The everything store

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators -- Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg -- Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.

The Everything Store will be the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue (p. 3)
• Part I Faith
• Chapter 1 The House of Quants (p. 17)
• Chapter 2 The Book of Bezos (p. 30)
• Chapter 3 Fever Dreams (p. 65)
• Chapter 4 Milliravi (p. 100)
• Part II Literary Influences
• Chapter 5 Rocket Boy (p. 139)
• Chapter 6 Chaos Theory (p. 160)
• Chapter 7 A Technology Company, Not a Retailer (p. 193)
• Chapter 8 Fiona (p. 224)
• Part III Missionary or Mercenary?
• Chapter 9 Liftoff! (p. 261)
• Chapter 10 Expedient Convictions (p. 286)
• Chapter 11 The Kingdom of the Question Mark (p. 320)
• Epilogue (p. 343)
• Acknowledgments (p. 357)
• Appendix: Jeff's Reading List (p. 361)
• Notes (p. 365)
• Index (p. 375)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Arguably, there are three great stories that have emerged from the current age of technological innovation: Steve Jobs, the "Google fellows," and Jeff Bezos. Bloomberg Businessweek writer Stone employs a historian's approach in presenting Amazon in relentless detail flowing from the personality and focus of founder Jeff Bezos. This can lead to insights as well as mind-numbing detail: "Christopher Smith, a twenty-three-year-old warehouse temp with tattoos of Chinese characters on his forearms...." Amazon is presented as a triumph of small things done well in creating a global organization that is potentially on the threshold of even more exponential growth. Bezos is presented as a driven, detailed-oriented innovator focused on improving the customer experience at Amazon, which has grown as a function of Bezos's personality. Neither Steve Jobs, as presented by Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs (CH, Apr'12, 49-4500), nor Bezos comes off as an average nice guy. How could they? The real lesson is that the "heroic entrepreneur" is captive to his/her vision and that most other things are secondary. Anyone wanting to learn about Jeff Bezos's remarkable development of Amazon and his ambition to make it "the everything store" will want to read this book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels and collections. S. A. Schulman CUNY Baruch College

Kirkus Book Review

Fair-minded, virtually up-to-the-minute history of the retail and technology behemoth and the prodigious brain behind it. Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Stone has covered Amazon, "the company that was among the first to see the boundless promise of the Internet and that ended up forever changing the way we shop and read," and its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, among other technology stories, for 15 years, and his inside knowledge of a company ordinarily stingy with information is evident throughout the book. In addition to speaking to Bezos several times over the years, including an interview for this book, Stone also spoke with employees across all levels of the company, from C-level officers and software developers to fulfillment center "associates," including many who have moved on. The author's research, which also included access to volumes of emails and other internal documents, revealed an extraordinarily difficult corporate culture for ordinary human beings to work in, one designed to forge (but not necessarily reward) people able to think like Bezos. The ultimate objective of this culture was to create the illusion for the consumer of a frictionless shopping experience, originally for books but ultimately for every product imaginable. The patented one-click shopping button, which enabled online customers to order, pay for and have shipped any item with a single click of the mouse, was the apotheosis of Amazon's consumer-oriented ethos. But this illusion required an enormous amount of friction behind the scenes. Bezos, a billionaire several times over whose ultimate dream is to blast himself into space from a launch pad he's building on his enormous Texas ranch, is notorious for squeezing as much productivity out of his underpaid employees as is humanly possible. Stone presents a nuanced portrait of the entrepreneur, especially as he sketches in Bezos' unusual family history and a surprising turn it took during the writing of the book. His reporting on the Kindle's disruption of traditional publishing makes for riveting reading. A must-add to any business bookshelf.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.