Volume Business

Michael Powell wasn't seeking to level the playing field with superstore chains when Powell's began its on-line service. Nor did he look for venture capital--he spent, compared with Bezos, next to nothing. For Powell, setting up shop on the Internet was something of an offshoot of a different endeavor. The company's Web site was created in one of the more torturous processes Powell's has been through: computerizing its stock. In addition to the million-plus books in the inventory, the store buys 2,000 to 4,000 used books daily. "We had to get specially written software to control the constantly changing database," says marketing manager Gopalpur. "And then it took us two years of round-the-clock drudgery for data entry."

As soon as the scut work was done, he says, it was natural to take the digital information on-line. In 1993 the Internet site debuted, offering books from the company's computer-book store, which was the first to computerize its catalog. To Gopalpur's surprise, within hours on-line orders started coming in.

A year later, Powell's moved the catalog of technical books onto the Web, and by 1996 the complete catalog was on-line ( www.powells.com). Since then, sales have grown by 10% to 20% a month. A back room in the office overflows with books going to New York and Iowa, Canada and Korea. In five years, Michael Powell says, the store may bring in a third of its sales on-line.

Powell says that he's "not putting any money into marketing." Rather, he's banking on the better mousetrap theory: build one, and the world will beat a path to your door. In this case, the better mousetrap is one of the world's biggest and best-organized stockpiles of used books. Like Amazon, Powell's has an almost graphics-free user interface, suitable for people with slow Internet connections. But Powell's doesn't provide reviews, contests, customer comments, or E-mail notifications about book arrivals. Instead it offers a simple way to search through a list of new and used books--especially used books, which, as Powell likes to point out, are books that people either can't buy anywhere else or can buy elsewhere at a higher price. Unlike customers in the physical store, on-line customers treat the new books as lagniappe--extras to toss in while ordering used books. The focus on used books allows Powell to welcome the presence of Amazon and other Internet vendors of new books. "They get people used to buying and ordering books on-line," he says. "That can only help us in the long run."

Aiming for the worldwide bibliophile market, Powell's is setting up its site in other countries. Its first foreign partner is a Japanese Internet-marketing company that has set up links to the on-line catalog. "If we find good vendors in each country," Powell says, "they can add our product to their mix at little cost except for the telecommunications expense." Powell says that people all over the world will eventually take the virtual voyage to Powell's "as long as we have something they can get nowhere else. You can make a bookstore a destination in the real world by having a wonderful atmosphere, a good cafÉ, and great service. But the Internet gives you fewer options. You have to be unique because you're competing with everyone else on earth."

Despite running bookselling businesses that are now a mere mouse click apart, Powell and Bezos aver that they're not competing. In fact, each insists that the other's presence on the Net will, if anything, help its business.

This equanimity may be more than the businessperson's usual caution about publicly bad-mouthing the competition. Both entrepreneurs have created something entirely original, and there may be room for both to thrive. On the other hand, real-world bookstores that don't provide a unique inventory and a stimulating experience--as well as virtual bookstores that don't offer an extraordinary catalog and tremendous convenience--might well wonder about their future.

Web Design
Elaborate Isn't Always Better

When Michael Powell decided to take Powell's City of Books on-line (www.powells.com), he chose not to imitate Amazon's successful and elaborate virtual bookstore (www.amazon.com). Instead he set out to create a simpler site that played to his customers' no-nonsense desire to access a huge inventory of used as well as new books.

Here's how the two sites compare, along with Michael Powell's reasoning:

Charles C. Mann is a contributing editor at Science and the Atlantic Monthly.