A Short History of EBooks Part 4

BOL.fr was the French subsidiary of BOL.com (BOL: Bertelsmann On Line), launched in August 1999 by Bertelsmann, a German media giant, in partners.h.i.+p with Vivendi, a French multinational company.

Unlike their counterparts in the U.S. and in U.K., where book prices were free, French online bookstores couldn't offer significant bargains. A French law - the Lang law - regulated prices. (Jacques Lang was the ministry of culture who fathered the law to protect independent bookstores.) The 5% discount allowed by law for both traditional and online bookstores was offering little lat.i.tude to Amazon.fr, Fnac.com, and the likes, who were nevertheless optimistic about the prospects offered by the French-language international market. A significant number of orders was already coming from abroad, with 10% of orders for Fnac.com as early as 1997.

Interviewed by AFP (Agence France-Presse) on the Lang Law and the meager 5% discount allowed for book prices, Denis Terrien, president of Amazon France (until May 2001), explained in August 2000: "Our experience in Germany, where book prices are also regulated, shows that prices are not the main factor for our customers to purchase books at Amazon. The main factor resides in the additional services we provide. We offer a whole bunch of services, beginning with a large choice in our catalog - we sell all the French cultural products. We have a powerful search engine. As for music, our site offers the only catalog searchable by song t.i.tle. In addition to the editorial content of our site, which ranges from the one of a traditional bookstore to the one of a magazine, we have a customer service 24h/24 7days/7, something unique in the French market. Finally, an additional specificity of Amazon is our commitment for a fast delivery. We aim to have more than 90% of our products in stock (at our storage facility)."

Amazon's economic model was already admired by many in Europe, but could hardly be considered a model too for staff management, with short-term labor contracts, low wages, and poor working conditions.

Despite the secrecy surrounding the working conditions of the European staff, problems began to filter. In November 2000, the Prewitt Organizing Fund and the French union SUD-PTT Loire Atlantique launched an awareness campaign among the employees of Amazon France, after meeting with a group of 50 employees in the distribution center of Boigny-sur-Bionne. In a statement following the meeting, SUD-PTT denounced "degraded working conditions, flexible schedules, short-term labor contracts in periods of flux, low wages, and minimal social guarantees".

Similar action was conducted in Germany and in U.K. Patrick Moran, head of the Prewitt Organizing Fund, founded an employee organization under the name of Alliance of New Economy Workers. In response, Amazon sent internal memos to its employees, stressing the pointlessness of unions within the company.

At the end of January 2001, Amazon, which employed 1,800 people in Europe, announced a 15% reduction of its European staff. It also closed its customer service center in The Hague (Netherlands). Its 240 employees were offered to work in one of the two other European customer service centers, in Slough (United Kingdom) and in Regensberg (Germany).

= Amazon worldwide

The second group of foreign clients - after European customers - was in j.a.pan. In July 2000, during an international symposium on information technology in Tokyo, Jeff Bezos announced his intention to launch Amazon j.a.pan in the near future. He insisted on the high potential of the j.a.panese market, with expensive real estate affecting the prices of goods and services and, as a result, online shopping being more convenient than traditional shopping. High population density would mean easy and cheap home deliveries.

A j.a.panese call center opened in August 2000 in Sapporo, a city on the Hokkaido island. Amazon j.a.pan opened three months later, in November 2000, as the fourth subsidiary of Amazon and first non-European subsidiary, with a catalog of 1.1 million t.i.tles in j.a.panese and 600,000 t.i.tles in English. To reduce delivery times to 24 to 48 hours instead of six weeks for books published in the U.S., a large distribution center (15,800 m2) was created in Ichikawa, a town in the east of Tokyo.

In November 2000, Amazon had 7,500 employees, a catalog of 28 million items, and 23 million clients worldwide. It opened its digital library with 1,000 ebooks, and the promise of many more t.i.tles for soon.

Amazon also began focusing on the French-language market in Canada. It hired staff knowing the language and the market, to be able to offer French-language books, music and films (VHS and DVD) in a Canadian subsidiary. Amazon Canada, the fifth subsidiary of the company, was finally launched in June 2002 with a bilingual (English, French) website.

Surprisingly, even for the marketing of a main online bookstore, paper was not dead. For two consecutive years, in 1999 and 2000, Amazon sent a print catalog to its customers (10 million in 2000) before the holiday season.

2001 marked a turning point for the company, with the need to address the internet bubble affecting the "new" economy and so many companies. Following a deficit for the fourth quarter 2000, Amazon reduced its workforce by 15% in January 2001.

1,300 employees lost their jobs in the U.S. 270 employees lost their jobs in Europe. Jeff Bezos decided to diversify the products sold online, and to sell not only books, videos, CDs and software, but also health care products, toys, electronics, kitchen utensils, and garden tools. In November 2001, cultural products - books, CDs and videos - represented only 58% of sales, the total of which were US $4 billion, with 29 million customers.

The company was beneficiary for the first time in the third quarter 2003.

In October 2003, Amazon launched a full text search (Search Inside the Book) after scanning the text of 120,000 t.i.tles, 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, j.a.pan, 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 compet.i.tion 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 computers. In December 1999, she wrote in an email interview: "My site is still pretty basic and under construction. Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money from it, but that doesn't worry me... I am very pessimistic though, because the internet is killing off specialist bookstores."

Some booksellers decided to run most of their business online, for example Pierre Joppen and his wife Joke Vrijenhoek, the owners of Paulus Swaen Old Maps and Prints, a bookstore founded in 1978 in the Netherlands that relocated in 1996 in Florida.

The bookstore offers maps, atlases and globes ranging from the 16th to the 18th century. The maps cover all parts of the world, and were produced by renowned cartographers, such as Ortelius, Mercator, Blaeu, Janssonius, Hondius, Visscher, de Wit, etc. The bookstore has also sold travel books and Medieval ma.n.u.scripts. It has offered an online internet auction since November 1996, first twice a year, in March and November, and then four times a year, in March, May, September and November.

1996: THERE ARE MORE AND MORE TEXTS ONLINE

= [Overview]

Created in 1992, the Etext Archives were "home to electronic texts of all kinds". Created in 1993, the E-zine-list was a list of electronic zines around the world. The first electronic versions of print newspapers were available in the early 1990s through commercial services like America Online and CompuServe.

In 1996, newspapers and magazines began offering websites with a partial or full version of their latest issue, available freely or through subscription (free or paid), as well as online archives. In United Kingdom, the daily Times and the Sunday Times set up a common website called Times Online. The weekly publication The Economist also went online, as well as the weekly Focus and Der Spiegel in Germany, the daily Le Monde and Liberation in France, and the daily El Pais in Spain. The computer press went logically online as well, first the monthly Wired, "the magazine of the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century", then ZDNet, another leading computer magazine.

More and more "only" electronic magazines were also created.

= Electronic texts and newsletters

The Etext Archives were founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, and hosted on the website of the University of Michigan. They were "home to electronic texts of all kinds, from the sacred to the profane, and from the political to the personal". They provided electronic texts without judging their content, in six sections: (a) "E-zines": electronic periodicals from the professional to the personal; (b) "Politics": political zines, essays, and home pages of political groups; (c) "Fiction": publications of amateur authors; (d) "Religion", mainstream and off-beat religious texts; (e) "Poetry": an eclectic mix of mostly amateur poetry; and (f) "Quartz": the archive formerly hosted at quartz.rutgers.edu.

As recalled on the website in 1998: "The web was just a glimmer, gopher was the new hot technology, and FTP was still the standard information retrieval protocol for the vast majority of users. The origin of the project has caused numerous people to a.s.sociate it with the University of Michigan, although in fact there has never been an official relations.h.i.+p and the project is supported entirely by volunteer labor and contributions. The equipment is wholly owned by the project maintainers. The project was started in response to the lack of organized archiving of political doc.u.ments, periodicals and discussions disseminated via Usenet on newsgroups such as alt.activism, misc.activism.progressive, and alt.society.anarchy. The alt.politics.radical-left group came later and was also a substantial source of both materials and regular contributors. Not long thereafter, electronic 'zines (e-zines) began their rapid proliferation on the internet, and it was clear that these materials suffered from the same lack of coordinated collection and preservation, not to mention the fact that the lines between e-zines (which at the time were mostly related to hacking, phreaking, and internet anarchism) and political materials on the internet were fuzzy enough that most e-zines fit the original mission of The Etext Archives.

One thing led to another, and e-zines of all kinds - many on various cultural topics unrelated to politics - invaded the archives in significant volume."

Another list, the E-zine-list, was launched by John Labovitz in summer 1993 to list e-zines around the world, accessible via FTP, gopher, email, the web, and other services. The list was updated monthly.

What exactly is a zine? John Labovitz explained on his website: "For those of you not acquainted with the zine world, 'zine' is short for either 'fanzine' or 'magazine', depending on your point of view. Zines are generally produced by one person or a small group of people, done often for fun or personal reasons, and tend to be irreverent, bizarre, and/or esoteric. Zines are not 'mainstream' publications - they generally do not contain advertis.e.m.e.nts (except, sometimes, advertis.e.m.e.nts for other zines), are not targeted towards a ma.s.s audience, and are generally not produced to make a profit. An 'e-zine' is a zine that is distributed partially or solely on electronic networks like the internet."

3,045 zines were listed in November 1998. John wrote on his website: "Now the e-zine world is different. The number of e- zines has increased a hundredfold, crawling out of the FTP and gopher woodworks to declaring themselves worthy of their own domain name, even asking for financial support through advertising. Even the term 'e-zine' has been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come to mean nearly any type of publication distributed electronically. Yet there is still the original, independent fringe, who continue to publish from their heart, or push the boundaries of what we call a 'zine'."

After many years of maintaining this list, John pa.s.sed the torch to others.

"Chroniques de Cyberie" was launched in November 1994 by Jean- Pierre Cloutier, a journalist living in Montreal, Quebec. As a weekly French-language report of internet news, Jean-Pierre's newsletter was sent by email to its subscribers (free subscription), and available on the web on a dedicated website (from April 1995). Bruno Giussani, journalist, wrote in The New York Times of November 25, 1997: "Almost no one in the United States has ever heard of Jean-Pierre Cloutier, yet he is one of the leading figures of the French-speaking internet community.

For the last 30 months Cloutier has written one of the most intelligent, pa.s.sionate and insightful electronic newsletters available on the internet, (...) an original mix of relevant internet news, clear political a.n.a.lysis and no-nonsense personal opinions. It was a publication that gave readers the feeling that they were living week after week in the intimacy of a planetary revolution."

"Venezuela a.n.a.litica" was a Spanish-language electronic magazine conceived as a public forum to exchange ideas on politics, economics, culture, science and technology. Roberto Hernandez Montoya, its editor, wrote in September 1998: "The internet has been very important for me personally. It became my main way of life. As an organization it gave us the possibility to communicate with thousands of people, which would have been economically impossible if we had published a paper magazine. I think the internet is going to become the essential means of communication and of information exchange in the coming years."

= Print magazines go online

The first electronic versions of print newspapers were available in the early 1990s through commercial services like America Online and CompuServe.

In 1996, newspapers and magazines began offering websites with a partial or full version of their latest issue, available freely or through subscription (free or paid), as well as online archives.

For example, the site of The New York Times site could be accessed free of charge, with articles of the print daily newspaper, breaking news updated every ten minutes, and original reporting only available online. The site of The Was.h.i.+ngton Post gave the daily news online, with a full database of articles, with images, sound and video.