king 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:

"He regularly hangs out at the Elliott Bay Book Co., a sprawling, independent
bookstore in downtown Seattle which has exposed brick walls, a cafe and lots of
friendly salespeople. And he talks about how 'books creak in that nice kind of
way'. 'We are trying to make the shopping experience just as fun as going to the
book store', he says, 'but there's some things we can't do'."

3.2. On-Line Bookstores: Some Examples

Amazon.com is the largest on-line bookstore, with instant access to 3 million
titles, authoritative reviews, author interviews, excerpts, customer reviews,
and book recommendations. It is an Internet retailer of books, music, and other
information-based products that offers services traditional retailers cannot:
lower prices, selection, and a wealth of product information.

Today Amazon.com offers 3 million books, CDs, audiobooks, DVDs, computer games -
more than 14 times as many titles as the large chain superstores - to more to 3
million people in more than 160 countries. "Businesses can do things on the Web
that simply cannot be done any other way", says Jeff Bezos. "We are changing the
way people buy books and music."

Any book-lover ca