Hmm, I got 24h shipping in basically every German bookstore way before amazon arrived on the market (to the store, of course, not to my home address). Did that

Hmm, I got 24h shipping in basically every German bookstore way before amazon arrived on the market (to the store, of course, not to my home address). Did that change in the last few years? I think one of the big factors of amazon right from the start in Germany (and probably Austria and France, too, both of which have similar price laws) was that you could get the books to your own address, and that pretty quickly. That combined with the browsing experience (part of which was the novelty) got them established, and later on the expanded product range and the recommendation engine cemented their foothold. So I would say it's not all just about the price, although I'd be very interested to hear about pricing arrangements with the publishers, especially in the early years where they didn't exactly dominate the market. To me, the biggest boon of amazon was getting English books easily and without a big markup (straight USD/EUR rates, not some fairy tale wiggle factor). Programming books were quite a bit cheaper (German books were almost always hardocover only, and with a fixed price, of course), never mind novels (ages to translate and almost every trilogy becomes a hexalogy in German).