Amazon.com Advantage: A program that allows any publisher to open a direct account with Amazon.com and put their books on our virtual shelves.

Amazon.com bestseller lists: The bestseller lists available on our subject pages, which reflect sales within their particular genre. One way these can be accessed is by clicking on the links on the Browse Subjects page.

Amazon.com Eyes: An automated notification service, Amazon.com Eyes tracks every newly released title and notifies our customers about books that match their interests.

Amazon.com Hot List: The week's top 100 titles at Amazon.com. Updated every Wednesday.

ASCII: ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Basically, if you are asked to submit something in ASCII format it means that you must save the file as text only (.txt), as opposed to .doc or other types of formatting.

Amazon.com Associates: Amazon.com Associates is a program that pays you referral fees when customers buy books via a link from your Web site. Customers like buying from Amazon.com because we provide the books they want. They'll like buying through you because you provide the guidance they need. Through the Associates Program, your insight combined with Amazon.com's service will give your visitors a unique and valuable reason to return. You choose what to feature and create your own bookstore on the Web. We do all the rest. Learn more about our Associates program.

Author comments: Authors can visit their books' detail pages on our site; read customer reviews of their titles; post their own reviews, comments, and excerpts; share their experiences; or just talk about how the book came to be. Using our book content update form, authors can easily add whatever content they desire.

Availability: Amazon.com's promise to customers as to how quickly we can ship the title from our distribution center. Also referred to as Delivery Promise.

Browse Subject page: Our customers browse through thousands of subjects in categories ranging from history to mystery, literary fiction to romance, children's books to computers--all packed with recommendations, reviews, award winners, and more.

Catalog: The complete listing of titles in Amazon.com's catalog. Amazon.com has more than 4.7 million titles in our catalog.

Customer comments: Word-of-mouth recommendations. We welcome customer comments on the books in our catalog. Customers can enter comments and rate each book at the bottom of the book's detail page.

Content: Content refers to the information on an Amazon.com product detail page beyond the basic bibliographic information. For example, cover art, an excerpt, and a table of contents are all great ways to add content to your page. For more information and easy instructions, go to the Enhancing Your Book's Detail Page by Adding Persuasive Content section of our Catalog Guide.

Cover Art: A picture of your title's cover. Also refers to the graphical image of the cover of your book. This image is found to the left of the bibliographic information on a title's product detail page. By supplying cover art for each of your product detail pages, you can arrange each of your books in our catalog with a "face-out" position. For more information and easy instructions, go to the Cover Art section of our Catalog Guide.

Detail page: The Amazon.com Web page for a book. Each of the more than 4.7 million titles listed in our catalog has a dedicated page. See what one looks like. At minimum, it includes the basic bibliographic information of title, author, publisher, ISBN, and price. When additional information, such as cover art, description, excerpts, table of contents, review, etc., is added, a detail page can be influential in a customer's purchase decision. You as the publisher or author have the greatest impact on the content of your title's Amazon.com detail page. For further information and easy instructions on how to enrich your detail pages, please see the Enhancing Your Book's Detail Page by Adding Persuasive Content section of our Catalog Guide. Note: an Amazon.com detail page is also sometimes referred to as the "title" page.

Digitize: To digitize information usually means to put it in electronic form. It is important to digitize your text or cover art when submitting them for your Amazon.com detail page.

EDI: Electronic Data Interchange. It usually refers to the automated and electronic method of ordering products (such as books) via computer.

Excerpt: A sample (usually a full chapter) of the text from your title. In the physical world, customers often leaf through a title and read a few passages before deciding to purchase. Providing a chapter or several pages is a great way to hand-sell your title to customers.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol. This is one way you can send us files over the Internet.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language, the programming language most Web pages are written in.

JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG is one of several file formats available (including GIF and TIFF) for sending us a digitized image of your title's cover.

Link: Link is short for Hypertext Link. In the Internet world a link is usually denominated by colored and underlined text. When you click on a link it will allow you to view another page or go to another section of the current Web page.

Look Inside: The Look Inside the Book feature allows customers to browse through many of our books as they shop. Any time you see a bent orange arrow on a book--or the words "Look inside!"--it means parts of that book are available to look at online. To see how it works, look inside Tiger Woods's How I Play Golf. Learn how your titles can be included in the Look Inside the Book program.

Post: To post something frequently refers to the action of placing a piece of information on a Web site (such as posting a publisher's comment on a title's detail page).

Publisher comments: Publishers have the opportunity to compose comments about their titles and have those comments appear on that title's detail page. Publishers can insert comments by clicking on the "I am the Publisher and I want to comment on this book" link at the bottom of a title's Amazon.com detail page.

Reviews: Reviews are a separate feature from comments. There are currently several types of reviews that appear on detail pages. These include Amazon.com reviews, licensed content from third parties (Kirkus Reviews, The New York Times, etc.), and customer reviews.

Amazon.com reviews: Our editorial staff writes reviews on many books in our catalog. These are preceded by the heading Amazon.com.

Third-party reviews: Amazon.com purchases content and reviews from a wide variety of sources. Additional third-party reviews can be added by the publisher. Learn how to add reviews and other content.

Customer reviews: Customers are encouraged to add reviews. Our intention for the online reviews is to offer our customers a glimpse of what their peers are saying about any title. We do require e-mail addresses to enter commentary and offer customers the choice of having it displayed or not. Our policy is to remove any review that is obscene, inflammatory, etc.

Subject pages: Amazon.com currently has over 30 subject category pages, ranging from history to mystery, literary fiction to romance, children's books to computers. Each is essentially a specialty store within our store, packed with editorial commentary, recommendations, reviews, award winners, and more. Within our subject pages, we get even more specific, with thousands of bestselling categories. We even have a bestselling list for teddy bear books. See Browse Subjects for an introduction to our subject pages.

Table of contents: Like an excerpt, including the table of contents as it appears in your book allows our customers to preview the book. You can learn how to add your table of contents free of charge by going to the Enhancing Your Book's Detail Page by Adding Persuasive Content section of our Catalog Guide.

TIFF: Tagged Image File Format, one of several file formats you can use to send us a digitized image of your title's cover. The other possible formats are GIF and JPEG.

Title page: See entry for "Detail page" above.

URL: Otherwise known as a Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is basically the street address of a Web site or other file accessible on the Internet. A URL can be recognized by its "http://" beginning. A good example is http://www.amazon.com.

Web site: A Web site is a group of Web pages on a particular subject that includes a portal file called a home page. For example, from Amazon.com's home page our customers can access all of the over 4.7 million pages on the site!

Web server: A server is a computer that holds the files for one or more sites. A very large Web site may reside on a number of servers located in many different geographic places.

Zip: Zipping is the act of compressing one or more files so that they will take up less space on a diskette or take less time to send to someone. When a file is too large to send through conventional file transfer systems, "zipping" that file often provides the solution.

Several popular tools for zipping exist: PKZIP in the DOS operating system, WinZip in Windows, and MacZip for Macintosh users. The result of zipping is a single compressed file with a ".zip" suffix. After you download or otherwise receive a zip file, you must unzip it in order to access the original files. Typically, by double-clicking on a self-uncompressing zip file, it will automatically uncompress into its individual files.