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 DM60 million (about $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 American booksellers.
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. Commanding one-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 in Germany, 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 approximately DM3 million (about $1.9 million) and expects that amount to triple this year. Much like Amazon.com, Buecher.de is spending much of its revenues on advertising and marketing. The company offers some 1.6 million German and international titles and offers a CD-ROM with 800,000 titles that allows users to search titles off-line (generally, Internet access is more expensive in Germany 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 make available titles from its German and French sites. BOL.com also just began selling some 200,000 music CDs on its German and U.K. sites, and will expand next year to include videos, DVDs, magazines and content for Rocket eBooks. Another hot competitor is Booxtra.de, 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 heavily promote Booxtra.de 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 nearly 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, had its own Web bookselling program for booksellers, Buchhandel.de, which approximately 600 bookstores use. The B rsenverein had a section in the fair's multimedia hall highlighting online booksellers, offers seminars on the subject and, emphasizing the niche possibilities online, sponsored a competition for the 10 most interesting "theme" online bookselling sites. The winners, who were chosen from a field of 150, ranged 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 also sell nonbook products such as music and videos.) 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 of Germans who go online. (In a multiyear study of online users, she found that 62.3% of online users had bought books online.)
Not unlike the American experience, the first group of German Internet users was overwhelmingly male, well-educated and technically oriented. Each year, however, more women take the plunge into cyberspace, and the income and education levels of German Net users are coming closer to reflecting the country™s societal makeup. 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 is extremely 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 told PW that to be successful, German online booksellers must recognize the difference between providing customers with an ordering experience and a shopping experience. She added that online booksellers should realize that they need to be ready for constant change.
