Book Stacks Unlimited

» see books.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Book Stacks sits in the part of internet history I can read about but cannot remember. It was finished before I had a modem. By the time I dialed up in 1998 the online bookstore question had already been answered by a company in Seattle, and the answer looked so settled that nobody thought to ask who had gotten there first.

Charles M. Stack got there first. He came up with it in 1991 for a reason he was happy to state plainly years later: he read a lot, he liked to read everything published on a subject, and no physical store carried more than a couple of titles per topic. The store he wanted did not exist, so he built it in 1992 as a dial-up bulletin board in Cleveland. You called it with a modem, browsed a catalog on a text screen, and it mailed you a new book.

The web version opened as books.com in 1994, a year before Jeff Bezos shipped his first order. It listed 500,000 titles, searchable by title or author or subject or keyword or ISBN, and pulled half a million visitors a month. Thirty-five staff wrote recommendations. There was a daily literary journal with summaries of new releases, and there were forums where customers argued about what they had just read.

That last part is the detail that dates it and also makes it look modern. Book Stacks was trying to be a bookshop with people in it. The thing that beat it was trying to be a warehouse with a search box.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the bbs years ~

Selling books over a bulletin board in 1992 meant a bank of modems in Cleveland and a phone bill for anyone outside the local area code. There was no browser to hand the catalog to and no payment layer to lean on, so the whole thing sat on software Stack had to write and on customers willing to dial long distance to buy a paperback.

That constraint is why the 1994 move to the web looks like a rescue rather than a pivot. The catalog was already built and already national in ambition. What the web supplied was the missing piece, which was a way for someone in another state to reach it without paying for the call.

~ what really happened ~

CUC International, a Stamford consumer services company that later became Cendant, bought Book Stacks outright in 1996. In 1997 it went into netMarket, Cendant's one-stop internet mall, alongside a music store and a video store both operated out of the same Cleveland offices. The brand stopped being a bookstore and became a department.

Cendant then had its own problems, netMarket never became the mall anyone wanted, and the books.com address eventually got sold to Barnes and Noble. Type it today and you land on barnesandnoble.com. The first serious online bookstore in the United States now functions as a redirect for a chain that itself lost the category.

Nothing about this reads as a failure of the idea. Stack had the concept, the catalog, the staff and a three-year head start, and sold at a moment when selling looked like winning. The company that did not sell is the one everybody has heard of.

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