Many HN threads and articles (including this one) about Jeff Bezos link to interviews or speeches where he tells the primary reason he chose books as the first articles Amazon sold: because you could not build a physical book store offering millions of books.
I don't fully understand that reason. It was trivial to get one of the millions of books not in stock at a book store even before Amazon. You could just ask for it, or call them, and they would order it. You could usually pick it up the next day. After all, they were using exactly the same infrastructure to order the books as Amazon. So basically any half-decent bookstore was offering millions of books decades before Amazon did, and any half-decent bookstore would also do home delivery.
1. You had to go through their order process, talking to someone, completing the ordering process, and then coming back to pick it up. If you live 45 minutes from the book store, that gets to be a pain.
2 You have to know the book existed. I don't think I ever really ordered a book, because for the most part, I didn't know what alternatives existed to what they offered. Amazon helped fix that. Instead of finding say one book on Python, there were a dozen on Amazon's site.
> Going to the store in person? Or calling them on the phone??? It's not 1874 anymore, nobody wants to do either of those things.
Signal-to-noise. I'd love having a knowledgeable consultant to help cut out the noise.
For instance, I'm kinda-sorta in the market for a new mechanical keyboard for my home office. (I got one for work years ago and might want something a little different.) The price point is enough that I want to have some confidence before an online order. The Internet has tons of data that are nowhere close to giving me the knowledge I need to make an informed decision about whether it will satisfy my desires.
Crucially, I also don't know exactly what questions to ask to winnow the universe of possibilities into something more manageable.
Being able to consult with someone in the absence of having access to a plethora of keyboards would be huge—the feedback is killer.
I suspect books are actually very similar in this regard. The world of books is huge, and having a guide to get you to what's helpful is really important. I don't have time to read everything to get to the Good Stuff.
The point is that on Amazon, you can browse the whole collection with the long-tail as a first-class citizen. With brick-and-mortar stores the buying experience for long-tail books was clearly inferior for browsing. Sure, if I knew I wanted a particular book, I could get it -- but you couldn't browse the long-tail to explore if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for.
Every friction point in the customer experience causes potential customers to lose interest and give up on their prospective purchase. So if your potential customer has to take two actions, spread across multiple days, then all else being equal you're (hopefully obviously) going to get lower conversion/purchase rates and lower customer satisfaction than if they can impulse-buy in one action.
I think you and a lot of other readers of this thread would get much from reading about a "similar" book enterprise - Chegg, and Osman Rashid. This episode was mind-blowing for me personally https://open.spotify.com/episode/3JXLKRQaZGqiBuyyGfICYe?si=3.... It takes as much tenacity as deciding to open up a restaurant or a pizza shop.
Sadly, not every city has a bibliomecca such as Powells.[0] The initial catalyst for Amazon wasn't selling every book, it was discovery that other books in your obscure little interest even existed.
Being from a smaller town I'll note a _good_ bookstore is not always an option. I don't think my town has any first-hand bookstores (at least not anymore) so I have to drive 45 minutes one-way just to get to a B&N.
I don't fully understand that reason. It was trivial to get one of the millions of books not in stock at a book store even before Amazon. You could just ask for it, or call them, and they would order it. You could usually pick it up the next day. After all, they were using exactly the same infrastructure to order the books as Amazon. So basically any half-decent bookstore was offering millions of books decades before Amazon did, and any half-decent bookstore would also do home delivery.