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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 st

by 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.
  - ergothus 11y ago
    I think you've totally missed my point, and will simply not agree. Perhaps I was too sarcastic in response to being called "daft". My point, for clarity: * There was NOT a large sell-book-by-catalog business. Those companies that did it were either rackets, or extremely niche, or both. * At the time of Amazon's founding, it was a wide open question as to whether they could make enough money to cover costs, and a bigger question as to whether this was best investment for that much money. Now, you can argue that either of these is wrong, but those are my personal memories of the time, and I feel #2 is supported by #1, and I'm the only one that has mentioned ANY book catalogs, and both of those are NOT general providers. Do you have any examples that show that there WAS such general success to prove your point? (I've done some brief googling, but articles from 1995 are hard to locate)
    - makomk 11y ago
      Before the Internet, if your local bookstore didn't have the book you wanted in you asked them to order it in and then waited for it to turn up and collected it from there. The Internet was a definite improvement in convenience.
      - ergothus 11y ago
        Of course the Internet was an improvement! I'm not arguing it wasn't. It is a fantastic improvement. We know that. But in the '90s, none of that had happened, and it was as uncertain and unproven as VR is now, or voice commands before Siri and Echo were available, etc. To pretend that uncertainty didn't exist is to deny what actually happened.

by psb217 11y ago

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.
- ergothus 11y ago
  I think you've totally missed my point, and will simply not agree. Perhaps I was too sarcastic in response to being called "daft". My point, for clarity: * There was NOT a large sell-book-by-catalog business. Those companies that did it were either rackets, or extremely niche, or both. * At the time of Amazon's founding, it was a wide open question as to whether they could make enough money to cover costs, and a bigger question as to whether this was best investment for that much money. Now, you can argue that either of these is wrong, but those are my personal memories of the time, and I feel #2 is supported by #1, and I'm the only one that has mentioned ANY book catalogs, and both of those are NOT general providers. Do you have any examples that show that there WAS such general success to prove your point? (I've done some brief googling, but articles from 1995 are hard to locate)
  - makomk 11y ago
    Before the Internet, if your local bookstore didn't have the book you wanted in you asked them to order it in and then waited for it to turn up and collected it from there. The Internet was a definite improvement in convenience.
    - ergothus 11y ago
      Of course the Internet was an improvement! I'm not arguing it wasn't. It is a fantastic improvement. We know that. But in the '90s, none of that had happened, and it was as uncertain and unproven as VR is now, or voice commands before Siri and Echo were available, etc. To pretend that uncertainty didn't exist is to deny what actually happened.