Amazon.Con
Amazon.com calls itself
"Earth's Biggest Bookstore," and the media, online and off, have accepted that
claim uncritically. "The toast of cyberspace" is the Economist 's
accurate characterization of this Internet book-ordering service, which was
founded in 1995. Time rated Amazon one of the 10 best Web sites of 1996.
The Washington Post called Amazon a "megawarehouse." The New
Yorker pointedly compared Amazon's claimed inventory of 1.1 million books
with the mere 170,000 titles available at a Barnes & Noble superstore.
In fact,
Amazon's "megawarehouse" in downtown Seattle contains just 200 or so titles.
Any other book must be obtained from a wholesale distributor or the publisher.
This is exactly what any traditional bookstore does when it doesn't have a book
in stock. The difference is that traditional bookstores start out with a lot
more than 200 titles in stock. "Earth's Biggest Bookstore"? More like "Earth's
Smallest."
How does Amazon get the books it doesn't have in its
warehouse? According to Jennifer Cast, vice president for marketing, it uses
several big distributors--including the Ingram Book Co., one of the
largest--and sometimes, it calls the book's publisher directly. She says that
in certain cases, it has even called the authors. And how do less advanced
booksellers do it? At Politics and Prose, a small local bookstore in northwest
Washington, D.C., one employee told us, "We try Ingram first, ... and then call
the publishers." At a northern Virginia outlet of Borders Books, the superstore
chain, an employee said: "It's no secret we try Ingram. ... If all that fails,
I guess we go to the publishers."
So why
shop at Amazon? Cast gives four reasons: "One, we have a lower price. Two, we
have a better selection. Three, we're probably much faster. And we're
definitely more convenient." We conducted an experiment to test these claims.
On Dec. 16 we ordered the same two books from Amazon, Politics and Prose, and
Borders. All three were told to gift-wrap and ship each book as soon as
possible. One book was Scott Turow's newest novel, The Laws of Our
Fathers , the kind of best seller that even Amazon actually has in stock.
The other was an obscure psychology text even Borders wouldn't carry, chosen
from the catalog of the State University of New York Press, called The Ego
and the Dynamic Ground: A Transpersonal Theory of Human Development (second
edition), by Michael Washburn.
How did the three booksellers compare by
Amazon's own standards?
Selection?
We've covered that. If you define "inventory" as any book a store can
special-order for you, as Amazon does, then the selection is identical at
almost every halfway-decent bookstore in America. At Amazon, you can browse
through all the titles and authors--and through some descriptive material--by
computer. At a conventional bookstore, you can pick up and leaf through actual
books, but fewer of them.
Convenience?
For ordering, Politics and Prose was by far the easiest. Heidi answered the
phone on the first ring. She was chatty, but professional. The store had "many,
many, many" copies of the Turow on hand, and she promised to send one out
"right away, tomorrow morning at the very, very latest." When asked about the
psych text, Heidi apologized ("sorry, sorry") for not carrying it, and offered
to order it. Estimated time of arrival: four weeks. She took a name, address,
credit-card number. The entire phone call took 2 minutes and 38 seconds.
Borders
was slightly less helpful. When asked to send the Turow, Drew groaned at our
lowbrow taste, but quickly said he'd send it the next day. The second
selection's obscurity didn't cheer him up: "Ugh, can't do you the Washburn
book." When pressed, he said it could be ordered, but would probably take two
weeks. Borders' system is that when the book arrives, you are sent a postcard
asking you to come to the store and pick it up. Can't they just send the book?
"We prefer people do it this way," Drew said, but then he gave in and agreed to
send it. Total phone time: 9 minutes and 32 seconds.
After calling the stores, we connected to Amazon using
Netscape Navigator 3.0 and a 28,800-baud modem. Amazon has a special page
dedicated to the Turow book, complete with a picture of the cover and some
unenlightening amateur commentaries from other Amazon users. The psychology
text, not surprisingly, was listed with no description and no commentaries.
Amazon said it would take one to two weeks to order.
After clicking your purchases
into a "shopping cart," you are directed to a "secure Netscape server" that
will encrypt your credit-card information. After this is done, you are told:
"Finalizing Your Order Is Easy." Nothing could be further from the truth. Lower
down in the verbiage, Amazon concedes, "Though we have tried hard to make this
form easy to use, we know that it can be quite confusing the first time."
Amazon users have to page through screen after screen of details about shipping
charges, refund rules, and disclaimers about availability and pricing. Then you
are told to allow between three and seven days for delivery after your book
leaves Amazon's warehouse. "Upgrading to Next Day Air does NOT [their emphasis]
mean you'll get your order the next day."
Total
online time from when we accessed Amazon's home page to when we completed the
book order: 37 minutes and 12 seconds. It would be shorter once you got the
hang of it.
Speed? Turow's book arrived in three
days from both Borders and Politics and Prose, in plenty of time before
Christmas. Politics and Prose wrapped the book perfectly. Borders wrapped it
attractively, but left the receipt inside. The Turow didn't arrive from Amazon
until Dec. 27--more than a week after the conventional stores. Furthermore, the
wrapping looked as if it had been done by a fourth grader. However, it came
bundled with the obscure psych book (which still hadn't arrived from the
conventional stores as of New Year's Day). Eleven days for that one is pretty
good. As for the Turow, we had checked a box asking that each book be sent
separately, as soon as possible--so, either Amazon ignored these instructions
or it really needed the full 11 days to get the Turow to us.
By the way, let's not forget
that in a conventional bookstore, you can also--if you choose--acquire books in
zero days, by "going to" the store in the pre-Internet sense of actually going
there.
Price?
Amazon and Borders both offered the Turow for 30 percent
off the list price. Politics and Prose offered 20 percent off. All three wanted
full price for the psych book. Amazon charges $3 plus 95 cents per book for
standard shipping. Borders charged $4 to ship the Turow, and Politics and
Prose, $3.50. Amazon charges $2 a book for gift-wrapping, which is free at the
other two stores, but Amazon accidentally charged only $2 for wrapping both
books. Finally, stores with local outlets must charge sales tax on shipped
items; Amazon does not (unless you live in Washington state). In all, the Turow
cost $23.72 from Borders and $26.30 from Politics and Prose. If Amazon had sent
it separately as we had instructed, it would have cost $24.82. Gift-wrapped and
sent separately, the psych text would cost more at Amazon than at the other
two; unwrapped and bundled, about the same.
There is a third category of books (besides those that
everyone has in stock and those that no one has in stock). These are books that
Amazon doesn't have in stock, but a normal bookstore does. (Barnes &
Noble's 170,000-strong inventory, sniffed at by The New Yorker , is a
good example.)
This category is Amazon's
greatest weakness. It includes hardly obscure current books that aren't best
sellers, like The New Our Bodies, Ourselves , produced by the Boston
Women's Heath Book Collective. Borders' had three copies on the premises.
Amazon needs two to three days to obtain this one, plus between three and seven
days to send it to you. Likewise for a classic like the Penguin paperback of
Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities , which any Borders or Barnes &
Noble will have on hand.
Then there's a semiobscure
book such as Robert Marr Wright's Dodge City: The Cowboy Capital and the
Great Southwest . This hardcover book about cowboys is on Borders' shelves.
At Amazon it is listed as a "special order," which means it might be available
to be shipped in four to six weeks, but, our computer informs us: "PLEASE NOTE
that it might not be available at all. Publishers do not always notify the book
community about changes in the availability of their titles." Not
available? So much for the pretense that Amazon's list of 1.1 million books
makes it "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" in even a metaphorical sense.
