No Coffee, No Ink, All Books

By Bill Fick

When I first came to Russia in 1991, English-language books, periodicals, and other reading materials carried over from home were a rare and coveted commodity, cherished and traded from hand to hand until they were left in tatters. These days, however, I have little sympathy for expats who complain of high prices and limited selection in Moscow's foreign language bookstores. With a credit card and Internet connection, you can order just about any book ever printed, often at a steep discount off the cover price, and receive it in a matter of days by DHL or regular mail to your PXPost or Post International box.

On-line bookstores admittedly lack the soothing odors of roasting coffee, fresh printers' ink, and musty paper. Computer browsing also denies the tactile pleasures of cracking a crisp binding for the first time when you pull a tome off the shelf. But Internet booksellers offer lower prices, convenience, amazing reference resources, and unrivaled breadth of access to the printed word in far-flung locales Barnes & Noble superstores may never reach.

Amazon.com Inc. (http://www.amazon.com), "Earth's Largest Bookstore" and the recognized industry heavyweight, has grown at 34 percent a month since its founding in 1994, according to President Jeffrey Bezos. The company has already attracted sizable venture capital and announced in late March that it is planning an initial public offering of stock. Bezos says that the company is not yet profitable-although it could easily be-because of massive investment in advertising across the Internet and refinement of its marketing techniques and value-added services to customers.

Amazon boasts access to over 2.5 million titles, with 40 percent discounts off the cover price for bestsellers, other special categories and new releases. It offers a sophisticated search engine and well-developed promotional articles, interviews with authors, links to reviews, and other services. In addition, customers can sign up for automatic notification by e-mail of new books by favorite authors and editors' picks on selected subjects. All of these techniques appear designed to micro-market sales to individual tastes. Last week the company even paid $10 to selected regular customers who replied to a detailed survey.

In addition, Amazon is recruiting an army of sales agents across the Internet with its commission-based Associates program. For example, if I maintain a website with everything you wanted to know about Japanese gardening, I can review and recommend books on the subject and include a special link to Amazon.com so that my readers can buy the books I review in one easy mouse click. For every book sold through my site, Amazon will pay me 8 percent of the sale.

While Amazon has a head start and huge market share, it is not without competitors. For example, Tennessee-based BookServe International (http://www.bookserve.com) boasts faster turn around time and lower shipping costs than Amazon for its large database of titles in English, German, Dutch and Spanish. Soon, the retail giants Borders and Barnes & Noble are expected to go on-line with their own Internet stores as well, and could prove to be formidable competitors.

At the other end of the spectrum, specialty stores will probably remain competitive since Amazon can hardly hope to develop individual expertise in everything from rare needlework books (such as you can find at http://www.needleworkbooks.com) to out-of-print science fiction and fantasy titles (such as you can find at http://portal.mbnet.mb.ca/pandora/).

Interestingly, big U.S. Publishers have not rushed on-line with their own discounted direct sales because of resistance from the American Booksellers Association (http://www.bookweb.org) which represents the interests of the traditional storefront bookshops that still provide the bulk of overall sales and fear being undercut by direct marketing. One of the few publisher catalog sites, for Simon & Shuster (http://merchant.superlibrary.com), has avoided retailers' ire by focusing on textbooks and technical manuals sold at the cover price.

Given the renowned voracious reading habits of Russians, it should come as no surprise that fledgling Russian Internet bookstores have appeared as well. For sales within Russia, even the relative lack of credit cards among consumers has not proven an obstacle because of the long-time use of "nalezhenyie platezhy" (a kind of cash-on-delivery system) in mail-order distribution of books.

The publisher "Knorus" (http://www.book.ru) offers a large collection of non-fiction, mostly business-oriented titles for sale. "Cyrillica" (http://www.clever.net/cyrillica/) has mounted a catalog of 1781 humanities and literary titles, although you must pay in advance with a bank transfer rather than using the more convenient Russian postal COD system.

Finally, the Russian export giant Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga (International Book; http://www.mkniga.ru) has a promotional site with information about the company and catalogs, but without an on-line ordering system.

Aside from the internal market, it seems likely that a virtual Russian bookstore could also generate substantial sales among the Diaspora. The primary challenge-and, ironically, one of the reasons why on-line Russian bookstores are so sorely needed-is that the centralized publishing and distribution system has broken down to the point where it is very difficult for any single seller to put together a large or comprehensive inventory of titles.