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THERE is a familiar irony to the way retailing is developing on the Internet. Just as the computerised “paperless office” has turned out to be a voracious gobbler of trees, so the world of virtual words is proving a warm friend to that most tangible of literary technologies, the book. Among the few kinds of business to do well so far on the World Wide Web, bookselling stands out. Amazon.com, an on-line bookseller based in Seattle, soon to float on the stockmarket, is one of the largest retail businesses on the Net, taking about $16m of the $500m total revenues collected by electronic retailers last year, although it made a loss of $4.7m in the second half of 1996.