The online bookstore Amazon.com was launched by Jeff Bezos in July
1995, in Seattle (United States), after a market study which led him to
conclude that books were the best products to sell on the internet.
When Amazon.com started, it had 10 employees and a catalog of 3 million
books. Unlike traditional bookstores, Amazon's windows were its
webpages, with all transactions made through the internet. Books were
stored in huge storage facilities before being put into boxes and sent
by mail. In November 2000, Amazon had 7,500 employees, a catalog of 28
million items, 23 million clients worldwide and four subsidiaries in
United Kingdom (launched in August 1998), Germany (August 1998), France
(August 2000), and Japan (November 2000). A fifth subsidiary opened in
Canada in June 2002. A sixth subsidiary, named Joyo, opened in China in
September 2004.
December 1995 > The Kotoba Home Page, to read several languages on the
computer screen
Yoshi Mikami, a computer scientist at Asia Info Network in Fujisawa,
Japan, created in December 1995 the website "The Languages of the World
by Computers and the Internet", also known as the Logos Home Page or
Kotoba Home Page, "to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and
phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects for
each of the six major languages of the world, in English and Japanese".
Yoshi was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara)
of "The Multilingual Web Guide" (Japanese edition), a print book
published by O'Reilly Japan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into
English, French, and German.