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: * T

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)