A: Seattle, Washington, United States
In July 1994 Jeff Bezos of Seattle, Washington, incorporated Amazon.com. The company originally promoted itself as "Earth's biggest book store."
Amazon.com was very nearly called "Cadabra," as in "abracadabra." Bezos rapidly re-conceptualized the name when his lawyer misheard the word as "cadaver." Bezos instead named the business after the river for two reasons: to suggest scale, as the earth's biggest book store, and because website listings were often alphabetical at that time.
In July 1995 Amazon sold its first book: Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.
According to Amazon's website, of which a screen shot is attached, I began purchasing from the company in 1999. That is about the time that I began working on the timeline that originated in Origins of Cyberspace, and evolved into what you see now. The ready availability of books from Amazon and other Internet sites made obtaining the reference material that I need for creating HistoryofInformation.com more convenient and efficient than it could ever have been previously.