ublishers struggle to find the right business model for
offering scholarly documents online, 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 online, 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 online.
And it costs money and time to download it'." (excerpt from the Project
Gutenberg Newsletter of October 1997)

1995: AMAZON.COM

[Overview]

Amazon.com was a "pioneer" online bookstore that created an entirely
new economic model. Amazon.com was launched by Jeff Bezos in July 1995,
in Seattle, on the west coast of the U.S., after a market study which
led him to conclude that books were the best products to sell on the
internet. When Amazon.com started, it had 10 employees and a catalog of
3 million books. Unlike traditional bookstores, Amazon.com didn't have
windows looking out on the street and books skillfully lined up on
shelves or piled upon displays. The virtual window is its website, with
all transactions made through the internet. Books are stored in huge
storage facilities before being put into boxes and sent by mail. In
November 2000, Amazon.com had 7,500 employees, a catalog of 28 million
items, 23 million clients worldwide and four subsidiaries in UK (in
August 1998), in Germany (in August 1998), in France (August 2000) and
in Japan (October 2000). A fifth subsidiary opened in Canada in June
2002. A sixth subsidiary - named Joyo - opened in China in September
2004.

[In Depth (published in 1999)]

Jeff Bezos launched 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 twenty products that could be sold
online, ranging from clothing to gardening tools, and then researched
the top five, which were 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. Book