the everything store jeff bezos and the age of amazon

Unsurprisingly, the focus stays closely on the internal culture of the firm, its financial performance, competitive tactics, organizational structure (such as it is), and the many personalities who have come and gone. It follows the company’s humble beginnings in a garage, its spectacular success during the dot.com bubble, its survival and recovery from the great challenge of the dot.com bust, and its continued growth and expansion amidst obstacles and challenges.

The Everything Store book belongs firmly in the business book category. Amazon is so many things at once-a rapidly expanding global mega-retailer operating in more than a dozen countries, a Web services provider, a publisher with eleven imprints, a hardware manufacturer (of Kindles and soon, Stone speculates, a phone), a video-streaming service, a constant e-commerce innovator, and much more-that those readers hoping to find a detailed treatment of any one part of the company might well come away disappointed. That said, covering the twenty-year history of a company and the fifty-year life of its founder in just 384 pages means that The Everything Store cannot, in fact, give us everything. He not only takes the story forward but he enriches what is known with new details and testimony, weaving together an immense amount of material into a readable, compelling account of a complex, dynamic company and its driven founder. But no significant book about Amazon has been published in ten years, which makes Stone’s book all the more welcome. Much of Amazon’s (and Bezos’s) story has been told before, either in the business press or in a few books about Bezos and Amazon’s early years: Robert Spector’s : Get Big Fast (2000) James Marcus’s Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut (2004) or in Mark Liebovich’s The New Materialists (2000). The result, based on 300 interviews, as well as Stone’s fifteen years of reporting for Newsweek, the New York Times, and Businessweek, is a deftly crafted biography of both Amazon, the company, and Jeff Bezos, the man.

Although Bezos did not consent to being interviewed for the book, he approved interviews with other Amazon executives, as well as friends and family, making The Everything Store the first book about Amazon to have the authorization of its subject. With The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, technology journalist Brad Stone set out to write the “seminal” book about Amazon. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

The everything store jeff bezos and the age of amazon