Inside the Book) after scanning the text of 120,000 titles,
with many more to come. It also launched its own search engine,
A9.com.

A sixth subsidiary - named Joyo - opened in China in September
2004.

The net income of Amazon was US $588 million for 2004 - 45% of
which from its six subsidiaries (Canada, China, France,
Germany, Japan, U.K.) -, with a total of $6.9 billion for
sales.

Amazon became a reference for global online commerce.

In July 2005, for its 10-year anniversary, Amazon had 9,000
employees, and 41 million clients enjoying attractive prices
for a whole range of products they could get within 48 hours in
one of the seven countries with an Amazon platform.

Amazon also sold more and more ebooks. In April 2005, it bought
the French company Mobipocket, specialized in ebooks and
readers (software) for PDAs.

In November 2007, Amazon launched its own reading device, named
Kindle, with a catalog of 80,000 ebooks on Amazon's website.
538,000 Kindle were sold in 2008. A new version of Kindle,
named Kindle 2, was launched in February 2009, with a catalog
of 230,000 ebooks.

= What about small bookstores?

Local bookstores have closed one after the other, or have had a
hard time keeping up with the competition of Amazon.com and
other online bookstores. Amazon and others are also bad news
for specialist bookstores, for example the travel bookstore
created in 1971 by Catherine Domain in Paris, France.

According to Catherine, Librairie Ulysse (Ulysses Bookstore) is
the oldest travel bookstore in the world. Its 20,000 out-of-
print or new books, maps and magazines - in a number of
languages and about any country - are all packed up in a tiny
space, in the heart of Paris, on Ile Saint-Louis, a small
island surrounded by the Seine river.

Catherine has been a traveller since she was a child. She
travels every summer - usually sailing on the Mediterranean,
the Atlantic or the Pacific - while her boyfriend runs the
bookstore. She is also a member of the French National Union of
Antiquarian and Modern Bookstores (SLAM: Syndicat national de
la librairie ancienne et moderne), the Explorers' Club (Club
des explorateurs) and the International Club of Long-Distance
Travelers (Club international des grands voyageurs).

Catherine visited 140 countries, and some trips were quite
challenging. But her most difficult challenge was to set up a
website on her own, from scratch, without knowing anything
about com