An Expected New Offering
One new Internet company about to come to
market looks like a much smaller but solid play:
Computer Literacy. NationsBank Montgomery
hopes to price it tonight.
Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures is one of the half
dozen VC shops already in. Look for only about 3
million shares to be offered, about 30% of the
company, so demand should help support the
post-IPO price. At the same time, you might not
have much trouble getting an allotment of shares,
since the company, and the IPO, are so
little-known.
CL's Web site is an Amazon lookalike and, in the
main, they both work alike. But CL focuses on
technology books and, despite the name, not just
computer stuff. Scientists from all over the world
turn to CL for quick delivery on books simply
unavailable anywhere else. And hackers and
programmers turn to them for quick service on
more-common computer texts.
Among its many strengths are the high prices for
many of the books it sells to researchers and
academics at full price: for example, Seymour (not
me), Tucker and Taylor's Biochemistry in Fruit
Ripening, at a cool $139.95. While popular
computer titles are often 30% to 40% off -- low
enough to compete with the more mainstream
Amazon.com -- the academic/scientific/corporate
audience, which plays with Daddy's money, can
afford those triple-digit prices.
CL has also worked out a bridge between the
online and physical worlds. It operates storefront
bookstores in Sunnyvale, San Jose and Vienna,
Va., the latter for the Washington, D.C., tech
crowd. When you search on computerliteracy.com
for a title and find it, a box pops up in the
upper-right-hand corner of your screen, showing
the in-stock status of the title at each of those
stores. If you want it now, go get it. You can even
click to send a "hold it for me" message to the
store; you'll also find the phone number for the
store's hold-it hotline.
Computer Literacy is unlikely to balloon to an
Amazonian $8 billion market cap any time soon.
But it does look like it can become one of the solid,
reasonably profitable Internet stocks that give the
business a good name -- and make money for
their shareholders. |
