Belgium or in Switzerland, where the local communications are billed by the minute, for the same number of hours on-line."

It follows that many European surfers spend much less time on the Web than they would like, or choose to surf at night to cut their expenses. At the end of 1998, in several countries (Italy, Germany, France, etc.), surfers began to boycott the Internet for one day to make phone companies aware of their needs and give them a special monthly rate.

In 1997, Babel - a joint initiative from Alis Technologies and the Internet Society, ran the first major study of the actual distribution of languages on the Internet. The results are published in the Web Languages Hit Parade, dated June 1997, and the languages, listed in order of usage, are: English 82.3%, German 4.0%, Japanese 1.6%, French 1.5%, Spanish 1.1%, Swedish 1.1%, and Italian 1.0%.

To reach as large an audience as possible, the solution is to create bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual sites. The website of the Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir presents the newspaper in six languages: French, English, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish. The French Club des poètes (Club of Poets), a French site dedicated to poetry, presents its site in English, Spanish and Portuguese. E-Mail-Planet, a free e-mail address provider, provides a menu in six languages (English, Finnish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish).

As the Web quickly spreads worldwide, more and more operators of
English-language sites which are concerned by the internationalization of the
Web recognize that, although English may be the main international language for
exchanges of all kinds, not everyone in the world reads English.

Since December 1997 any Internet surfer can use AltaVista Translation, which translates English web pages (up to three pages at the same time) into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and vice versa. The Internet surfer can also buy and use Web translation software. In both cases he will get a usable but imperfect machine-translated result which may be very helpful, but will never have the same quality as a translation prepared by a human translator with special knowledge of the subject and the contents of the site.

The increase in multilingual sites will make it possible to include more diverse languages on the Internet. And more free translation software will improve communication among everyone in the international Internet community.

In Web embraces language translation, an article published in ZDNN (ZD Network
News) of July 21, 1998, Martha L. Stone explained:

"This year, the number of new non-English websites is expected to outpace the growth of new sites in English, as the cyber world truly becomes a 'World Wide Web'. […] According to Global Reach, the fastest growing groups of Web newbies are non-English-speaking: Spanish, 22.4 percent; Japanese, 12.3 percent; German, 14 percent; and French, 10 percent. An estimated 55.7 million people access the Web whose native language is not English. […] Only 6 percent of the world population speaks English as a native language (16 percent speak Spanish), while about 80 percent of all web pages are in English."

Robert Ware is the creator of OneLook Dictionaries, a fast finder for 2,061,220 words in 432 dictionaries (as of December 10, 1998) in various fields: business; computer/Internet; medical; miscellaneous; religion; science; sports; technology; general; and slang. In his e-mail to me of September 2, 1998, he wrote:

"An interesting thing happened earlier in the history of the Internet and I think I learned something from it.

In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package on a particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the same problem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me… the software was written only 30 miles away but I was getting help from a person half way around the world. Distance and geography no longer mattered!

OK, this is great! But what is it leading to? I am only able to communicate in English but, fortunately, the other person could use English as well as German which was his mother tongue. The Internet has removed one barrier (distance) but with that comes the barrier of language.

It seems that the Internet is moving people in two quite different directions at the same time. The Internet (initially based on English) is connecting people all around the world. This is further promoting a common language for people to use for communication. But it is also creating contact between people of different languages and creates a greater interest in multilingualism. A common language is great but in no way replaces this need.

So the Internet promotes both a common language AND multilingualism. The good news is that it helps provide solutions. The increased interest and need is creating incentives for people around the world to create improved language courses and other assistance and the Internet is providing fast and inexpensive opportunities to make them available."

For more information about the Web and languages, please see my study about
Multilingualism on the Web.

3. ON-LINE BOOKSTORES

[In this chapter:]

[3.1. Books: a Good Product to Sell On-line / 3.2. On-line Bookstores: Some Examples / 3.3. Digital Books]

3.1. Books: A Good Product to Sell On-Line

Many "traditional" bookstores - with booksellers, windows, books piled upon display shelves or lined up on shelves around the shop - have created on-line bookstores on the Internet - for example, Barnes & Noble (barnesandnoble.com) in the United States, Chapters (Chaptersglobe) in Canada, Waterstone's in the United Kingdom, etc. Other bookstores have no walls and no windows looking out on the street. They are "only" on-line (for example Amazon.com in the United States, Internet Bookshop in the United Kingdom). Their window is their website, and all the transactions are made through the Internet.

These on-line stores don't sell only books, but also CDs, audiobooks, DVDs, computer games, sheet music, movies on VHS, console and CD-ROM software games, etc. As we are dealing here with the relationship between the print media and the Internet, we shall focus on books only.

The book-lover searches the on-line bookstore's catalog on his screen. In most cases, searches are possible by author, title and subject. The home page of the bookstore often looks like a literary magazine, so the book-lover can be kept informed of the latest current events. For someone who does not like queuing in his favorite library on a Saturday afternoon, the Web can bring a lot of relief. He can "leaf" through short descriptions and extracts of books, order on-line the books he is interested in and pay with his credit card. The only delay encountered is the time necessary for the book to be shipped to his house. Such a person is looking forward to being equipped with a digital book, which will appear in 1999.

Jeff Bezos created Amazon.com in July 1995, after a market study which led him to conclude that books were the best products to sell on the Internet.

In Spring 1994, he drew up a list of 20 products that could be sold on the Net, from clothing to gardening tools, and then researched his top five: CDs, videos, computer hardware, computer software, and books.

"I used a whole bunch of criteria to evaluate the potential of each product, but among the main criteria was the size of the relative markets. Books, I found out, were an $82 billion market