ll on
the internet. When Amazon.com started, it had 10 employees and a
catalog of 3 million books. Unlike traditional bookstores, Amazon
doesn't have windows looking out on the street and books skillfully
lined up on shelves or piled upon displays. The "virtual" windows are
its webpages, with all transactions made through the internet. Books
are stored in huge storage facilities before being put into boxes and
sent by mail. In November 2000, Amazon had 7,500 employees, a catalog
of 28 million items, 23 million clients worldwide and four subsidiaries
in United Kingdom (launched in August 1998), Germany (August 1998),
France (August 2000) and Japan (November 2000). A fifth subsidiary
opened in Canada in June 2002, and a sixth subsidiary, named Joyo,
opened in China in September 2004.

December 1995 > The Kotoba Home Page, for a multilingual web

Yoshi Mikami, a computer scientist at Asia Info Network in Fujisawa,
Japan, launched in December 1995 the website The Languages of the World
by Computers and the Internet, also known as the Logos Home Page or
Kotoba Home Page. (The website was updated until September 2001.) Yoshi
was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of The
Multilingual Web Guide (Japanese edition), a print book published by
O'Reilly Japan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into English,
French and German.

March 1996 > The Palm Pilot was the first PDA

Palm, a company based in California, launched the Palm Pilot in March
1996, as the first PDA, and sold 23 million machines between 1996 and
2002. Its operating system was the Palm OS and its reading software the
Palm Reader. In March 2001, Palm users could also use the Mobipocket
Reader, and Palm bought Peanutpress.com, a company specializing in
digital books for PDA, with its Peanut Reader and 2,000 titles that
were transferred to Palm's digital bookstore, called Palm Digital
Media. While some book professionals were concerned about the small
screen, Palm users reading on their screens found it was fun.

April 1996 > The Internet Archive

Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a
non-profit organization that has built an "internet library" to offer
permanent access to historical collections in digital format for
researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web is stored
every two months or so. In late 1999, the Internet Archive started to
include more collections of archived webpages on speci