cts 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.

As recalled by Jeff Bezos in Amazon's press kit (in its 1998
version), "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 online, 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."

People could search the online catalog by author, title,
subject, date, or ISBN. The website was offering 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.com 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, there were discounts on 400,000 titles, with 40% on
some feature books, 30% on hardcovers, and 20% on paperbacks.
Amazon.com was also selling CDs, DVDs, audiobooks and computer
games, with 3 million clients in 160 countries, and a catalog
with ten times as many titles as the largest supermarkets'
bookstores.

As mentioned by Jeff Bezos in Amazon's press kit: "Businesses
can do things on the web that simply cannot be done any other
way. We are changing the way people buy books and music. 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