Surprisingly, even for the marketing of a main online
bookstore, paper was not dead. For two consecutive years, in
1999 and 2000, Amazon sent a print catalog to its customers (10
million in 2000) before the holiday season.
2001 marked a turning point for the company, with the need to
address the internet bubble affecting the "new" economy and so
many companies. Following a deficit for the fourth quarter
2000, Amazon reduced its workforce by 15% in January 2001.
1,300 employees lost their jobs in the U.S. 270 employees lost
their jobs in Europe. Jeff Bezos decided to diversify the
products sold online, and to sell not only books, videos, CDs
and software, but also health care products, toys, electronics,
kitchen utensils, and garden tools. In November 2001, cultural
products - books, CDs and videos - represented only 58% of
sales, the total of which were US $4 billion, with 29 million
customers.
The company was beneficiary for the first time in the third
quarter 2003.
In October 2003, Amazon launched a full text search (Search
Inside the Book) after scanning the text of 120,000 titles,
with many more to come. It also launched its own search engine,
A9.com.
A sixth subsidiary - named Joyo - opened in China in September
2004.
The net income of Amazon was US $588 million for 2004 - 45% of
which from its six subsidiaries (Canada, China, France,
Germany, Japan, U.K.) -, with a total of $6.9 billion for
sales.
Amazon became a reference for global online commerce.
In July 2005, for its 10-year anniversary, Amazon had 9,000
employees, and 41 million clients enjoying attractive prices
for a whole range of products they could get within 48 hours in
one of the seven countries with an Amazon platform.
Amazon also sold more and more ebooks. In April 2005, it bought
the French company Mobipocket, specialized in ebooks and
readers (software) for PDAs.
In November 2007, Amazon launched its own reading device, named
Kindle, with a catalog of 80,000 ebooks on Amazon's website.
538,000 Kindle were sold in 2008. A new version of Kindle,
named Kindle 2, was launched in February 2009, with a catalog
of 230,000 ebooks.
= What about small bookstores?
Local bookstores have closed one after the other, or have had a
hard time keeping up with the competition of Amazon.com and
other online bookstores. Amazon and others are also bad news
for specialist bookstores, for example the travel bookstore
created in 1971 by Catherine Domain in Paris, France.
According to Catherine, Librairie Ulysse (Ulysses Bookstore) is
the oldest travel bookstore in the world. Its 20,000 out-of-
print or new books, maps and magazines - in a number of
languages and about any country - are all packed up in a tiny
space, in the heart of Paris, on Ile Saint-Louis, a small
island surrounded by the Seine river.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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