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

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).






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