Books

This is one of the main existing e-business markets, whose context is almost identical to that of the CD market. The number of titles that can be stocked in a physical space is limited to several hundred, or thousands at the most, whereas the demand is for tens of thousands of titles. A store such as Amazon-http://www.amazon.com or Barnes and Nobles (http://www.barnesandnobles.com)
offer a wide permanent choice of several millions of books (between 4 and 5 million). In France, the Fnac-http://www.fnac.fr, Club Internet's book club-http://www.club-internet.fr, the Furet du Nord- http://www1.furet.com and Le monde en tique-http://www.lmet.fr/Homefr.html are the nearest equivalent, but the largest only offers between 300 000 and 400 000 books. The problem is closely related to that of music publishing, with the same concentration of sales during launches of new books and of very well-known writers, with the same problem of financing stock. And for the same reasons, Internet allows the possibility of increasing the distribution area and improving stock rotation. The early 1990s saw a problem of concentration in the world of books. Internet could reverse this trend through the new space it offers to small specialised structures. Even if their limited resources don't allow them wide visibility compared with the big publishers, in particular in relation to financing huge publicity campaigns, creating communities can offer the opportunity to find specialist customers. In addition, self-publishing, whilst it may not become a dominant factor, seems bound to develop : any number of authors are publishing their own work on their own websites.

The main players now and in the future
The federal sites such as Amazon which distribute millions of titles. The intelligent agents which will compare what's on offer from the federal sites, will also eventually include the large and smaller publishers in their comparisons, and will compare bibliophiles' opinions. The major publishers. Authors who will publish their work direct on their own site, thus creating their own publishing and distribution structure.

Innovative services
Online publishing systems for the reader.
Remote downloading and reading systems on an independent terminal (ebooks-http://www.rocketbook.com)

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