Helpful Internet Links

Helpful Internet Link about Books on the Internet: Buy, Read and Publish Books; Find Specialty Books

Since Jeff Bezos started amazon.com in July 1995, the Internet has played an ever-increasing part in the distribution of books. Barnes and Noble joined in later and is still playing catch-up.

Independent booksellers have been hurt first by chain superstores, and then by Internet sales but they are not giving up. They are launching a national campaign called Book Sense, including an Internet site called BookSense.com coming in 1999, so that customers will be able to buy books at competitive prices from independent bookstores.

A new kind of book is a portable electronic "book" that substitutes an LCD screen for the printed page. It is a handheld electronic book-reading machine about the size of a small book. Instead of turning a page, you press a button. You can bookmark passages and look up definitions.

Already many publishers and retailers offer thousands of electronic titles. The reader-friendly electronic book-reading machines are price in the $500-$600 range. Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble both sell electronic book titles. The electronic readers will allow users to choose from among 10,000 book titles by year's end; get older, out-of-copyright works; browse online self-published books; or, download a semester's worth of required reading.

A new idea in publishing can be found at instabook-corporation.com. The InstaBook Corporation offers to lease bookstores a machine called the InstaBook Maker to produce books on demand. The machine is small enough for an office and can make a perfect-bound book in a couple of minutes. With this type of technology, more books can be published as needed or in small number for a niche audience.

For your book-buying needs, here are a few sites worth exploring:

http://www.amazon.com/
That site is still cited as an example of commerce on the Web. Books are an ideal type of merchandise to sell on the Internet. Amazon.com is user-friendly, has great prices and delivers quickly. You get an automatic acknowledgement of your order by e-mail, and you are notified when you order is shipped. They also offer older books, out-of-print books, CDs, videos, and more. The Home Page offers links to Customer Reviews, Author Interviews and Publisher Resources among many.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/
Barnes and Noble also has a large Internet presence. Its focus is almost exclusively on books. At the bottom of the Home Page, there are several interesting links. I have no experience with them but they are big and well known. Maybe you can try a sample order of two or three titles at both places, compare prices, get a feel for their procedures before you decide. Until you give out your credit card number and click the final OK, the transaction is not processed.

http://www.cais.net/sberner/
Retrieve calls itself a unique consolidated book and publications acquisitions service. It specializes in breaking through the complex maze of U.S. government and other Washington-based publication sources. They obtain publications from sources untouched by virtually all other vendors such as the American Bar Association, the Harvard Business School, the Hemlock Society and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, for example. It has clients throughout the world.

http://www.bibliofind.com/
Bibliofind brags on its Home Page that it offers nine million used and rare books, periodicals and ephemera by thousands of booksellers around the world making it the most interesting book-selling site on the Web. A note at the bottom of the page states that it's being acquired by Amazon.com.

http://www.arkhamhouse.com/
Arkham House prides itself on its commitment to bring the very best in horror, supernatural, fantasy and sci-fi literature at affordable prices.

http://www.ambook.org/
The American Booksellers Association is a not-for-profit trade association representing independent bookstores nationwide. Their Web site features Member Directories as well as news and other information. You can use the site to locate stores.

It appears that the Internet will benefit the marketing of books in a way similar to what television, video stores, and pay-per-view have done for the movies.

NOTE: Use the "BACK" function of your browser to return to your point of origin. If you spot a dead link, alert the author by e-mail marked as such in the Subject.