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I'll stand by my position. BOTH Amazon and books.com were crazy initially. Books had never had been proven to be sellable in quantity to an audience that hadn

I'll stand by my position. BOTH Amazon and books.com were crazy initially. Books had never had been proven to be sellable in quantity to an audience that hadn't physically seen them. The web was so young, it was still called the World Wide Web in the media, and everything was expressed in strained superhighway analogies. We can look back on it and say "Of _course_ people will want to do shopping online", but that's with the benefit of hindsight. While it was a _stupid_ idea, it wasn't a well-proven one. Nowadays Amazon can spend quarter after quarter deliberately avoiding profitability, and no one strenuously questions it because it is known they can focus on profitability anytime. Back then it was a far more open question if they had something people would want, and something that wouldn't be easily copied by the established competitors.

B1FF_PSUVM 11y ago
> audience that hadn't physically seen I heard the Sears&Roebuck catalog was quite a hit in its time. Also, some people made some money selling by mail and phone. Crazy stuff.
- ergothus 11y ago
  Snark is funny, but you're doing exactly what I said: commenting with the benefit of hindsight. Obviously SOME people, ENOUGH of the RIGHT people thought it would work, because Amazon existed, but I'll point out that books WEREN'T big sellers in those catalogs you speak of. I remember when Amazon was founded. (Heck, I was taught how to order from a catalog in Home Ec classes). A lot of people found the idea cute. Laughable. Or maybe just naive. I mean, sure, you could sell SOME stuff in a catalog, but would enough people want to buy books that way? (SciFiFantasy book club ala Columbia House notwithstanding) And that assumed enough people understood these fancy "home computers" to order things. All with enough volume to justify the costs. I mean, we're talking about a time when no one said "Amazon", they'd say "www.amazon.com" (WWW required when you said it!), and that's assuming they didn't say "H.T.T.P. colon. uh, is that forward or backslash?..." and so forth. I mean, had the idea NOT been crazy, it'd have been done earlier. And when it was enacted, lots of smart people had doubts. Lots of rich people didn't try to get their foot in that door. All because there were very realistic doubts. They just turned out to be horribly wrong and Amazon succeeded like crazy.
  - psb217 11y ago
    Books are almost the perfect item to sell from a catalog. They require no personalization, they have a pronounced long tail demand distribution (i.e. a small store often won't have what you want), they can be stored space-efficiently and near indefinitely in a warehouse, they're rarely returned due to manufacturing defects, they're rarely returned due to "poor fit" or because "the color wasn't what I expected". All information required for deciding to purchase a book is also ideally suited to the internet -- i.e. opinions of authoritative figures, discussion among like-minded people, etc. To think that profitable companies could be built around selling clothes, furniture, and appliances by mail from paper catalogs, but that there might be no profit in selling books online, is absolutely daft.
    - ergothus 11y ago
      Of course, you are correct. I must have blocked the memory of all the book catalogs from my childhood, confused myself thinking that I requested bookstore gift certificates for every holiday for years. Obviously I must have requested the items I wanted from catalogs, year after year! I must be mistaken when I thought of how fun it was to wait the weeks or months for the books I _do_ remember ordering from pamphlets at school to arrive. Obviously all these distorted memories should be forgotten as we recall how brick-and-mortar bookstores (or as we called them then, "bookstores") were in constant collapse due to the competition from these book catalogs. Obviously I'm just daft and history didn't happen.
      - psb217 11y ago
        I don't recall saying that it was obvious Amazon would destroy the brick-and-mortar book business, or that Amazon would come to control significant chunks of internet infrastructure. Your comment was about the fiscal viability of selling books online, and that's what I was responding to. As you've just pointed out, people were already buying books from catalogs, and profitable companies were built around this activity. There was a clear market for it, and centralization of this activity via the internet just happened to provide a bigger boost to Amazon's success than many people would have predicted.
- obsurveyor 11y ago
  @ergothus The adults ordering from Amazon when it started out were the kids were ordering books from catalogs in elementary school 20+ years before that. It wasn't a crazy idea at all, in fact, I'd say people were already well primed for it, the rise of the Internet gave Amazon the reach it needed.

B1FF_PSUVM 11y ago

> audience that hadn't physically seen I heard the Sears&Roebuck catalog was quite a hit in its time. Also, some people made some money selling by mail and phone. Crazy stuff.

ergothus 11y ago
Snark is funny, but you're doing exactly what I said: commenting with the benefit of hindsight. Obviously SOME people, ENOUGH of the RIGHT people thought it would work, because Amazon existed, but I'll point out that books WEREN'T big sellers in those catalogs you speak of. I remember when Amazon was founded. (Heck, I was taught how to order from a catalog in Home Ec classes). A lot of people found the idea cute. Laughable. Or maybe just naive. I mean, sure, you could sell SOME stuff in a catalog, but would enough people want to buy books that way? (SciFiFantasy book club ala Columbia House notwithstanding) And that assumed enough people understood these fancy "home computers" to order things. All with enough volume to justify the costs. I mean, we're talking about a time when no one said "Amazon", they'd say "www.amazon.com" (WWW required when you said it!), and that's assuming they didn't say "H.T.T.P. colon. uh, is that forward or backslash?..." and so forth. I mean, had the idea NOT been crazy, it'd have been done earlier. And when it was enacted, lots of smart people had doubts. Lots of rich people didn't try to get their foot in that door. All because there were very realistic doubts. They just turned out to be horribly wrong and Amazon succeeded like crazy.
- psb217 11y ago
  Books are almost the perfect item to sell from a catalog. They require no personalization, they have a pronounced long tail demand distribution (i.e. a small store often won't have what you want), they can be stored space-efficiently and near indefinitely in a warehouse, they're rarely returned due to manufacturing defects, they're rarely returned due to "poor fit" or because "the color wasn't what I expected". All information required for deciding to purchase a book is also ideally suited to the internet -- i.e. opinions of authoritative figures, discussion among like-minded people, etc. To think that profitable companies could be built around selling clothes, furniture, and appliances by mail from paper catalogs, but that there might be no profit in selling books online, is absolutely daft.
  - ergothus 11y ago
    Of course, you are correct. I must have blocked the memory of all the book catalogs from my childhood, confused myself thinking that I requested bookstore gift certificates for every holiday for years. Obviously I must have requested the items I wanted from catalogs, year after year! I must be mistaken when I thought of how fun it was to wait the weeks or months for the books I _do_ remember ordering from pamphlets at school to arrive. Obviously all these distorted memories should be forgotten as we recall how brick-and-mortar bookstores (or as we called them then, "bookstores") were in constant collapse due to the competition from these book catalogs. Obviously I'm just daft and history didn't happen.
    - psb217 11y ago
      I don't recall saying that it was obvious Amazon would destroy the brick-and-mortar book business, or that Amazon would come to control significant chunks of internet infrastructure. Your comment was about the fiscal viability of selling books online, and that's what I was responding to. As you've just pointed out, people were already buying books from catalogs, and profitable companies were built around this activity. There was a clear market for it, and centralization of this activity via the internet just happened to provide a bigger boost to Amazon's success than many people would have predicted.
obsurveyor 11y ago
@ergothus The adults ordering from Amazon when it started out were the kids were ordering books from catalogs in elementary school 20+ years before that. It wasn't a crazy idea at all, in fact, I'd say people were already well primed for it, the rise of the Internet gave Amazon the reach it needed.