In September 1996, Kinokuniya launched Kinokuniya BookWeb, an online ordering and search service for books, and music CDs for our individual customers. As a result of surveys conducted by Yahoo! Japan, Kinokuniya BookWeb received the Yahoo! Web of the Year award in the e-commerce category, in 1998 and 1999. The site currently has a database of 2 million Japanese books, and in collaboration with Baker & Taylor in the US, 2.5 million books in English and other languages. It is a membership-based service and more than 200,000 individual customers already have signed up for membership.

Because of the success of Kinokuniya BookWeb, we developed and introduced BookWeb Pro in 1999 to sell publications to our institutional customers. Instead of using credit card transactions, BookWeb Pro is based on accounts-receivable trade and is designed to meet the accounting requirements of institutional customers. Since most of the customers for this service are academic institutions, BookWeb Pro carries a full line of academic as well as non-academic books. More than 6 thousand institution users already have signed up for the service.

Electronic journals have emerged as the latest media for the distribution of academic research papers, and most STM publishers have introduced electronic editions. In comparison to the U.S.A. and Europe, Japan has been somewhat slower in migrating to electronic editions. For customers who are still rather new to electronic journals, it is not always easy to keep up with new developments or to decide which products to adopt. Nevertheless, libraries in Japan have much wider access to electronic journals than before, taking advantage of consortia deals that have spread significantly in the past few years. In this situation, Kinokuniya expects to play a key role as a consultant offering state-of-the-art information on available products. We organize seminars and provide consulting services to assist customers to determine which electronic journal packages or platforms are best for them. To accommodate customers’ needs, we provide the following services.

Journal Catalog on the Web
We have developed a journal catalog on the Web. Customers can search it by title name, title keyword, subject, and/or publisher name. License information by publisher for electronic editions also is given.

OJ Web and Gateway
Customers can tailor their Web pages in K-Port to display a link list of journals they are qualified to access. This list will provide links to electronic journals on a title by title basis. If a customer orders through Kinokuniya, those titles are automatically included in the link list. K-Port is also linked to secondary information sites not only to offer trials but also to facilitate access to those secondary information products. Kinokuniya has launched a gateway service on behalf of some publishers so that K-Port can supply links at the article level.

Access Web
For our consolidation subscribers of printed journals, Kinokuniya provides a journal receipt list on the Web. If customers also subscribe to the e-mail-based TOC (Table of Contents) alerting service which Kinokuniya offers in collaboration with the British Library, customers can link the issues received with the relevant TOC information.

Kinokuniya e-Alert had been a combination service with a customized Web page and an alerting service by e-mail until December, 2009. This service was shifted to our website Kinokuniya BookWeb Pro that relaunched on December, 2009. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued business.