Most such ventures are small, private affairs, and it is on those that the Net seems to have exerted its greatest impact, taking what has been mostly a cottage industry and positioning it right in the center of the global village. Typical is the Book Worm in Albuquerque, N.M., which has 1,800 of its 30,000 books listed online. For others, such as Wayne Pierce of Stellar Books, the Net has provided the perfect complement to an offbeat lifestyle. Pierce lives 20 miles from Oroville, Calif., itself no metropolis. He built his own house and two large book buildings, and uses solar panels and a small hydroelectric source to power his computer.
Several bookstores have their own Web sites.
In addition to Powell's, there's Pandora's Books Ltd., an operation run by J. Grant Thiessen and his wife, Maureen, in Manitoba. Their shop contains about 200,000 books and magazines, all of which have been entered into their database. The Boston Book Co. has 14,000 books from its inventory in its online database. Even some smaller operations, such as James DenBoer's Paperworks, have Web sites. But most don't, and most don't need to.