Telebuch

» see telebuch.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 1998 I was getting online over a dial-up modem and an account with one of the Turkish providers, and the idea of buying a book through it was science fiction to me. The shipping alone. Germany was a few years ahead on exactly this and the reason is a piece of infrastructure that never existed where I was, so this is a story about a country that got a head start and spent it.

Bildschirmtext was the Bundespost's videotex system, a numbered-page service you reached with a decoder and a telephone line, and it had been running since the early 1980s. In 1991 a company in Regensburg put a bookshop on it at page *TELEBUCH#. That is where the name comes from, and it is why Telebuch is older than almost anything it ended up competing with. The company itself was ABC Bücherdienst GmbH, founded by Ulrike Stadler and Michael J. G. Gleissner, with Christian Jagodzinski named as a third founder in some accounts.

It moved onto the open internet in 1995, under the same name, at telebuch.de. By the spring of 1998 the homepage opened with a line thanking you for visiting ABC Bücherdienst and advertised over a million titles to search and order, with same-day ordering for next-day delivery. Amazon's own announcement that April called it Germany's number one online bookstore and counted the catalog at nearly 400,000 German-language titles, which is the same shelf described two different ways. The company also had operations in Spain and the United States, and its Spanish arm is still visible in the archive as a host called db2.telebuch.de serving something called LibroWeb.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the april deal ~

Amazon bought three companies at once in April 1998 and announced them together on the 27th. The Bookpages merger in Britain closed on the 17th; the Internet Movie Database and Telebook both closed on the 24th. Amazon's quarterly filing puts the aggregate purchase price for all three, with related charges, at approximately 55 million dollars, paid in cash and common stock. No per-company figure has ever been published and none can be derived, because the cash was not broken out.

The closest thing to a price is a table in an Amazon registration statement filed that September listing the selling stockholders. Michael J. G. Gleissner received 129,532 shares. Christian Jagodzinski and Ulrike Stadler received 75,676 each. Maria Garcia Nielson received 3,778. That is 284,662 shares to four people for the whole of Germany's largest online bookseller, and those four names match the owners German Wikipedia lists at exit. The entity Amazon actually merged with was not the Regensburg GmbH at all but Telebook, Inc., a Florida corporation registered in Miami that held it.

~ the october launch ~

The brand kept trading for almost six more months and the archive shows it wearing the new owner openly. The last Telebuch-branded capture of the homepage is from 3 May 1998 and its logo file is a black "tele" and a red "buch" sitting above the line "an amazon.com company". The page is still titled Telebuch and still thanks you for visiting ABC Bücherdienst. It also still lists libri and amazon among its own meta keywords as search bait, which was never going to be necessary again.

amazon.de opened on 15 October 1998. The first order placed through it was an English-language textbook on Simulink, and it shipped out of Regensburg. By the time the Internet Archive came back round on 2 December, telebuch.de had become a thousand-byte page titled "telebuch wird Amazon.de" with a meta refresh set to sixty seconds, telling customers that the merger announced some time ago was now visible and that existing customers could keep using their old customer number as a password. Ten months later the same address was a bare Apache directory index with one folder in it called stats, and after that a plain redirect.

~ the regensburg warehouse ~

What makes this different from the usual local-clone purchase is how little Amazon actually threw away. It took the name off the front and kept the rest. Amazon's own twentieth-anniversary post says flatly that Amazon in Germany came into being through the integration of ABC Bücherdienst GmbH of Regensburg. A few dozen people in that building handled the range and the shipping in 1998, and seven of them were still at the company twenty years later. Customer accounts carried over with their passwords intact.

The market it was handed turned out to be tiny and about to be fought over. German online book sales in all of 1998 came to around 60 million marks, roughly 0.5 percent of German book retail. Bertelsmann's BOL did not launch until February 1999, four months after amazon.de, and closed its German business at the end of 2002. Booxtra arrived in June 1999. By late 1999 amazon.de had about a third of German online bookselling and was the largest single player, which is a thing it accomplished by buying a company that had been selling books down a telephone line since before the web.

Amazon announced the closure of the Regensburg customer service site in 2023, thirty-two years after the page number.

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