chnology products
category, open its SoftwareForPCs.com site at barnesandnoble.com."

The opening of barnesandnoble.com sparked a fierce price war in a low-margin
business. It now competes directly with the main on-line bookstore Amazon.com.
Because of this competition, Amazon.com came to be known as "Amazon.toast". Jeff
Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, doesn't fear the competition though. In Success of
July 1998, he told journalist Lesley Hazleton:

"The gap has increased rather than decreased. We went from $60 million
annualized sales revenue in May to $260 million by the end of the year, and from
340,000 customers to 1.5 million, 58 percent of them repeat customers - all that
in the context of 'Amazon.toast'. We're doing more than eight times the sales of
Barnes & Noble. And we're not a stationary target. We were blessed with a
two-year head start, and our goal is to increase that gap."

Located in United Kingdom, Internet Bookshop (iBS) is the largest on-line
bookstore in Europe. The main English bookstore Waterstone's also launched its
electronic bookstore, with a catalog of 1.4 million titles.

In Fall 1998, Chapters, the main Canadian bookseller, together with the daily
newspaper The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada, opened their cyberbookstore
Chaptersglobe.com, "the on-line destination for Canadian book-lovers". A new
on-line bookstore is also expected from Bertelsmann, one of the largest media
companies in the world, with headquarters in Germany. The companies of the
Bertelsmann Group employ about 60,000 employees in more than 40 different
countries. The 300-plus independently operating firms are organized into five
divisions within an integrated leadership structure: books, entertainment,
Gruner & Jahr (publishing and printing house), industry, and multimedia.

There are also international suppliers of books and periodicals - like the two
Anglo-American companies Blackwell and Dawson - who work exclusively for
libraries and documentation services. Thanks to them, these organizations can
now avoid multiple orders and invoices, and they can also order foreign books
and periodicals without the complications related to ordering of documents
outside a country.

Based in Oxford (United Kingdom), Portland, Oregon, and New Jersey, Blackwell's
Book Services specialize in the supply of books and value added bibliographic
products and services to over 15,000 academic, research and special libraries in
over 120 countries arou