This note considers Amazon.com, the dominant online book etailer, and its peers.

It covers -

• introduction - scale and scope in consumer etailing
• Amazon and its competitors - superstores, category killers, Barnes & Noble, Borders and other chains
• overseas - developments in Japan, Germany and other markets
• the antiquarian market - intermediation and aggregation in antiquarian, remainder and second-hand book sales
• development beyond books - the future of the 'virtual mall'
• studies - academic studies, industry reports and popular accounts
• landmarks - key dates

It supplements the broader discussion of online retailing and marketing mechanisms and issues.


     studies

Background about the evolution of bookselling over the past century is provided here, along with pointers to salient works such as Albert Greco's The Book Publishing Industry (Boston: Allyn & Bacon 1997) and Andre Schiffrin's The Business of Books (New York: Verso 2000)

Amazon is described - superficially and without sparkle - in Rebecca Saunders' Business the Amazon.Com Way: Secrets of the World's Most Astonishing Web Business (Oxford: Capstone 1999). For us, spray-painting 'dot com' and 'etail' onto every page is not a substitute for analysis or hard information.  We recommend instead Robert Spector's more insightful Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: Harper 2000).

We are overdue for an adulatory biography of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. There was an intelligent profile in the March 1999 Wired and one in the May 2001 First Monday.  Lenny Riggio and Barnes & Noble featured two months later.

Sandeep Krishnamurthy has published an Amazon.com case study (PDF), perhaps more insightful than Mikey Daisey's memoir 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com (London: Fourth Edition 2002) or James Marcus' Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut (New York: New Press 2004). Adrienne Massanari's 2003 dissertation "Work hard. Have fun. Make history. [Make money]": Narratives of Amazon.com (PDF) is upbeat.

For Barnes & Noble see in particular Daniel Raff's 2004 Three Sites of Transformation In the Very Modern History of the Book (PDF). A perspective is provided by Austan Goolsbee & Judith Chevalier's 2002 Measuring Prices and Price Competition Online: Amazon & Barnes and Noble (PDF).

     landmarks

1917 Barnes & Noble founded

1962 Walden Book Company founded by Lawrence Hoyt

1965 Leonard Riggio establishes Student Book Exchange (SBX) in Greenwich Village

1969 Walden Books acquired by retail conglomerate Carter Hawley Hale

1969 Barnes & Noble acquired by Amtel retail conglomerate

1971 Riggio buys ailing Barnes & Noble for US$1.2m

1971 Borders formed by Tom & Louis Borders

1977 Barnes & Noble buys BookMasters and Marboro Books chains

1981 Waldenbooks has 750 outlets

1984 Waldenbooks buys Brentano's chain

1984 buys Longmeadow Press

1984 K-Mart buys Waldenbooks chain

1986 Barnes & Noble explores online marketing through Trintex (Sears, CBS and IBM joint venture videotext service that becomes Prodigy in 1988)

1987 buys B. Dalton Bookseller (797 retail bookstores) from Dayton-Hudson retail conglomerate

1987 buys Doubleday Book Shops from Bertelsmann

1987 buys Scribners retail operation

1989 buys BookStop discount superstore chain (24 units)

1990 Steve Bezos becomes Vice President of Bankers Trust

1992 becomes Senior Vice President of Wall Street investment house D E Shaw & Co

1992 K-Mart acquires Borders for US$100m, forms Borders-Walden Group

1993 Barnes & Noble goes public

1994 Bezos founds Amazon.com

1994 Borders-Walden buys Planet Music chain

1995 Borders-Walden Group spun off amid K-Mart financial crisis, becomes Borders Group Inc

1995 Amazon site goes live, has US$15.7 million sales

1996 Barnes & Noble has 1,000 stores, aggregate US$2.4bn sales

1997 barnesandnoble.com launched

1997 Crown Books superstore chain collapses

1997 Borders opens first outlet outside US (in Singapore)

1997 Amazon tagged as 'Amazon.toast' by Forrester Research

1997 Amazon raises US$54 million in IPO

1998 Amazon adds music CDs and movie videos

1998 launches sites in Germany and United Kingdom

1998 Borders expands into UK

1998 Bertelsmann buys 50% of barnesandnoble.com

1999 Barnes & Noble abandons US$600m takeover of Ingram

1999 Borders buys 20% of Sprout

1999 Amazon.com buys 46% of drugstore.com

1999 launches auction service

1999 Amazon adds toys, electronics, software, video games and home improvement items

1999 Amazon sales reach US$1.6bn, with US$550m cumulative loss

1999 Bertelsmann and Barnes & Noble float 20% of barnesandnoble.com for US$422m

1999 Bezos becomes Time 'Man of the Year'

2000 Amazon launches sites in Japan and France

2000 Amazon takes US$60m stake in Kozmo.com delivery service (folded in 2001)

2000 alliance with Toys R Us

2000 criticised by EPIC and others for selling customer data

2001 Amazon reports loss of US$1.4bn

2001 announces alliance with Borders

2001 Barnes & Noble buys SparkNotes.com

2002 Amazon adds apparel items

2002 announces first quarterly profit

2003 Amazon.com US$8.4bn market capitalisation is equivalent to 40% of General Motors

2003 establishes A9 search engine subsidiary

2003 unveils 'Search Inside the Book' technology

2003 Barnes & Noble buys Sterling Publishing

2003 launches Barnes & Noble Classics imprint

2003 buys Bertelsmann stake in barnesandnoble.com for US$164m

2004 buys public stake in barnesandnoble.com

2004 spins off GameStop subsidiary (US video game retailer with 1,500 stores)

2004 Amazon reports first annual profit







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