[a fool in paradise]

Amazon “sold” from the Books In Print catalog.

Same as any brick and mortar could do for you if you’d only walked up to the counter and special ordered a book.

They didn’t actually stock all of those titles, they just listed them and would backorder quite a few of them if you placed an order.

[SamAdams76]

True. But I didn’t have to drive to a store.

[lodi90]

There wasn’t anything unique about Amazon when they started out. There were at least 4-5 other big online only booksellers.

They didn’t really take off until they allowed third party sellers to sell directly to consumers. First media sellers and then other categories. Then amazon used their sales data to cut out the 3P sellers and made even more money selling their own products to amazon customers. The rest is history.

[cgbg]

Same as any brick and mortar could do for you if you’d only walked up to the counter and special ordered a book.

Lol.

Back in the day I bought hundreds of hard to find old science fiction books from Amazon, most of them used, many from across the Pond.

The local book store was for entertainment purposes only, not serious book ordering.