Internet businesses evade all these activities, which are critical to the survival of communities and local economies. During the past year, the media seem to be completely smitten with the idea of e-commerce. But the actual retail business of Amazon shows only staggering losses, which grow exponentially with every quarterly report. The speculation in Internet stocks has been compared to the tulip craze in seventeenth century Europe, during which the value of a tulip was greater than that of a town house. The public's response to bookselling on the Web is mixed.
Most books continue to be sold in physical, as opposed to virtual, bookstores.
But for many, quite fairly, the ease of ordering on the Web takes precedence over the pleasures of taking a book in hand and browsing its pages. Then there is also the entertainment provided by the clever ways in which Amazon, for example, manipulates its database. The hourly moving figure of where a book stands in sales on Amazon is a matter of much curiosity, even if it fails to make a great deal of sense. Some years ago, when Cody's first began doing business online, we believed that the Internet would be a great medium for diversity and multiplicity in the retail sale of books. It is, after all, quite inexpensive to set up a Website and start doing business worldwide.