Need Publishers? / 4.3. Electronic Publishing]

4.1. Publishers: Examples and Directories

A number of publishers chose to put the full text of some of their t.i.tles on the Web. There was no drop in the sales of these publications - on the contrary, sales increased.

The National Academy Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish the reports issued by the Academy and by the National Academy of Engineering, the Inst.i.tute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. The NAP publishes over 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, presenting the most authoritative views on important issues in science and health policy.

The NAP Reading Room offers more than a thousand entire books, free for reading, from the first page to the last, and available in a variety of versions, including scanned pages in image format, hypertext HTML books, and as Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

The MIT Press (MIT: Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology) is dedicated to science and technology. The MIT Press publishes about 200 new books a year and over 40 journals, and is a major publishing presence in fields as diverse as architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational science, with a long-term commitment to the efficient and creative use of new technologies.

In the Project Gutenberg's Newsletter of October 1997, Michael Hart wrote:

"As university publishers struggle to find the right business model for offering scholarly doc.u.ments on-line, some early innovators are finding that making a monograph available electronically can boost sales of hard copies. The National Academy Press has already put 1,700 of its books on-line, and is finding that the electronic versions of some books have boosted sales of the hard copy monographs - often by two to three times the previous level. It's 'great advertising', says the Press's director. The MIT Press is experiencing similar results: 'For each of our electronic books, we've approximately doubled our sales. The plain fact is that no one is going to sit there and read a whole book on-line. And it costs money and time to download it'."

Some sites maintain a directory of publishers, for example, Publishing Companies Online and Publishers' Catalogues.

Publishing Companies Online is the WWW Virtual Library list of publishing companies, cla.s.sified in the following categories: academic publishers; computer book publishers; scientific, technical, medical (STM) publishers; electronic publishing companies; on-line publishing projects; and other commercial publishers.

Maintained by Peter Scott of Northern Lights Internet Solutions Ltd. in Saskatoon (Saskatchewan, Canada), Publishers' Catalogues has a very practical geographical index.

4.2. Do Authors Still Need Publishers?