Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut

The Earthly Paradise

OK, let’s first scoot the elephant out of the room by conceding James Marcus is hot.

After losing his way from the narrow path of literary humanism, Marcus elegantly describes his mid-life journey through the corporate wilds of Amazon.com. He tells his story as ‘Employee No. 55’ with self-deprecating charm and offers a fascinating look into how Amazon worked in the early days (everybody was to be on-deck during the holidays to work in the shipping warehouse, and you could feel the cold of the cement floor through your shoes.) He doesn’t discuss company secrets and when he’s got something mean to say about someone he masks their identity. James Marcus is a likable, easy-going guy. Which is going to hurt his show more sales.

He traces Amazon from its early days as an exciting, cash-rich place that was getting big fast and encouraged innovation, through a time of experimentation and occasional failure, the rise of the MBA bean counters, and the eventual burst of the dotcom bubble and hard times for the company. As senior editor, he ran the Books page and had access to literary figures and a team of top-flight editors that most magazines could never hope to assemble. He was successful and the site was interesting (I remember it.) Success breeds complexity, and complexity draws MBAs, which in turn often breed more complexity. Eventually, Marcus and most of the editorial team were fired or quit after their five years were up and their stock options available.

Marcus remains aloof from the business side of Amazon and is slightly disparaging of his role in hawking James Patterson; but he realizes that more people buy Harry Potter than Ovid’s Metamorphosis. He also has an entertaining meltdown when he’s passed over for promotion, and gets his comeuppance by talking the talk and proving that he is the man for the job of pushing a wide spectrum of books into American homes. And here is the really salient point of the book (other than his hotness)- people sell books to people. Almost at the end of his time at Amazon, Marcus introduced a Classics Bestseller list which had a conversion rate (people who clicked on it then bought a book) of almost 16%, a staggeringly high number. After he left, the Classics Bestseller list was taken down (no doubt it didn’t integrate with a prevailing MBA algorithm.) People sell books; Amazon’s bookbot can’t offer the unexpected surprise or the refreshing affirmation. As a customer, I love Amazon and use it frequently, even when B&N is cheaper (but not when it’s MUCH cheaper.) I wish they would have retained the editorial team as a sales driver and not reduce the site to recommendations of the bookbot (if you liked this, then you’ll love this), which trots out the same books time after time and eventually is as forgettable as a news scroll marquee. Reed Elsivier does a good job of providing bright, often reliable descriptions, but the site has lost the human touch.

Oh, and Marcus loses most of his stock money when he sells at a low. show less

Amazonia is a history of book selling, Amazon at its beginning, and its impassioned leader Jeff Bezos. The story stops in 2003 leaving the author in some doubt if this was a successful enterprise. Now we can see that commercially and Wall Street wise its rise has been stupendous but what it has done to the book publishing, book selling industry, and the reading public is problematic. James Marcus gives us an easy read with just enough nuance and fact to make it satisfying.

Quotes: (pages 36-37) “At that moment, in fact, he was laying the groundwork for Amazon's initial public offering. I knew nothing about that and had little notion of the company's financial health. Susan mentioned to me in passing one day that Kleiner Perkins show more Caulfield and Byers, the big daddy of tech incubators, had pumped $8 million into the coffers just a couple of months before I came aboard. To me that sounded like major money. The sort of sum you'd fork over to a real corporation. Yet the place didn't feel like a real corporation. The payroll department still consisted of Jeff's wife, McKenzie, a slender young woman who drifted through the office wearing a tiny back black the size of a nectarine. There were dogs on the premises, there were crude wooden desks everywhere, and there were more employees, already, than could be accommodated by all those desks. It felt like Spring Break in a cool climate, and I decided to enjoy it for as long as it lasted.”

(pages 103-104) “Well, the numbers were impressive. In fact, it's worth pausing at this point to note some additional ones. By October, Amazon would be among the twenty-five most visited sites on the entire Web. That same month, the company announced that its customer data base now topped the 1,000,000 mark. This was not simply a numerical triumph. It indicated a real shift in public sentiment: suddenly more than a million Americans had entrusted a website---with their names, addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, and so forth. Plus, the data itself was likely to turn into a major asset. Of course the company offered repeated assurances of confidentiality. But information, as the mantra told us, likes to be free. Or at least fungible.
Let me fish up a more impressive number. By the end of 1997, the company would rake in $147.8 million in annual revenue. That same year, the total North American market for consumer books ran to about $18 billion...Look at it this way, though: only two years before, hardly anyone had even heard of e-commerce, and the idea of buying stuff over a computer network sounded something like out of the Jetsons.”

(page 193) “The point was that we had a content factory in operation here. With a staff of twenty-five editors--- bigger, in fact, than many a national magazine---and a huge pool of freelancers, we were able to walk, talk, and even quack like a real publication. And since hundreds of writers were eager to collaborate with us, not to mention a sprinkling of elected officials and holy men, we had and additional advantage. True, many of these contributors simply wanted to flog their latest book. Some may have had their arms gently twisted by the publisher, who was twice as eager to have the book flogged. Still, Amazon's giant clout created some superb editorial opportunities for us, which would have been hard to duplicate elsewhere.”

(page 225) “What as the problem then? Well, at some point a conversation of a different kind took place in the Amazonian corridors of power. The company had a choice. It could continue to pay its editors and freelance writers top dollar for book reviews. Or it could shift the emphasis to its customer reviewers, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands and were happy to work for nothing. What was the decision? Let's just say it was a victory for Internet democracy.” show less

An interesting account of the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of Amazon from a small company to a huge juggernaut of a store, the triumph of accountants over the book people and the triumph of Jeff Bezos' vision of an online book marketplace that has moved away from books and diversified.

James Marcus spent five years, starting quite early in the company's story, with amazon and he details a lot of what happened from his point of view. It's interesting and you can see some of the pangs of regret as his job takes over his life and his life suffers.

I was an early adopter of amazon and remember early days of shopping there but some of what he is proud of and remembers from then really didn't filter through all that well to my show more level. A shame really, but then again it was an interesting thing to watch from the outside then and interesting for me to watch from the inside now, looking back. Where amazon is going to go is anyone's guess but it has certainly carved a niche for itself in the world of books. show less

This is a really interesting account of the 5 years that James Marcus spent as employee #55 at Amazon.Com. I've worked at startups and dot coms and I can see the headquarters of Amazon.Com out my living room window so possibly, I had a bit more interest in the topic than your average reader, but I think it has broad appeal.

Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut By James Marcus looks at employee number 55 of Amazon.com. Marcus is a writer answering a job interview for an internet site in 1996. One forgets how weird this was back then, but Marcus come's over as really enthralled by his new job as a book editor on this site (but not always enamoured with the technology). Marcus gets shares as part of his job (which he sell's when really low....whoops), works late hours packing over the holiday period for Amazon and talks with his boss Jeff Bezos. Slowly, as the technology and the reviews from users come's in Marcus become's more despondent in his role, but always with a smile. This even leads to Marcus penning his own reviews on the show more site as a joke (which back fires when he wins the Amazon prize). This book is a MUST read. Marcus comes over as a nice guy, stuck in the headlights of the biggest internet store, and laughing at the stupidity of the internal politics.
I also sent him an email saying how good his book was and got a very nice response. show less

A reminder: art is not a popularity contest.

pp 226

http://dhamel.typepad.com/book_blog/2004/06/amazonia_by_jam.html
I