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

To: GST who wrote (37002)	1/26/1999 10:11:00 PM
From: The_Guru_00	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Better Yet, who said anything about printing. The Digital Age, my friend. No need for those bulky books. Just down load to my digital assistant. In fact load a few books, because I don't know which I want to read on vacation. www.author.com. Where authors can sell their works (not books) directly to consumers. WaLa, no middle man, no Amazon, nothing but me and John Grisham. www.grandstand.com. Where bands can sell their works (not CDs) directly to consumers. etc. Guru

To: GST who wrote (37002)	1/27/1999 1:56:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

GST, I hear what you are saying but the problem I keep coming back to is B&N retail outlets. I dont know how B&N online is structured, is it a seperate company (seems like it based on Glenns comments that there is no sales tax). If B&N online is not a separate company then that means there is inventory all over the system which cant be accounted for or moved in a cost effective manner. It will pull B&N down I believe - they need to eliminate those stores, or sell them etc. At this point distribution automation is a hub and spoke kind of thing, a few centralized distribution centers and end users. B&N has an intermediate retailer in there. To be efficient, they will have to treat the retailer as an end-user - but they cant, because there is inventory which needs to be accounted for. Its too expensive to move product from distributor to retailer to end user, or even worse distributor to retailer to another retailer (different loc) to end user, because retailer #1 has excess inventory. The key for B&N is to remove all these hops. If they set up a seperate company and function independently from the retail outlets while benefitting from the technical infrastructure that is already there for B&N then I agree B&N has a heads up over amzn. But note that cpq was never able to break free from its traditional channels even though they saw the writing on the wall. Michelle