At a November 1 press conference in Tokyo, Amazon.com Inc. unveiled a new Japanese-language site to serve the world's second-largest market of online shoppers.

The site, amazon.co.jp, which in the past simply redirected Japanese users to Amazon's English-language U.S. site, was localized by Massachusetts-based Basis Technology Corp.

Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos told the news conference that Japan has Amazon's biggest customer base outside the U.S., with more than 193,000 Japan-based customers making purchases $34 million annually through the online retailer's U.S. site.

The new amazon.co.jp currently offers a selection of 1.7 million Japanese- and English-language books and Japanese-language editorial content.

Unlike Amazon's other sites--in the U.S., U.K. Germany, and France--the Japanese site offers only books. While music CDs and videos are likely to be added later, no date for doing so has been set.

Japanese law strictly regulates the retail price of publications, which will prevent Amazon from discounting the Japanese books it carries.

Foreign books, however, are being offered on amazon.co.jp at up to 30 percent off list price--something unheard of in a country where the few stores that handle imported books typically charge double or more of the U.S. price.

In fact, a quick check of the amazon.co.jp site reveals several American books that, based on the current exchange rate (108.6 yen per US dollar), are actually priced lower than the same books at amazon.com.

The first book in the Harry Potter series, for example, No. 13 on amazon.co.jp's "Foreign Top 100" list, is being offered at 602 yen (US$5.54) on the Japanese site versus $6.29 on the U.S. site. ("List price" on both sites is $6.99.)

Amazon's operations in Japan include an office in Tokyo, a distribution center in Chiba prefecture, and a customer service center in Sapporo. Japanese books sold through amazon.co.jp will be shipped from the warehouses of Osaka-based book wholesaler Osakaya Co.

According to Carl Hoffman, chief executive officer and founder of Basis Technology, his firm began working with Amazon on its Japan Web site project in late 1999.

Hoffman said that the decision was made in February to aim for a November 1 launch of amazon.co.jp, which created a very intense development schedule considering the complexity of fully "internationalizing" Amazon's underlying retail platform (such as to properly handle double-byte Asian-language characters) and "localizing" Amazon's content for Japan.

In addition to handling the software engineering and content localization for the project, Basis Technology, which recently opened offices in Tokyo, also provided business strategy services to help Amazon establish the support structure for amazon.co.jp.

Amazon joins an increasingly competitive online book market in Japan--one that, according to Yano Research Institute, will grow fivefold by 2002.

Amazon's stiffest competitors are likely to be the BookWeb Internet service of bookstore chain Kinokuniya; the Japanese site of German media giant Bertelsmann AG-affiliate Bol.com, which launched a Japanese- and foreign-language book sales sites in June; and popular Japanese online shopping site Rakuten, which has announced it will start selling books online in January.