Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

New York: Little

Brown, 2013. $28 Cloth.

Explosive. Thats how the cover of Bloomberg Business Week bills The Everything
Store by journalist Brad Stone. Thats an overstatement but the meticulously
reported book has plenty of gems for anyone who cares about Amazon, Jeff Bezos,
entrepreneurship, leadership or just the lunacy it took to build a company in less than
two decades that now employs almost 90,000 people and sold $61 billion worth of, well,
almost everything last year.

From moment one, Bezos, who named his company after the river that blows all other
rivers away, had what Stone calls a limitless spring of new ideas, and Amazon has
already seen boom, bust and boom as well as both fawning adulation and deep
skepticism.
Stone recounts how he pitched Bezos on the idea of a book. Bezos who eventually
encouraged friends, family and executives to talk to Stone, but didnt himself cooperate
asked the author how he was going to deal with the concept of narrative fallacy. He
was talking about Nassim Nicholas Talebs contention in his book The Black
Swan, which is required reading for all Amazon senior executives, that humans use
narrative to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.

With The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, technology journalist
Brad Stone set out to write the seminal book about Amazon. 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.

The result, based on 300 interviews, as well as Stones fifteen years of reporting
for Newsweek, theNew York Times, and Businessweek, is a deftly crafted biography of
both Amazon, the company, and Jeff Bezos, the man. Much of Amazons (and Bezoss)
story has been told before, either in the business press or in a few books about Bezos
and Amazons early years: Robert Spectors Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (2000); James
Marcuss Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut (2004); or in
Mark Liebovichs The New Materialists (2000). But no significant book about Amazon
has been published in ten years, which makes Stones book all the more welcome. 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.
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. Amazon is so many things at oncea 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.

The Everything Store book belongs firmly in the business book category. It follows the
companys 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. 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.

These generic requirements limit Stones ability to focus on what might interest the
readers of the Journal of Electronic Publishing the most: Amazons outsized influence
on the book publishing business and its continued deep and intimate involvement with
books and their turbulent ecosystem. Nonetheless, Stone does unearth new
information. His chapter on the development of the Kindle, in particular, should interest
even those most aware of Amazons involvement with books. That chapter (entitled
Fiona, the Kindles codename in development) shows how fully the Kindle was

Bezoss project, and provides perhaps the best example, after the initial conception and
launch of the online bookseller in 1995, of Bezoss tenacity in following through on a
bold and, to some, improbable plan. It is the fullest treatment Ive read of the Kindles
pre-history, and it proves how important books have been not only to Amazons growth
as an e-retailer but also to its emergence as a multi-faceted company operating across
various industries.

In Stones telling, two different roads inside Amazon led to the Kindle. The first was
Bezoss early interest in the Rocketbook, an e-reader device developed by Martin
Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In 1997, Eberhard and Tarpenning visited Bezos hoping
to convince him to invest in their company, NuvoMedia. They almost persuaded him but
when Bezos, a shrewd investor, demanded exclusivity and veto power over future
investors, they went elsewhere (to Barnes and Noble and Bertelsmann).
The Rocketbook had some modest success but then fizzled after Eberhard and
Tarpenning unwisely sold NuvoMedia to the now-defunct Gemstar, a company that, as it
turned out, had little interest in the product. The Rocketbook was off the market by
2003. Meanwhile, Bezos watched from the sidelines, still interested in the idea of an ereading device.
The second route to the Kindle was the opening of the iTunes digital music service in
2003, after which Apple quickly became the top music retailer. This development both
stunned and impressed Bezos and convinced him that Amazon needed its own digital

strategy. After trying and failing to come up with a digital music store that could compete
with Apples, Bezos settled on developing a digital strategy for books that would, like the
iPod and iTunes, control the customer experience. If they didnt come up with a digital
bookstore, he was certain that Apple would and, in so doing, take away Amazons core
business. The irony, of course, is that, by this logic, Amazon would be taking away its
own core business, pre-empting the competition by competing with itself. With urgency,
in 2004, Bezos set up a secretive research and design group, called Lab126, in Palo
Alto, with orders to develop an e-reader as soon as possible. He re-assigned Steve
Kessel, who had run the physical book category, to oversee the Kindle project. With
insight gained from Clayton Christensens The Innovators Dilemma, Bezos insisted the
Kindle be handled entirely separately from the printed books group. Otherwise, Kessel
would not be able to ruthlessly compete against Amazons established print book selling
business. Bezos told Kessel: I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone
selling physical books out of a job (234). Believing that they were riding the crest of a
digital transition, media type by media type, Bezos and his team urgently set out to
develop both an iPod equivalent for reading books and an iTunes store equivalent for
buying them.

While hardware and software designers worked on the e-reading device in Palo Alto
and, later, Cupertino, the Seattle office set to building the other crucial component of the
Kindlethe catalog of books that would be for sale through the device. Bezos decided
the Kindle store would need 100,000 titles at the start to be successful, and yet, by their

calculation, publishers had at that time converted only 20,000 into digital form. The
Seattle-based Kindle group set out with a mission to persuade publishers to supply
another 80,000. It is here that the Kindle story takes on a darker character.

At this point in the Kindle story, Stone turns back to survey the industrys now-soured
relationship with Amazona story that will be familiar, if simplistic, to those who
participated firsthand. According to Stone, the relationship between Amazon and book
publishers was in the beginning uncomplicated and largely symbiotic (240). Publishers
had welcomed Amazon as a counterweight to the large chains and big-box warehouses
that had been expanding rapidly in the 1990s and increasingly demanding steeper
discounts. Amazon, with its much larger catalog, had also opened up new revenue
streams from publishers deep backlists, the so-called long tail. Although there were
some occasional skirmishese.g., some publishers didnt like Amazon allowing
customers to write negative reviews; the Authors Guild didnt like Amazon allowing thirdparty sellers to sell used books next to new booksthey were insignificant compared
to what was to come later. After surviving the dot.com bust and with an ever-growing
share of the bookselling market, Amazon had displaced the big chains to become an
even larger force to be reckoned with. Focusing more and more on growth and
profitability, Bezos wanted more from book publishers in exchange for the special
benefits Amazon had brought the industry: a selection many, many times larger than
any of its competitors; the revival of the long tail; and a very low return rate of unsold
books. Amazon was becoming more and more like its bricks-and-mortar rival Wal-Mart,

demanding greater and greater concessions from its suppliers who were, in a vicious
cycle, becoming more and more dependent on Amazon.

One Amazon practice that Stone digs up will likely make publishers cringe. In what
Amazons book team called the Gazelle Project, small publishers were singled out for a
special bullying tactic. If they were not willing to capitulate to demands for better terms,
Amazon retaliated by turning off its recommendation engine and other automated
systems that make a publishers books more visible to shoppers. Small publishers, who
perhaps unwittingly had become dependent on Amazons ability to move their back
catalogs, would eventually feel the pain and come groveling back. The Gazelle Project
got its name after Bezos had suggested that his staff negotiate with small publishers
the way a cheetah pursues a sickly gazelle (243). When Amazons legal team got wind
of the name, they demanded it be changed to the Small Publisher Negotiation
Program.

Relations grew even worse in the frenetic run-up to the Kindle in 2006. With the Kindle
still top secret, Amazon had a very hard time motivating publishers to convert books to a
new format. Bezos had whipped his executives into a Kindle frenzythey felt that they
were either about to make the future or have it snatched away by one of their
competitorsbut the publishers were not falling for what Stone calls Bezoss fever
dreams. They didnt see the urgency and had no reason to believe that suddenly e-

books would take off when interest had so far been tepid. Unlike the music business,
which was facing massive on-line piracy, book publishers didnt see the problem that
Amazon was claiming it would solve. This difference in perspective left Amazon with
little leverage and provoked a nastiness from the company. Book publishers feared no
similar bogeyman [as the music labels], Stone explains, So Bezos finally had to turn
Amazon into one (250). Amazon executivesone of whom had acquired the nickname
the battering ramsent contemptuous and incendiary emails; screamed at
publishers when they didnt get what they wanted; and even had the nerve to go straight
to authors, hoping that would make the e-books appear faster, which only angered
publishers further. One Amazon executive in the Kindle group was ordered to reopen an
already completed contract with Oxford University Press for the use of one of its
dictionaries in the Kindle. After he refused to do so, arguing that it would be bad
business practice, a tussle arose with the battering ram, and he was fired. Another
executive in the book group, who left around the same time, told Stone that after leaving
Amazon he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Only after Bezos revealed the
secret Kindle to publishers and, especially, once hed shown them a prototype with
functional wireless, did they come around. By the fall of 2007 Bezos had 90,000 books
for the Kindle, which was close enough to his goal. And when the launch finally came
around that November, the publishers joined in the celebration.

But the greater offense to the publishers was yet to come. Throughout their tense
negotiations, Bezos had deliberately withheld the Kindle e-book pricing strategy. Making

a gut call, Bezos had decided to sell the most popular books at $9.99, a price
fashioned after Apples $.99 price for a single in the iTunes store. Amazon would be
taking a loss but that willingness to defer profits is yet another example of Bezoss
strategy of long-term thinking or his ultra-competitivenessor both, depending on how
you choose to look at it. The book publishers would eventually come around, he
believed, but, in the time being, he knew that publishers did not want e-books to be
priced so low they would compete with their more expensive hardcover editions.
However, in his continued effort to gain publishers cooperation, Bezos instructed the
Kindle team to say only that they hadnt yet decided on their pricing strategy. At the
launch, when the $9.99 price was revealed, publishers were taken aback. Initially
confused, they soon realized that theyd been outmaneuvered. (Readers will find more
detail about Amazon muscling publishers in George Packers hard-hitting analysis of
Amazons effect on the book business in The New Yorker [Cheap Words, February 17
& 24, 2014)], an excellent complement to Stones book.)

The bitterness left over from the bullying and the deception around the Kindle e-book
pricing strategy would fester into the price-fixing debacle of 201012, when Amazon
out-foxed the publishers yet again. Stone provides less detail on this more recent
episode (for that, I recommend Andrew Albaneses The Battle of $9.99notably a
Kindle Single). From Stones point of view, the importance of the Kindleespecially
after the February 2009 release of the Kindle2is that it represents a turning point in
the story of Amazon. With the successful conception, design, and execution of the

Kindle, Amazon had entered the league of the most exciting companies around: For the
first time, Stone writes, Amazon was spoken in the same breath as Google and Apple
not as an afterthought but as an equal (285). It proved that Amazon was a widely
diversified company; that it wasnt afraid to compete with its own core businesses; that it
was much more than a retailer; and that it had successfully grown out of its image as a
dot.com survivor. At the same time, the company had also gone from being perceived
as an underdog to a bullying behemoth that seemed to think it could set rules not only
for itself but also for everyone else. Stone takes up this new image of a black-hatted
Amazon, post-Kindle, in the final third of the book, where, over three chapters, he
pursues the question of whether Amazon is missionary (as it claims) or mercenary (as it
appears to critics).

Others, however, might look to the story of the Kindle not for insight into Amazon itself
but for a glimpse into the future of reading, publishing, and bookselling. Toward this end,
I wish that Stone had had the space to explore Amazons extensive involvement in the
book ecosystem more fully. Beyond his chapter on the development of the Kindle,
publishing figures into the book mainly as one especially vivid example of Amazons
aggressive business practices. He describes briefly the bookseller boycott against
Amazons trade imprint headed by Larry Kirshbaum (who has since left Amazon), but he
has little to say about the wide range of Amazons other publishing activities and its
growing number of imprints. Nor does he consider Amazons extraordinary success with
self-publishing through CreateSpace and KindleDirect. The new communities that have

grown around the Kindlebuyers, readers, authors, publishers, and booksellersare

nowhere to be seen. And he provides no analysis of the various responses to Amazons
dominance in the form of publishing start-ups, publisher strategies to sell directly to
customers, or the entire debate about DRM, which is central to the success of the
Kindle. It is in these proliferating developments in and around Amazon that one might
glimpse a more subtle sense of the future of books and publishing than that provided by
Stones rather narrow focus on the soured partnership between book publishers and
Amazon.

One especially important aspect of Amazon as an Internet company is its gradual

accumulation of a virtual data empire. By virtue of having the largest book catalog in the
world, as well as a vast network of third-party sellers of new and used books, Amazon
has developed a staggering amount of expertise about the business, very little of which
it shares. It sits atop an immense trove of information about books, bookselling,
consumer preferences and reading behavior, and it has gobbled up many smaller
companiesAbebooks, Goodreads, Lexcycle, Audible.com, The Book Depository,
Shelfari, Bookfinder.com, and its 40% stake in LibraryThingacquisitions that, it can be
surmised, serve to enrich this targeted expertise. Stone makes no mention of the
massive amount of data Amazon stores about its customers, nor does he question how
it safeguards customer privacy or how it responds to inquiries from the government
about its customers.

Because Amazon is one of biggest and most data-centric technology companies, I wish
Stone had taken an interest in these issues around civil liberties, government
surveillance, personal privacy, and more general questions about information policy in
the wake of the Internet. He, for instance, makes no mention of the controversy around
Amazons remote deletion of George Orwells 1984 from some customers Kindles after
it was determined that the publisher who had offered them for sale didnt have the right
to do so (a story Stone himself reported in the New York Times in 2009). Nor does he
mention Amazons controversial decision to quit hosting Wikileaks, possibly under
political pressure from Washington. Although Stone briefly mentions that Amazon is a
savvy navigator of the law, he gives very short shrift to Amazons sophisticated
lobbying and legal tactics. Indeed, the best evidence of the companys savvy
navigation is that its behind-the-scenes maneuverings rarely come to light, unlike those
of competitors Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Stone briefly mentions a white paper that
Amazon sent to the FTC with regard to the publishers price-fixing arrangement with
Apple, but certainly there is more to the story of Amazons involvement in the DOJ
investigation. Stone is certainly skilled enough to investigate the more political work that
Amazon engages in as it pursues its expansive agenda of growth.

As a company Amazon is, literally, all over the place, and its twenty-year history has
been dramatic. To his credit, Stone has impressively wrestled that history into brisk
narrative form without taming it too much and without ironing over all the creases and
wrinkles. Still, I cant help feel that he has found himself in the constrained posture of

seeing the world primarily from the perspective of his subject. Near the end, he sums
up: When you have fit yourself snugly into Jeff Bezoss worldview and then evaluate
both the successes and failures of Amazon over the past two decades, the future of the
company becomes easy to predict. The answer to almost every conceivable question is
yes (339). Such awe-struck insularity may be the fate of all books that cant be fully
researched without the authorization of their subjectsindicating the perils of what has
been called access journalismor of an author who spends a long time immersed in a
compelling and outsized story that revolves around a complicated and charismatic
figure. Nonetheless, it is reasonable for a reader to want and expect more. After all,
during his book tour, Stone himself told an interviewer at the Commonwealth Club:
These [tech] giants are changing the world in all kinds of ways ... [and] it is our job to
get underneath their skin a little bit and describe what is going on.

When Bezos gave his blessing to Stones book, he also told him that he thought it was
too early to be reflective about Amazon. (In the late 1990s, Bezos told Robert Spector,
author of one of the early Amazon books noted above, the same thing.) Given Bezoss
futurist benthis famous long-term thinkingit is hard to know when, if ever, reflection
can properly occur. Thats the trick of futurism: it defers judgment. Stone is thus to be
commended for not taking Bezoss advice, and for plowing into the unfulfilled present,
providing his readers with careful, detailed reporting and astute observation.

The books weakness is that its central character and omnipresent force in
a way, the entire company is scaffolding built around his brain, Stone writes
of Bezos is strangely absent. Because he didnt sit down for interviews, his
current thinking about his own and his companys past is missing. As a reader,
you long to know how Bezos rationalizes, or doesnt, some of the
contradictions in himself and his creation. Lets hope Stone eventually tells
that part of the story, too.