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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (8170)	4/19/1999 2:27:00 AM
From: FR1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

BKS - not an IPO buy (unless you can get some) but a backdoor IPO buy Agreed. barnesandnoble.com symbol = BNBN. BKS will make BNBN look good by sending a lot of orders through it. They can do a lot of that. Also, Bertlesman, one of the largest communications businesses on earth, will drive a lot of its sales through BNBN. They almost have a monopoly on a lot of the magazines in Germany. Anyhow, the problems are many. 1) BKS: They have been flat as a pancake for years: exchange2000.com If they were such a hot business, we would have seen it by now. 2) Over a thousand stores on some of the most expensive real estate you can rent. Constantly opening and closing locations. Every week. 3) Suppose you are a publisher and want to sell books to bookstores. Go to Amazon. You see a button right on the main page. They welcome you and go out of their way to set up a relationship with you. Go to BNBN. No welcome button. Not on the main page. Not on any page in their web site. They don't want to talk to you. Call them and they tell you they don't want to do business with you. Go to a distributor, they say. You go to Ingram. Ingram says they won't deal with you - go to a small press distributor. In short, BKS has a very long tradition of alienating a sizable percentage of the publishing community. When asked directly, they will tell you that they can't handle the computer work involved in setting up hundreds of accounts (but they can handle a web site) - BNBN has a lot of fences to mend. 4) You think just the small presses are alienated? We won't discuss the fact that BKS buys books at 46% discount from publishers but will now be asking for them at around 55% since BKS = Ingram = distributor. Also, partner Bertlesman is one of the largest publishers in the world (Bantam, Doubleday, zillions of magazines, bookclubs, etc). Guess who's books they are going to favor. 5) Bertlesman is one of the most bloated middle management businesses to ever come into existence. It's a long story having to do with German monopolies. They put the old AT&T to shame. Anyhow, you can bet that any profits will be sucked up immediately by that black hole. BNBN could do well if they go into multimedia distribution (pay for play, etc), try to take advantage of broadband pipes, mend fences with all publishers, and completely rewire the concept of bookstore. Anything could happen. The management, however, is not exactly X generation and I don't see them hiring a swat team to change image/direction. The speakers they send around are painting BNBN as a quality book store only and they pride themselves on not getting into anything else. Let's see... www.barnes+noble.com - no that's not a web site. Try...www.barnes&noble.com. No that doesn't work either. Am I spelling barnes right? Who thought of this name for a web site? Only 30% of web users ever heard of barnesandnoble. 70% know Amazon (easy name to remember). After all that negative, I'm gonna keep a open mind and probably even by some shares since it won't sink.