Why is There so Much Recent Interest in Online Bookselling?

Why is There so Much Recent Interest in Online Bookselling?
It was only a few years ago that online booksellers had
only a couple of options for listing their books on
Internet marketplaces. Enter Amazon.com, and suddenly
there were some radical changes in the landscape as well as
a huge market for online booksellers. Amazon has modified
the way many things are bought and sold through the
Internet, but their greatest influence has without a doubt
been with respect to books, CD's, and other goods with
standardized numbering systems, e.g., ISBN and barcode
identifiers. When they began to allow third-party sellers
to sell used items alongside the new ones Amazon was
offering, many people, and certainly some other businesses,
thought they were crazy, but Amazon.com maintained that
they were customer-centric and intended to provide a
marketplace where their customers could make their own
decisions while being assured of a satisfactory experience.

Recently, some very interesting events have taken place
that warrant at least a cursory look. Google introduced
Froogle quite some time ago, but recently introduced Google
Base which I believe is intended to be the long-term
replacement for Froogle. Google Base offers a venue for
online booksellers to list their Amazon inventory for sale
and potentially a means for sellers to circumvent the sales
commissions charged by Amazon.com. While Google Base is
still in its infancy, once Google has all the details
worked out and has integrated into their service a means
for secure customer payment and seller notification, Base
will in all likelihood be a real headache for Amazon.com.
I say this because Amazon.com is accustomed to market
domination and Google is not very well known as settling
for being number two at anything. I am sure Amazon.com
will counter with other incentives and features to maintain
their position and market presence, but Google will go for
position number one in online bookselling if they really
decide to get into the business. The developments are
going to be very interesting to say the least.

An even more recent development that lends credence to the
value of the bookselling market was Microsoft's
announcement that they will be launching an Internet book
search feature which will target only books in the public
domain and those that publishers ask to have included which
are under copyright protection. Thus, Microsoft is now at
about the same point where Google was a few years ago, but
is not targeting all books like Google first declared they
would be doing.

So, why are Google and Microsoft so interested in books?
The only logical explanation is that both see a way to
derive substantial revenues from the sale of books. What I
do not understand is why it took them so long to see this.
Amazon.com is a multibillion dollar company with very
respectable annual earnings, and surely Google and
Microsoft were aware of Amazon.com's business theme before
now. Amazon.com did not get as big as it is by giving
their services away.

Regardless of their motivation, it is great to see some
industry giants coming into the picture; the competition
for Amazon.com should only strengthen the industry and
result in competitive marketplaces that offer booksellers
and buyers a reliable and trustworthy transaction
experience.

Now, if I could only raise the capital to start up a
competitive co-op online marketplace that would only charge
booksellers 5% - 10% commissions and no listing fees, I
could jump into the action too. It would only take a
hundred million dollars or so to get started, but the last
time I checked my bank account I was a little short.

What I am realizing as a result of the big guys taking an
interest in books is a surge in the public interest with
respect to online bookselling. It is a huge market as
evidenced by the involvement of Amazon.com, Alibris.com,
Half.com, BarnesandNoble.com, Biblio.com, ebay.com, and
dozens of other lesser-known marketplaces. With the
addition of Google and Microsoft involvement, they must be
expecting the future of online bookselling to be very
lucrative, which begs the question of why more individuals
are not getting into the business as either a full-time or
part-time income source. The growth in the number of new
online booksellers seems to be lagging the growth of the
marketplaces, which indicates - at least to me - that there
is substantial room for many more ambitious people to get
into the business and realize a respectable income with
enormous room for growth. One thing is for sure, those
that get into it early and get established are the ones
that are likely to be successful, and those that continue
to procrastinate will be left in the dust by the ambitious.

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Michael E. Mould is the author of "Online Bookselling: A
Practical Guide with Detailed Explanations and Insightful
Tips," [Paperback ISBN 1427600708, CD-ROM ISBN 1599714876]
and the developer of "Bookkeeping for Booksellers" [CD ISBN
1427600694], you can learn more about online bookselling
at: http://www.online-bookselling.com .