Book sales online in Germany are proportionally several years behind those in the U.S., but are growing fast and in many ways resemble the rough-and-tumble world of U.S. online bookselling, although with a few twists.
In 1998, online book sales amounted to DM 60 million (about U.S.$39 million), or some 0.5% of the German retail book market. This year that figure is expected to double, and most observers predict that as the use of the Internet by German consumers continues to grow, sales of books online will jump to levels familiar to Americans.
For now, there has been a flurry of activity among online booksellers, as a variety of private, international and joint venture online booksellers are jockeying to become the Amazon.com of Germany. (Fully 1200 traditional bookstores have Web bookselling sites already.)
Amazon.com itself intends to reign in Germany as it d s in the U.S. With a third of the online bookselling market, Amazon.de is the single-largest online bookseller in Germany, but nowhere near the 80% market share of its parent company. Amazon.de, which has a warehouse here, recently launched an Austrian site, Amazon.at, whose sales are being handled in Germany. (The great majority of books sold in Austria originate in Germany.)
Last year, Amazon.de's single-biggest competitor was Buecher.de, a publicly traded company that has been selling books on the Web for two years. The company had sales of some DM 3 million (about $U.S. 1.9 million) and expects that amount to triple this year. Much like Amazon.com, Buecher.de is spending several times revenues on advertising and marketing. The company offers some 1.6 German and international titles and offers a CD-ROM with 800,000 titles that allows users to search titles offline (generally Internet access is more expensive here than in the U.S.) Besides books, Buecher.de offers videos, CD-Roms and software.
Launched in February, BOL.com, Bertelsmann's online bookselling venture, recently opened a Swiss site that will offer titles from its German and French sites. Another hot competitor is Booxtra, launched in June, which has the high-power backing of Holtzbrinck, Weltbild, Alex Springer and Deutsche Telekom. Springer, the huge German media empire, is beginning to promote Booxtra in a big way in its newspapers and magazines.
As in the U.S., the major German wholesalers are offering fulfillment services for bookstores that want to sell online. KNO, for instance, offers buchkatalog.de, which has some 1.5 million titles from Germany, the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy and Spain. (Its U.S. partner is Baker & Taylor, which has 400,000 titles.) Some 950 German bookstores take part in the program, which was begun three years ago.
The B rsenverein, the German book trade association that runs the Frankfurt Book Fair, has its own Web bookselling program for booksellers, buchhandel.de, which some 600 bookstores use. The B rsenverein has a section in the multimedia hall highlighting online booksellers, is offering seminars on the subject and emphasized the niche possibilities online by sponsoring a competition for the 10 most interesting "theme" online bookselling sites. The winners, chosen from a field of 150, range from the Berlin-area regional bookseller Kiepert's Web site to sites offering educational material, computer books, erotica, feminist books, gay titles and books about Third World politics. (Like many other German online booksellers, most of the winners are selling nonbook products such as music and videos, too.)
As in the U.S., several Internet trends make German booksellers optimistic about selling books online. As Susanne Fittkau of Fittkau & Maass, a market research firm, pointed out in a seminar in the multimedia area, books are the most popular product to purchase for Germans who go online. (In a multiyear study of online users, she found that fully 62.3% of online users had bought books online.)
Not unlike the American experience, the first group of Internet users was overwhelmingly male, well-educated and technically oriented. But each year more women take the plunge into cyberspace and the income and education levels of German Net users comes closer to reflecting society at large. Still, as Fittkau emphasized, market opportunities exist among older people and women, who still make up just a quarter of German Internet users.
In a few twists on the American model, the convenience of being able to buy at any hour was most popular in Germany, which has severely limited store opening hours. Also, a major hurdle among potential customers is payment security and the privacy of purchasing data -- in the land that experienced Big Brother in a big way, such concerns run especially deep.
Fittkau also said that to be successful, online booksellers should recognize the difference between providing customers with an ordering experience and a shopping experience. She also said online ooksellers should realize that they need to be ready for constant change.
