[ableal]

The anecdote I usually trot out is this: back in 1990, there was a company in Ohio, called Book Stacks Unlimited, if memory serves. They had the books.com internet address.

Books.com sold books by allowing one to telnet to their server, and picking items from their catalog - on a terminal screen, natch ;). They had reasonable shipping fees, and used only recyclable materials, namely crumpled brown paper for padding. (It did not work too well versus the foam peanuts more common at the time.)

A few years later Amazon was all over the place claiming "a river of one million books", and becoming synonymous with internet book-shopping. The books.com domain now belongs to Barnes&Noble.

[escaped_hn]

I get a weird tingling when a startup/company's domain name is worth more than the company itself minus the value of the domain name.