Fatbrain.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

Before it was a dot-com it was a shop. Computer Literacy Bookshops opened in Sunnyvale in March 1983, run by Dan Doernberg and Rachel Unkefer, and it stocked one subject. Language references and chip documentation, an entire wall of O'Reilly. If you worked in that valley in the eighties this was where you went when the thing on your desk did not do what the thing on your desk was supposed to do.

It registered clbooks.com on 25 August 1991 and started taking orders by email from anywhere in the world, which in 1991 was a genuinely strange thing for a bookshop to be doing. An online-only rival called CBooks Express turned up in 1995, and in June 1997 the smaller newer company bought the older bigger one. The combined thing went public in 1998, spent six months looking for a name it liked better, and came back as Fatbrain.com on the NASDAQ under FATB.

barnesandnoble.com announced it was buying Fatbrain in September 2000 for around $64 million and closed the deal that November. The physical stores were shut on 1 December 2001 and clbooks.com was retired. The website lasted a few months longer than the shelves did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ ematter ~

In the summer of 1999 Fatbrain started selling documents that were not books. eMatter let a writer upload a piece of technical work, set a price on it, and sell it as a file, with Fatbrain taking a cut and handling the money. There was no publisher in the middle and no minimum length. A forty-page thing about one compiler could be a product.

That was two years before anybody was comfortable with the phrase self-publishing and roughly a decade before the tools for it were ordinary. It got spun out into a separate company called MightyWords, which is the usual fate of a good idea sitting inside a retailer during a bull market. The idea outlived both companies and belongs to Amazon now.

~ the last spring ~

Nobody announced the end. The archive has a working Fatbrain homepage on 28 March 2002, and on 1 June 2002 the same address answers with a redirect to btob.barnesandnoble.com. Somewhere in those nine weeks a decision got made about a subdomain by somebody whose job it was to reduce the number of storefronts.

The logo on that last homepage tells you how the story ends before the redirect does. The word fatbrain in lowercase, a trademark symbol, and underneath it in small type: a Barnes and Noble.com company.

The word for what happened is absorption rather than failure. Fatbrain sold for real money, its buyer kept the customers, and the technical-book business carried on inside a larger catalog with a worse front page. What went away was the specialization. A general bookstore has a computing section. A computing bookstore has a section for the parts of computing nobody has heard of, which is the only reason to have one.

~ photocopies ~

I started university the year after Fatbrain closed, and this category of shop never existed where I was. Imported technical books in Turkey cost more than a student had, so the actual distribution system was the photocopy place next to the faculty building, where a course's worth of chapters came back stapled for the price of lunch. Half the CS degrees in the country ran on that shop.

The books were the same books. Somebody in Sunnyvale had walked into a store and bought the original off a shelf, and the same pages reached Ankara priced by the sheet, with the cover missing.

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