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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (19913)	10/4/1998 3:24:00 PM
From: OtherChap	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 164684

>I believe the junk bond debt is between $500 and $550 million. I >would to look to be specific. It is much higher that $300 million. Thank you for correcting me Glenn, I had almost forgot that while the repayment value of the bonds was closer to 550 million, Amazon only received 300 million in cash because of the extreme risk involved in this junk. As of yet, no information has been released about who bought these bonds, even though that sort of thing is illegal. I'll bet they were probably bought by AMZN's underwriters as nobody else would touch them.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (19913)	10/4/1998 10:02:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Where we're going Will e-books survive? Initial response to the Rocket eBook and the SoftBook has been positive, painting a hopeful future for the electronic book. In the next few years, the devices will change and adapt to fit users' needs. As Jonathan Guttenberg, VP of new media at NY Random House put it: "We're going to see an evolution. As new uses arise, new form factors will appear." Already the Rocket eBook and SoftBook offer different paradigms; more will surely emerge. Industry experts agree that electronic books will not replace printed books. Just as radio survived TV, and film lived on after video, traditional and electronic books will coexist in the future. Softbook CEO Jim Sacks says "Electronic books will be ubiquitous within five-plus years." Librius' chief executive officer, Don Bottoms, predicts electronic books will be a $2.5 billion market by 2002--a statistic few agree with. Jonathan Guttenberg of NY Random House thinks that the market will be slow to take off, as consumers get used to e-books and find their own, personal needs for them. Consumer interest will also be piqued by the eventual drop in prices, the growing number and availability of titles--both Librius and NuvoMedia envision kiosks in supermarkets and bookstores for downloading the latest digital texts. Near-future book By early 1999, a new electronic book called the Everybook will be available. Offering two large (13-inch) color LCD screens bound in a metallic casing, it attempts to mimic a real book. Its screens replicate book layouts exactly--showing colored text, graphs, mathematical formulas, and illustrations. At 3.7 pounds, it's the largest e-book we've seen yet, and it has the largest capacity: 500,000 pages. Like the SoftBook, it includes a modem for downloading texts from the Everybook site. The catch? Its $1,500 price tag. Everybook's Daniel Munyan hopes it will appeal to those who already spend thousands on high-end reference books. Electronic ink In the distant future, look for electronic ink, a technology developed by Professor Joseph Jacobson and his colleagues at MIT. With this ink, one could create "an electronic display that can be updated digitally but looks and feels like paper," says Russell Wilcox, vice president and general manager of Business Development at E Ink. The "ink" consists of tiny particles that are black on one side, and white on the other. Electric impulses sent from the spine of the "book" inform the particles which way to turn, thus creating a page of words. Because this ink could be printed on any material, the e-book of the future could hold pages that change depending on what you want to read. This technology could also be used to create a newspaper that wirelessly receives transmissions of the latest stories, and is therefore always up to date. It will be many years before we see such a product in mainstream use, but E Ink hopes to have prototypes available within five years. No one knows exactly what electronic books will look like in years to come, but it is clear that they are no longer merely the stuff of science fiction. This fall marks the emergence of the first e-books that may make it as a commercial success; from here, it'll only get better.