Fatbrain.com Increases Business-to-Business Focus, Creates New Company to Capitalize on Mass Market Digital Publishing Opportunities.

Business Editors & High Tech Writers

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 16, 2000

New Business Separates Consumer Digital Publishing Initiative

from Core B2B Direction

Fatbrain.com(TM) (Nasdaq: FATB) today announced that it is increasing focus on its business-to-business strategy, which accounts for a majority percentage of the company's revenues. In addition, Fatbrain.com announced it has created a new company -- introduced today in a separate press release under the name MightyWords(TM) -- to address the mass market opportunities created by its successful eMatter(TM) digital publishing initiative. Fatbrain.com will continue to leverage eMatter to deliver document publishing services for its corporate customers. Fatbrain.com is currently seeking private equity funding for MightyWords, which will be operated as a subsidiary.

Chris MacAskill, CEO of Fatbrain.com, also will serve as CEO of the new MightyWords subsidiary. Dennis Capovilla, president and COO for Fatbrain.com, continues in his role managing Fatbrain.com's core business-to-business operations. Joining MacAskill to lead the MightyWords executive team is Judy Kirkpatrick, executive vice president and general manager. Kirkpatrick has been instrumental in developing the eMatter digital publishing initiative since its inception last year.

"We're aggressively building on our business-to-business offering to capitalize on the expanding market for outsourced document management services, which is forecast to hit $54 billion by 2003 (CAP Ventures, Summer 1999)," MacAskill said. "At the same time, it became immediately apparent when we introduced the eMatter digital publishing initiative last Fall that we had hit on another exciting business opportunity. The creation of the MightyWords subsidiary allows us to take advantage of both, while maintaining the focus required to grow a business from the idea stage to creating real value for customers and investors."

Fatbrain.com's core business solves a major problem for corporate America. All corporations are publishers, creating a variety of documents including, but not limited to, sales and marketing materials, training materials, product manuals, technical documents, whitepapers and financial documents. This is an expensive and time-consuming function that distracts companies from their core business. For the last 15 years, the traditional document management houses and upstarts have only been able to solve pieces of this document management problem. Fatbrain.com's Information Exchange allows companies to outsource expensive and inefficient document services via the Internet while moving to a paperless model at their own pace.

Today, Fatbrain.com's business-to-business solutions account for a majority percentage of company revenues and reach more than 2.25 million employee desktops, including more than 300 Fortune1000 corporations worldwide. Some of these include Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HWP), Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), GTE Corp. (NYSE: GTE), Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) and Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU). Fatbrain.com's flagship business-to-business solution is called the "Information Exchange." The Information Exchange combines Fatbrain.com's e-commerce expertise, secure digital publishing technology known as eMatter, comprehensive professional bookstore, established print-on-demand infrastructure and world-class distribution and fulfillment services to deliver a powerful and complete Web-based solution for outsourcing mission-critical internal and external corporate information.

"eMatter is a powerful tool to serve our Information Exchange customers," said Capovilla. "This unique method of digital publishing for corporations sets Fatbrain.com apart from others in the document management industry by enabling our customers to manage their businesses more efficiently and providing the option to disseminate content in digital or print format."

About MightyWords

MightyWords is the definitive digital marketplace to read, write, buy and sell compelling written content. MightyWords uses the Internet to provide authors, professionals, academics and enthusiasts the control to instantly publish and sell their works to the world, earning at least 50 percent royalties on every copy sold. MightyWords features exciting content from best-selling and yet-to-be-discovered authors alike. Visit MightyWords at http://www.mightywords.com. MightyWords is currently a subsidiary of Fatbrain.com.

About Fatbrain.com

Fatbrain.com is the leader in managing, marketing and distributing information for businesses. Today, the company's business-to-business solutions reach more than 2.25 million employee desktops at more than 300 Fortune1000 corporations worldwide. Fatbrain provides businesses with a comprehensive Web-based solution for information exchange by combining its leading professional bookstore with unique print-on-demand capabilities and eMatter, a customized implementation of its secure digital publishing solution, for the printed and digital delivery of valuable, mission critical corporate information. Fatbrain.com enables paper and digital documents to co-exist in an organized and highly-accessible fashion. Last year, the company was named the second fastest-growing public company in Silicon Valley. Visit Fatbrain.com on the Web at http://www.fatbrain.com.

Fatbrain.com, MightyWords and eMatter are trademarks of Fatbrain.com, Inc. All company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.