The Everything Store
2013
- amazon.com (firm)
- electronic commerce
- internet bookstores
- businessmen
- history
- booksellers and bookselling
- biography
- success in business
- entrepreneurship
- businesspeople, biography
The story
This book is 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. - Publisher.
What it’s like
Brisk, reportorial prose with the texture of a business investigation: dense with names, dates and boardroom scenes, and reading like a long late-night briefing rather than a lyrical memoir. The voice is clear and unfussy, moving between Seattle warehouses, early garage-era improvisation and the glassy corporate campuses of later years, so the sensory world is mostly fluorescent office light, shipping cartons stacked to the ceiling and the hum of server rooms rather than landscapes. Pacing is steady and propulsive, with short chapters that jump forward in time, and there is a restless, almost sprinting momentum to the narrative. Tone is cool and analytical with flickers of admiration and unease; the emotional register sits in the ambition and strain of its central figures, an intensely driven founder and the employees who absorb his demands, rather than in any personal warmth. Intensity is low: no violence or gore, no sexual content, and little fear, though the corporate pressure and occasional blunt cruelty of management are described frankly. It suits a focused weekday reading session, a commute, or a curious, slightly sceptical evening, and is for readers who enjoy business history, how companies get built, and the human cost of ambition.
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