Amazon.com's Bookselling and Book Publishing Milestones

Amazon.com and its visionary founder Jeff Bezos are largely responsible for changing the way people shop. From allowing consumers to easily search online for what they want to offering free Super Saver shipping and easy returns; from making the two-dimensional product more tangible to potential buyers to encouraging consumer product feedback - much of our online shopping experience across many vendors today was initiated by Bezos and his company.

The Amazon.com site now offers millions of different products, but the company's online supremacy began with books, and that a relatively short time ago. As the retail giant moved into e-readers and e-books, then self-publishing and its own book publishing, it's interesting to look the timeline of Amazon.com's significant milestones as they relate to books.

July 1994 - Jeff Bezos incorporates Amazon.

July 1995 - Bezos ships the company's first book from a garage in Bellevue, WA.

July 1996 - Amazon.com Associates program launched. Program gives other websites incentive to link to - and promote products on - Amazon.com by rewarding them with a percentage of each sale they bring to the site.

May 1997 - Bezos announces Amazon.com IPO; begins trading on NASDAQ under "AMZN."

Feb 1998 -Amazon.com Advantage Program launched. Program is a self-service consignment vehicle that enables content owners (like, small publishers, indie music labels, studios, and authors) to promote and sell media products directly on Amazon.com. Amazon.com Advantage gives content owners the opportunity to make their products known to the audience of Amazon.com customers and offers distribution and order fulfillment for media product such as books, videos, and music.

1998 - Amazon.co.uk (Great Britain) and Amazon.de (Denmark) begin selling books.

Dec 1999 - Jeff Bezos named TIME Magazine "Person of the Year."

Nov 2000 - Launches Marketplace, an area for fixed-price product sales.

2000 - Amazon.fr (France) and Amazon.co.jp (Japan) begin selling books.

Nov 2000 - Introduces Free Super Saver Shipping (at program launch, shipping was free on orders over $100).

Apr 2001 - Amazon.com announces Borders Group alliance.

Oct 2001 - Look Inside the Book™ Program is introduced. Bezos tries to emulate the bookstore experience by allowing Amazon.com surfers to look at the pages inside the book. This requires Amazon to house book content in online form on their site, which raised some questions about whether this would expose book content to piracy. Ultimately, the publishers embraced the Look Inside the Book Program™ as an asset to sales.

Aug 2002 - Amazon.com lowers Free Super Saver Shipping threshold to $25.

2002 - Amazon.ca (Canada) begins selling books.

Oct 2003 - Search Inside the Book™ Program is introduced, giving Amazon.com customers an even more robust benefit than a bricks-and-mortar bookstore could offer - flipping through book pages by hand is less efficient than searching the text electronically.

Dec 2004 - Reports having busiest holiday season effort, signaling a tipping point in consumer acceptance of online sales.

2004 - Acquires Joyo.com Limited, online bookstore in Chin.a

Apr 2005 - Acquires BookSurge LLC, a self-publishing service and enters the growing self-publishing industry.

May 2006 - Introduces print-on-demand service for book publishers.

June 2007 - Rebrands Joyo.com as Joyo/Amazon.

Aug 2007 - Aggressively pursues textbook market; announces Tuition &Textbooks Sweepstakes with a Grand Prize of One Year of Tuition.

Nov 2007 - Launches Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

2008 - Acquires AbeBooks, purveyors of used, rare and out-of-print books.

Dec 2009 - Announces that Kindle is "the most gifted item ever."

Feb 2010 - Launches Amazon Kindle for Blackberry.

Mar 2010 - Launches Amazon Kindle for Mac.

Apr 2010 - Launches Amazon Kindle App for iPad.

May 2010 - Launches Amazon Kindle for Android.

July 2010 - Launches new generation Kindle.

Aug 2010 — Amazon announces that e-books sales outpaced hardcovers for the first time.

Dec 2010 - Announces Amazon Kindle for the web.

2010 - Amazon.it (Italy) begins selling books.

Sep 2011 - Announces new generation Kindle, the Kindle Fire.

Oct 2011 - Amazon.com establishes itself as traditional "trade" book publisher with an initial list of 122 titles.

Read more about Amazon.com.