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Technology Stocks : Fatbrain.com Inc. (FATB) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: get shorty who wrote (257)	9/2/1999 5:45:00 AM
From: Robert Scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 332

Shorts May be Wrong on this One: From BBRS ``Fatbrain.com added 800 new corporate partners during the quarter, including a multi-year deal with Lucent Technologies,' said Benjamin. ``In addition, Microsoft and Fatbrain.com extended their relationship with the launch of a new-online bookstore, the 4th Fatbrain.com store created for Microsoft's online properties. ``In our view, online print-on-demand documentation was surprisingly strong in the second quarter, representing 10.8 percent of sales, versus 5.5 percent in the first quarter,' said Benjamin. ``We estimate that print-on-demand has margins 2 to 3 times the normal book business, and represents a compelling eSourcing opportunity. ``We believe Fatbrain.com is solving the corporate 'headache' of documentation distribution and expect the company to expand its eSourcing services over time,' said Benjamin. Further: Content providers from the broad publishing community already have signed up to distribute new and existing content as eMatter. These include Macmillan USA, McGraw-Hill , O'Reilly and Associates, The Motley Fool, Salon.com and the Coriolis Group. Further: We have a market cap of <$225M or < 8X annualized sales = absolutely bargain basement for the potential opportunity. 1% of the present opportunity is $1 billion. Perhaps we will shortly hear of deals with Yahoo, AOL for joint ventures - this would quell the "What about Amazon copying their model" talk. Besides, Amazon has no experience in the publishing business. get shorty - The main business is called outsourcing - it's a great business.

To: get shorty who wrote (257)	9/2/1999 1:13:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 332

It's been my experience that most tech companies go out of their way to make their documents available for free. Thats true but that isn't the issue... its the distribution. It is in Oracle's best interest for example to get these structural docs out there to every university in the country. There are tons of white papers on every nichey thing in the world and these things really don't belong on the corporate website. Beyond that, there is the issue of product documentation which consists of about a million manuals (which are necessary but generate no revenue) that need to be produced, stocked, managed through the inventory system etc., updated constantly, a big hassle and again no economic benefit for the producer. Lately companies have been moving to CD-Rom distribution but even that is a hassle because every little change needs to be reflected in a new CD - this fatb system is much better, technology vendors do not want to be in the documentation biz! They just want to get their point out and thats it. BTW the general book market is completely different I think... comments please... but it is the timeliness and constant changing of tech docs that make this model worthwhile, plus tech docs are better in electronic format anyway. Nobody wants bestsellers in electronic format.