Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: SalonHerringWiredFool.Com
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 10/28/1999; 12:32:58 AM Topic: SalonHerringWiredFool.Com Msg #: 12441 (In response to 12416) Prev/Next: 12440 / 12442
Pat Breitenbach wrote:I stopped reading here: 'There's nothing unique about Amazon. It's easy to build a site that does what Amazon does, and only mildly challenging to do it better.'
Are you serious?
As a heart attack. The nice thing about a book site is that it poses no significant data-modelling issues because books have been uniquely identified by ISBN essentially forever; it's relatively easy to import, e.g. a book wholesaler's catalog into a good database system like Oracle. Given a good web server, scripting language, and interface to the database, building such a site is a pretty straightforward proposition. You can read all about it, and a lot more, in <http://photo.net/wtr/thebook>.
The hard part is making sure the site stays up 24/7.
I should point out that I now work for ArsDigita, the folks who did, e.g. MIT Press' site, and whose CEO wrote "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing," the online version of which I referred to above.
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