Tide continues to rise on Amazon

DelMio.com (MCT) - If Starbucks almost single-handedly changed America's taste for coffee, from mild to strong, then Amazon.com pulled off a similar coup in leading Americans toward online shopping. First for books. Then for many other things.

Not convinced? Consider two separate announcements on Monday, reflecting divergent shopping patterns during this overall bleak holiday shopping season.

For Amazon, a JPMorgan analyst upgraded the company's stock on the heels of the nation's largest online retailer having its "best ever" holiday season. The analyst, Imran Khan, further noted that while U.S. retail sales rose only 2 percent in the first nine months of 2008, e-commerce grew by 8 percent and Amazon's retail revenue in North America spiked 31 percent from the comparable period a year ago.

Khan expects the same trend to continue this year.

Meanwhile, the struggling Borders Group announced dismal sales for the nine-week holiday period that ended Jan. 3 _ with total sales of $868.8 million, representing a decline of 11.7 percent compared to the like period last year. Numbers for the Borders superstores were even worse. The same day, Borders also announced a top-level management shakeup and the appointment of a new CEO.

Looking back over Amazon's 15-year-history, the company probably could not have picked a better place to start than with books. Books are not something we naturally want to inspect, as with fabric on a dress. Yet buying books online gave us a taste for the convenience, which spilled over into other products.

New York Times writer David Streitfeld recently commented on the next step, beyond Amazon, in online book sales. He identified what he calls as "the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes, or ... in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds."

It took eBay to show us we can all be retailers. The art of shopping, after all, is about getting the things you want for the least amount of money.

For some reason, an old saying comes to mind: What goes around comes around.

Little by little, the big-box bookstores put many locally owned independent booksellers out of business. That's because the big players could leverage their size to offer lower prices. Now, who knows? Out of the rising network of amateurs, the little guys may win in the long run.

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A few of the titles from the Library Journal's recent list of best books in 2008:

"Say You're One of Them," by Uwem Akpan, about the fate of African children.

"The Hakawati," by Rabih Alameddine, about the tales of a Middle Eastern storyteller.

"All We Ever Wanted Was Everything," by Janelle Brown, about a Silicon Valley family in crisis.

"Split: A Memoir of Divorce," by Suzanne Finnamore, about making sense of a divorce that she never saw coming.

"Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir," by Michael Greenberg, about his daughter's psychotic breakdown.

"A Mercy," by Toni Morrison, about the human cost of slavery.

"John Lennon: The Life," by Philip Norman, about the renowned Beatle.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Diane Evans is a former Knight Ridder columnist and is now president of DelMio.com, a new interactive online magazine on books for writers and readers.

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© 2009, DelMio.com