Thanks for responding so rapidly and with such enthusiasm. We are
genuinely excited by positive responses like yours; feel free to offer
additional feedback directly to me or via the amazon.com homepage links
provided for that purpose. We read and personally reply to all
suggestions, which have already helped us become more useful to our visitors.
> I have found Amazon and I do like it. In fact, you are mentioned in a couple of
> places in the IBIC Guide (IBIC-homepage.html). May I post your letter in my
> what's new and letters to the editor hypermail files?
You certainly may.
> Can you give me some idea of how many foreign language titles are carried in
> your catalog? That is the key question I need answered before I know whether
> you really fit in the World Literature page (which is aimed primarily at foreign
> language literature).
There are already a number of foreign language titles available in our
catalog, though they are of course far outnumbered by our
english-language selections. It may be a while before we've made the
appropriate connections with each of the world's many thousands of
publishers.
> What differentiates your search engine from books in print? Or, to put it
> another way, what's in BIP that's not in Amazon? And how does Amazon compare in
> size with, say, the internal information system of a company like Borders?
> E.g., if I go to a Borders store and ask for "prudhomme" & "cookery", will I get
> the same two hits? That question is not to denigrate what you've done--making
> an information system of that scale available on the Net is a major public
> service.
We have not quite reached our ultimate goal of carrying every book in
print; there are roughly 1.4 million titles in print of which we now
carry over 1.1 million (see 'thousands of publishers' above for a
logistical explanation). It is a fair guess that, with a few exceptions,
these are by and large the most frequenly purchased 1.1 million in the US.
A store utilizing books in print can get the ISBN of any book in
print. Depending upon store policy, price and your patience you may be
able to order that book from them. Using amazon.com is almost always a
better way to go, however, for a number of reasons:
* you can browse at your leisure, in privacy, trying a number of
interesting queries until your search yields answers
* many of our titles come with more than just title, author and
ISBN - we are often able to offer descriptive text, cover art,
suggested cross-indices and even some critical commentary as well
* our free personal notification service persistently applies your
query on a daily basis, indefinitely, to find NEW titles which may
appear that satisfy particular areas of interest. The books in
print alternative is to ask a bookstore to do the same manually,
daily, for months or even years...
Thanks again for asking, and don't hesitate to send your questions and
suggestions to us again.
Tom Schonhoff
tom@amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com