The following article is based on the introduction from Shop Online the Lazy Way, a book written by Richard Seltzer, which was published in August 1999 by Macmillan. It is available in paperback directly from our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat or from Amazon.com. It is also available in a Braille edition from National Braille Press (www.nbp.org).
Now that the rights have reverted to the author, he is free to update and revise this online version. Please send email to alert him of changes and interesting new sites that you have encountered.
Books, for example, have been traditionally sold through physical stores that have limited shelf space. Publishers battle for this shelf space,and only the best selling books are stocked. Thousands of other books don't make it and even the ones that do soon get pushed aside by new titles. The losers are shipped back to the publishers as "returns," with the store receiving for full credit for the unsold books. The returned books eventually show up as "remainders," and are liquidated at enormous discounts.
Compare this traditional book sale model with today's online book store--a "virtual" store with no such physical constraints. The Internet version of the book store can include millions of different items, storing the information in a database so that you can find what you want quickly, searching by author, subject, or title.
So with an Internet-based book store, where do all the books come from? Typically, the basic listings come from Books in Print, a publication of R.R. Bowker (www.bowker.com) which attempts to catalog all books published in the U.S. Their Internet edition includes more than 900,000 titles published since 1979. A would-be superstore sets up a searchable database starting with that information and makes business partnerships with one or more distributors.
Some online superstores, like Barnes and Noble (www.barnesandnoble.com) are connected with pre-existing physical stores or chains of stores. Others like Amazon.com are new to this business and will probably never go to the expense of building brick-and-mortar stores. The typical superstore will have some best-selling books in stock for very quick turnaround. They'll forward other orders to their distributors for shipment in a few days. And others they'll special order from the publisher for delivery in a few weeks. If you need a book quickly, you might want to shop around the various superstores to see which one guarantees fastest delivery for that particular title.
The highly publicized success of Amazon.com has attracted lots of competitors. Here's a list of the best known online book retailers today, but expect plenty more to join the fray.
How do some of these stores offer numbers of titles far greater than those found in Books in Print? Some, like Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, bolster the number of items they have for sale by including out-of-print books (for which they have finder services.) Amazon also has a program, Advantage, for small presses. This program accepts books on consignment. Those efforts make available to the general public literary and other rare works that otherwise would be almost impossible to find and difficult to purchase.
I have to admit that I'm an Amazon addict. I spend an average of $100 to $200 a month there, and a lot more at Christmas when I buy gifts. But I also regularly buy books at Daedalus and Schoenhofs.
Daedalus (www.daedalus-books.com) regularly sends me a printed catalog, which has thoughtful, well-written mini-reviews of books I would otherwise probably never have heard of and that I very often find delightful. For the most part, these are low-priced remainders--hardcovers now going into paperback or gems that for one reason or other didn't make it in the book stores.
I shop at Schoenhof's (www.schoenhofs.com) for their enormous selection of foreign language books--French, German, and Russian. But while I'll check their Web site, I'm probably more likely to phone them, because their knowledgeable sales staff can let me know about alternative editions and related titles.
Whatever your tastes, there are probably niche stores on the Internet that can make it easy for you to decide what to buy, learn about new books in your field, or find a particular book when you don't know the title or the author.
Here's a sampling of the Internet's niche book stores. You will find many others by links from related Web pages and also by using the major search engines and directories (discussed in Chapter 1).
I operate a pseudo-store, myself, at my Web site at www.samizdat.com/#readers. There I have a list of every book I've read for the last 41 years (so I'm a bit obsessive), plus lists of my favorites, and reviews. Because those pages of mine are indexed at the major search engines (and especially at AltaVista), I get lots of email from other readers who have enjoyed the same books as I did. That email is my best source of recommendations for what to read next. It's also a lot of fun getting in touch with people of similar interests and sharing ideas with them. Since I'm an Amazon.com associate, I get a 5 to 15 percent referral fee on what visitors to my site buy at Amazon when they click to there from one of my links. You can do the same. It's relatively simple, and here are the steps:
1. Post one or more Web pages at a free Web-hosting site like NBCi [formerly Xoom] (www.nbci.com/), Tripod (www.tripod.com, or Geocities (www.geocities.com), as described in Chapter Five.
2. Sign up for an affiliate/associate program at one of the book superstores. Signing up typically costs nothing and takes about a day for verification that you do have a Web site and that you don't seem to be doing anything illegal there.
3. Make a list of books that you love and would like to recommend, preferably around a common theme, so your "store" will have an identifiable niche.
4. Following the instructions from the superstore, make hyperlinks from your pages to the pages at the superstore where those particular books are offered for sale.
5. Add additional content, such as reviews, to let visitors know more about the books you have chosen and to encourage them to click on the hyperlinks.
6. Anyone who clicks gets connected to the superstore, where they get more information and where they can place orders online.
7. The superstore collects the money and fills the order, periodically sending you reports about activity from your site. The site also sends you a check with a finder's fee that typically amounts to 5 to 15 percent of what the customers paid for the books they bought.
If you are considering creating a pseudo-store, don't get inflated expectations. You aren't likely to get rich this way. But if you love books and like to share your enthusiasm, this is a way to pick up a little "found money."
The difficult part is getting enough traffic to your little Web site to generate sales of this kind. For tips in doing that, you can check my book, The Social Web, which you can read online at www.samizdat.com/#social.
Yes, an online store may try to lure you in with ads about special prices on particular books, but so do physical stores, which heavily discount the best sellers and hope you'll buy more books once you're in the store. But shopping online you'll be hit with shipping charges, which decline the more you buy. If you only want that one item, the shipping will bring the real cost up close to list, or certainly no better than you could do at the physical store around the corner. You only get the benefit of the advertised cost savings on the one title by buying several or even half a dozen other books at the same time; however, those additional titles probably don't have the same high discount.
If you do insist on buying one book here and another there, while the nominal cost for each item might be less, the total cost, including shipping, will be much higher than if you bought them all at the same superstore.
By the way, you can't use a search engine like AltaVista and Hotbot to find out which online stores have the book or music or video you want. That's because the stores keep their catalog information in databases, and public search engines today cannot access databases. You can, however, use a comparison site like PriceScan (www.pricescan.com), or Acses (www.acses.com) to check the availability and price of particular title across a dozen or so online stores.
Logically, you might expect to get the best deal by eliminating the middleman and going straight to the publisher's site. In fact, you could use the search capability at an online superstore to find out who the publisher is and then go to the publisher's site to make the purchase. But the industry doesn't work that way.
Major publishers typically give bookstores and distributors a discount in the range of 40 to 55 percent, depending on the size of their orders. But, believe it or not, they are not set up to handle individual orders themselves and can't do so economically even though they'd get the full undiscounted price.
For instance, at Macmillan's site (www.mcp.com), you can search and browse their complete catalog (more than 2000 new titles published each year), and see a description, the table of contents, and a sample chapter of each. But you can't buy the book online there. Rather they expect you to make the purchase at retail book stores. Smaller publishers, whose books are carried by a limited number of stores, will probably include a list of those stores at their site. Only the very tiniest publishers, who sell primarily by direct mail and whose titles may not appear in stores at all, are likely to sell directly over the Internet.
That means that a superstore like Amazon.com is not in competition with the publishers, but rather works in partnership with them. In fact, Amazon.com welcomes all the information and excerpts and pictures that the publishers are willing to provide. Hence, the Amazon.com site becomes the simplest way for a publisher to sell single copies, without all the logistical headaches and cost of trying to deal directly with hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual customers.
If you know of a publisher that specializes in books in your field, you may want to check the publisher's Website for its latest catalog and browse to see what's new. Then you can go to an online superstore to make your purchase.
To help us make these decisions, we traditionally rely on best-seller lists, awards, reviews, and the opinions of friends. We also sample the goods--flipping through books in a physical store, or hearing music on the radio or TV or seeing previews of videos. Online superstores typically give you easy access to best-seller lists, award lists, reviews by professionals, and also reviews by people like yourself. (For instance, at Amazon.com you can post your own reviews of the books you've read.) And, thanks to their partnerships with publishers, they sometimes provide detailed descriptions, tables of contents, and even sample chapters.
If you are a glutton for reviews, check AcqWeb's Directory of Book Reviews on the Web at www.library.vanderbilt.edu/law/acqs/bookrev.html. This site will link you to all the major traditional sources of reviews, including Library Journal, Booklist, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Salon Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. It also includes links to publications that review scholarly and interdisciplinary books, children's books, and computing and Internet books.
You also could and should spend some time checking the book-related newsgroups, including the monstrously large and very active rec.arts.books, and its off-shoots (rec.arts.books.childrens, rec.arts.books.hist-fiction, rec.arts.books.marketplace, and rec.arts.books.tolkien). And science fiction lovers should consider rec.arts.sf.fandom, rec.arts.sf.marketplace, rec.arts.sf.misc, rec.arts.sf.science, rec.arts.sf.starwars, rec.arts.sf.superman, and rec.arts.sf.written. If you don't have access to a news server by way of your Internet service provider, you can search through and read and post to all of these at Dejanews (www.dejanews.com).
In any case, avid readers should definitely check Evelyn C. Leeper's home page at www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/. Evelyn has been a regular and prolific contributor to book-related newsgroups for many years. At her personal Web site, she has posted her numerous insightful reviews, along with the "frequently asked questions" (FAQ) documents from rec.arts.books. and rec.arts.sf.written, which may well answer some of your own questions. You will also find there a very complete list of physical bookstores worldwide, generated and updated by the collaborative efforts of newsgroup participants over many years.
But for buying books and music and videos, the online shopping experience is truly unique, and not just a matter of easy access to enormous quantities of information. The superstores can actually help me to better understand my own tastes and then to find the works that match. That's basically why I do nearly all my shopping for this class of goods online today, and why the unplanned, impulse purchases I make there are very often winners.
The simplest form of online personal recommendations matches you with others who have purchased an item in which you are interested. For instance, at Amazon.com, when I read the details about a particular book or music CD, I immediately see a list of the top three items that purchasers of this item also bought.
A class of software known as "collaborative filtering" takes this a giant step forward. Based on your previous purchases and on any information you provide regarding your tastes (for instance, rating titles that you are familiar with), the system learns your preferences. At the same time it is learning the preferences of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other consumers of books, music, and/or videos. It builds a profile of your preferences and matches you with others who have similar tastes. Then your list of personal recommendations (which you can access at the store's Web site or get periodically by email) includes those items that your cyber-soul-mates have given high ratings to and that you have not yet rated. The more people provide details on their preferences, the more effective the system is in predicting everyone's likes and dislikes; so when you take the time to give your input, you not only help yourself, but also the community of others like you. You learn what others like you enjoy, rather than what professional reviewers prefer. And the recommendations are truly tailored to you as an individual, rather than to some fictitious notion of you based on statistical averages.
This approach is very different from the demographic data, used to target advertising and programming to mass audiences. Demographics are static categories of people based on factors such as age, sex, race, education, and income. Advertisers try to find correlations between those factors and what people watch and what they buy. But individuality gets lost in averages. The "average man" is a statistical fiction. Such data helps advertisers define their target audience, determine what they are likely to watch, and craft messages that are likely to appeal to many of them. But they are useless for helping you determine what book or record or video is most likely to please you.
By the way, these online preference services provide a strong incentive to return over and over again to the same superstore. For instance, once you've taken the time at Amazon.com to rate dozens or even hundreds of books or music CDs or videos, you can count on getting useful recommendations there. And as you buy more there and rate more there, the recommendations keep improving.
Basically, online book shopping changes not just how you buy, but the whole economics of the publishing industry. You have far greater choice today, and even greater choice in the future, as publishers choose to keep their books in print longer, because now they have an outlet that isn't limited by shelf space. They also could publish more books because they no longer depend on large print runs and traditional distribution methods. They might, for instance, take advantage of print-on-demand technology that allows them to print a few copies or even a single copy economically, as orders come in. At the same time, very small and do-it-yourself publishers--that have no hope of making it into physical stores--can sell their books through the same online superstores that the major publishers do, giving you even greater choice.
Also, a few innovative publishers, like Macmillan (www.mcp.com/personal/) also make the complete text of selected books available to be viewed for free over the Web. Meanwhile hundreds of volunteers are making the full text of thousands of public domain classics available for free in electronic form--for the good of all--through projects like Gutenberg (www.promo.net/pg).
With computer displays the way they are today, very few people would be inclined to read an entire book online, and printing out an entire book on your personal printer is far more expensive than buying a book. So publishers who put the full text of books up on the Web are basically giving you an unlimited set of samples to consider--just like you could at a physical book store. Reportedly, the publishers who offer full texts of books free for viewing at their Web sites typically see a 20 to 30 percent increase in print sales for those same books.
The exception is the blind, who, thanks to computer-based text-to-voice converters, can and do read electronic books that are made available in plain text form (without fancy formatting and graphics).
We are just now beginning to see in the public marketplace inexpensive computer-like devices devoted to displaying electronic books. As such gadgets catch on, and as the displays for ordinary PCs improve, the market for books sold, delivered, and read in electronic form should soar, changing the standard practices of publishers and the buying and reading habits of people like you.
Also, thanks to affiliate/associate programs, expect to see lots of little pseudo-stores that sell music. These pseudo-sites will also provide information and recommendations about particular kinds of music and then provide links to superstores for particular titles, in return for referral fees or credit on future purchases. As in the case of books, if you are a serious music lover as well as buyer, you may want to consider becoming an affiliate/associate yourself and setting up your own Web pages, as described in an earlier section of this chapter. (Hundreds of thousands of people like yourself have done so already.)
When shopping for music, the online search capabilities at the superstores are particularly useful here. Categories of music tend to be very subjective and idiosyncratic (is that pop or folk or rock?) While one physical store might shelve a particular CD in one category, another might put it in a different category. And if you are trying to buy music as a gift--shopping for kinds of music with which you are not personally familiar--the physical store can be very intimidating, and it can take you a long time to find what you want unless you are able to find a helpful salesperson with a moment to spare.
Those same search capabilites make it easy for you to find and learn about independent labels and artists, whose music is now for sale online, but who couldn't get shelf space for their CDs and cassette tapes in physical stores.
For you to be able to hear music samples to help you make your online music-shopping decisions, your PC needs an audio card and related software, and you also need to fetch the appropriate plug-in software for your browser. (Most music sites use plug-ins from RealNetworks, which you can download from their Web site at www.real.com.) For the best sound, you may want to get quality speakers. Then you'll be able to get the most out of the music sampling capabilities at online stores.
As with books, the trend is first to provide excerpts/samples online, and later to sell the product in electronic form, so you can download it directly to your PC, rather than waiting for delivery of a physical CD or tape. You'll find the beginnings of electronic delivery today at a handful of sites, such as Music Boulevard.
At Music Boulevard, click on "Download Music" to see the selections. A single song might cost about a dollar and take about half an hour to download. But first you'll have to download and install a free e-mod music player, which will take you another five minutes.
If you are going to buy music in electronic form, you will want a portable way of saving it. Otherwise your hard drive will get filled quickly, and you will be frustrated when you want to play the music on a device other than your PC. You might consider adding one of the new CD drives that lets you write as well as read CDs.
For music, radio stations provide samples all day; you pick a station that suits your tastes, hear some tunes that you like, and buy them. But the stations only play a small percentage of what's available. What about the rest? In the past, those options were dead: An artist or group either "made" it or didn't. Now those unknowns can sell their CDs and tapes through online music superstores. But how do you find out that the "unknown" exists? (Yes, you can search for an "unknown" by name, but you already have to know their name to search for them.)
Emerging artists now have the opportunity to take matters into their own hands and offer samples of their music or complete works online at their own Web sites. We discussed in Chapter 3 how ordinary people like us can create our own Web pages at sites like Geocities, NBCi (formerly Xoom), and Tripod, that offer free space and the tools you need for ordinary pages consisting of text and graphics. If you love music or have your own music group and are ambitious,you can take this approach a step further and build a site with audio content, as well as text and graphics, at very little cost.
Audio files are much larger than text files: a single song might take up ten times as much space as an entire book (5 Mbytes vs. 500 Kbytes). So you wouldn't want to do much, if any, audio if you were limited to just 5 or 10 Mbytes of space (which is typical with free Web-hosting accounts). But, Hispeed (http://www.hispeed.com/) currently offers unlimited Web space for as little as $19.95 per month. Hispeed is also set up to handle "streaming audio"(for a couple extra dollars a month) --where the listener hears the sounds as they arrive, rather than having to download an entire files and then play it back. With free software from RealNetworks (www.real.com), you can turn your sound files into the format needed for "streaming audio" and post them on your site at Hispeed.
If you are really ambitious, you could create many such personal files--voice as well as music--and run your offerings regularly, operating your own Internet-based radio station at very low cost and without needing FCC approval. (Keep in mind that $15/month is the base price. The more you do, the more it costs; but you'll be amazed at what is possible on a shoestring.)
To see how online radio stations work, check the RealGuide at RealNetworks (www.real.com/realguide/index.html). Some of the sites linked to from there feature music from artists who have not yet hit the mainstream. You might also want to check Musicnet's HotPicks (www.musicnet.com/hotpicks/index.html), which offers over 2000 music clips.
You can also learn about new music artists through newsgroups which you can search for at Dejanews (www.dejanews.com), and through email discussion lists, which you can search for at Liszt (www.liszt.com).
For now, though, the Internet, is limited pretty much to buying or renting a video or DVD, and this process online is very much like buying a book. Nearly all the online superstores that sell both books and music (listed in this chapter), also sell movies, and provide the same kinds of capabilities to help you make your video choices. You will also find some sites that just specialize in movies, like Blockbuster Video (www.blockbuster.com) and Reel (www.reel.com).
Reel has an enormous selection of new and used videotapes to buy, DVD movies to buy, and videotapes to rent. With over 35,000 movies for rent, the Reel Web site is where you get hard-to-find films (foreign, cult, rare, classic, offbeat) and independent movies, as well as all of the mainstream ones. Blockbuster, a relative newcomer to the Internet, is rapidly catching up.
Keep in mind that "finding" is not necessarily the same as "receiving." Online vendors typically work through distributors, and some are better than others are providing realistic estimates of how long it will be before the item ships. The fact that a video appears in an online catalog is no guarantee that you'll receive the goods in reasonable time. Over time--and forced by competition--service should improve.
If you are addicted to movies, Reel has an affiliate program (similar to those discussed above for books and music), which will let you "build your own video store."
If you need more info to make your choices, check the Internet Movie Database (www.us.imdb.com), which is owned by Amazon.com. This database is purportedly "the ultimate movie reference source and covers everything you could possibly want to know about movies." Continuously updated, it also has hyperlinks to thousands of related external Web pages. It currently covers over 170,000 titles.
If you are interested in recent releases, check at the search sites like AltaVista--these days nearly every major new motion picture has it's own Web site, packed with graphics and multi-media effects, and info for fans.
If you are really into movies, and might even consider writing one yourself, be sure to visit these Web site locations:
Finally, for a personal view of movies that are worth watching, check the Web site of Mark R. Leeper (husband of Evelyn Leeper, mentioned earlier in this chapter) at www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6960. He has been a long-time active participant in movie-related newsgroups, and he posts at his site helpful and informative reviews of the many movies that he sees. To see my own fledgling effort along the same lines, check All about movies.
Part One covers aspects of online shopping that apply no matter what you want to buy.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
You may also want to check Richard's Online Shopping Directory www.samizdat.com/shopping.html, which has links to all the sites mentioned in the entire book, plus sites he has learned of since the book went into production.
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
For a thorough discussion of this topic, buy Richard's book Web Business
Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
Check our sitemap page www.samizdat.com/sitemap.html from which you can get to any other page at this site in one click.
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