In stylish circles, excitement - and some confusion - has been building around an Internet bookstore launched Monday by two 26-year-olds who run a hip, three-year-old publishing house in Sweden - former model Kajsa Leander and business partner Ernst Malmsten, who have been hailed as European "literary rock stars" by Elle magazine.
The LeanderMalmsten site, with its young, photogenic owners and promises of fashionable, international titles available for substantial discounts and worldwide delivery, is positioned to be the "glamazon.com" of the online book-sales business, offering a chic alternative to the more mainstream sites like that of Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.com. Leander is proud to point out that the British Web design firm Me Company, responsible for the official Internet presence of Icelandic rock star Björk, created the graphics for the LeanderMalmsten site.
The inventory boasts 1.5 million books representing American, English, and Swedish titles, mainly design books and academic texts by and geared toward a young, hip literary crowd. Illustrated feature stories on cultural news and interviews with authors are presented on the site as well.
Yet Net surfers who attempted to log on to komma.com (the name under which the site was publicized) on the scheduled launch day of 1 August found that komma.com didn't exist; in fact, even after the revised 18 August launch date, those searching for komma.com instead gain access to a site with another name: bokus.com. To add to the confusion, only orders from Sweden will be filled - from a site that is offered exclusively in Swedish.
"We found out too late that we couldn't get the international trademark for 'komma.com'," explains Leander. "Someone already owned it, so we had to make up a new name. 'Bokus' doesn't mean anything, and 'komma' sounds much better, but 'bokus' is close enough to 'book."
Leander and Malmsten still plan on bokus.com offering international sales as promised, but won't attempt this until 1 October. "We want to try Internet sales in Sweden only first," says Leander, toning down confident statements released to the press months ago heralding international sales. "We want to make sure everything runs smoothly; we're testing our site now, and we're merely postponing our worldwide version of bokus.com. You know, we didn't know much about the Net before, and we're just taking a bite of the apple now. A bite of the sour apple."
Is it worth it for an already successful offline venture (LeanderMalmsten published one of Sweden's biggest bestsellers, a 1994 translation of Tin Tin in the New World as its first title) to enter the world of online commerce? Observes Scott Rosenberg, senior editor of literary Internet magazine Salon (which has ties with bookseller Borders), "There are a couple of practical issues to consider: First, an international server in Sweden will be less accessible for visitors outside of Sweden - especially those in the US. Second, international customers will experience delays due to currency exchanges and prolonged shipping time."
Rosenberg also questions the practical value of hipness. "Unless they can provide some editorial value or an unusual annotation guide or some special guidance, there really isn't practical value. And looking at the bokus.com site, it doesn't look much different from Amazon, with lists of books to order."
One thing that visitors to bokus.com won't find are book reviews. "We'll recommend titles and design books by featuring them 'editorially.' We're thinking more like a magazine. Amazon does the reviews," says Leander, emphasizing that bokus.com "didn't use Amazon as a model."
Although international audiences might be disappointed that they can't place orders at bokus.com yet, the online store, with its discounts, offers affordable prices for otherwise high-priced books in Sweden, where only 39 percent of book sales occur in stores. Most readers buy directly from publishers, who charge, with tax, the equivalent of US$40 for a hardcover novel.
"We feel it's important to make the book-sales market in Sweden competitive," explains Leander, who hopes that prices will decrease as competition increases.
