From TeleRead:
Quora is a fun and interesting tool sometimes. It’s kind of neat to see what sorts of things people might ask (though, admittedly, about 95% of the questions are completely banal), or what they might say in answer to your questions.
But sometimes a question on Quora can serve as a writing prompt to get you thinking. For example, my answer to someone asking “Why doesn’t Barnes and Noble have something similar to Kindle Unlimited for Nook?”
As I note in my answer, the better question might not be so much why Barnes & Noble didn’t, but why Amazon did. And that led to me recalling all the other things Amazon did.
. . . .
Remember how Amazon began? It was a simple little bookstore site devoted to the proposition of selling paper books, just like your average Waldenbooks, Borders, or Barnes & Noble, but doing it over the Internet.
That’s all Amazon was, and all Amazon did, in the beginning. It was a store where you could buy physical goods over the Internet—like about a zillion other stores back in the day. It wasn’t even the only Internet bookstore! For the longest time, I only ordered books from Books a Million (I had a loyalty club membership and everything), because I had been annoyed at some obnoxious thing or other Amazon had done, so long ago that I can’t even remember what it was now, and had the foolish notion that my “boycott” of Amazon might have some effect.
. . . .
But what put Amazon out in front of all the rest of them? Well, just look at everything Amazon is and does now. An expanded merchandise selection beyond (way beyond) books. The Kindle. Kindle Desktop Publishing. Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime Now.Amazon Music. Amazon Streaming Video. The Kindle Owners Lending Library. Kindle Unlimited. The Fire Tablet. The Amazon Echo. Sunday mail delivery. Amazon Dash buttons. And on. And on. Every single one of those things was, at one time, something completely new Amazon was trying, and had its share of skeptics. And yet, all of those things have stuck around, so far.
And that’s the secret, really. Since it started acquiring the cash flow to end all cash flows. Amazon has never rested on its laurels.
Link to the rest at TeleRead
And, of course, the comments section has someone going on about how Jeff Bezos is a terrible person.
They’re always making the Kindle app better. Sometimes the library only offers ePub and I’m always so bummed. I miss highlighting that I can later copy off Amazon and transfer to Evernote. I miss reading speed, translation of foreign phrases, and page flip. It’s also a bummer that I can only read the book on one device. Unlike it’s competitors, Amazon keeps trying to be better.
I won’t say this piece is wrong, but I think it isn’t quite on point. Amazon had two things going for it, leading to what it is today.
The first is that Bezos correctly identified the best online commerce niche early on. Books are comparatively small, easy to warehouse, and practical to ship. On top of this is the long tail effect. Even early on, Amazon’s selection was vastly larger than even the best physical bookstore. Then there was a streak of genius in how well it replicated the bookshelf browsing experience. Put these together and you have a business playing to the internet’s strengths. Compare this with those operations trying to sell fifty pound bags of dog food over the internet. The only categories really comparable were CD and videos.
This brings us to the second thing Amazon had going for it. Bezos never thought of Amazon as an online bookseller. It was an online commerce company. Books were just where it started. The really tricky part was Bezos maintaining such a position of strength that he could resist all the ways the company could have cashed out, instead cycling its profits into expansion. Remember CDNow? This was a perfectly reasonable online commerce company–far more reasonable than pets.com. But it couldn’t stand up to Amazon simply because Amazon had all that cash available because it wasn’t paying dividends.
Put these together and Bezos figured out how to hack modern capitalism. At at time when most “innovators'” highest ambition was to be bought out by Microsoft, Bezos had figured out how to leverage the new internet technology and build a behemoth.
‘Amazon’s selection was vastly larger than even the best physical bookstore’.
Vastly and then some. As a reader, I’ve been with Amazon from the beginning because I could order books from my favourite authors that were either out of print, or never available in Australia.
I also like your comment about Amazon ‘hacking modern capitalism’. Capitalism used to stand for choice, but a walk through any supermarket shows how little real choice we now have. Lots and lots of products from the same few manufacturers, but little that is actually ‘different’.
Large bookstore chains are pretty much the same. For true diversity, you have to haunt the local, independent bookstore…or Amazon. 🙂
a walk through any supermarket shows how little real choice we now have.
I frequently walk through my supermarket, and see zillions of producers. I am offered so many choices, I lack the time to evaluate them all, and just take what I know works for me.
I went looking for Wasabi sauce last week, for the first time ever, and since I wasn’t familiar with it, I read the labels. I had eight choices from eight different producers. Then I discovered I had overlooked the offerings in the health food section. I picked one. That stuff is hot.
Yesterday Amazon introduced several new versions of the Echo. I scanned the info about them, but didn’t see any reason to switch to the newcomers. Seems like I’d have to spend a while reading more about them to discover the differences — sort of like reading Wasabi labels, except they’re all from one company.
Not a huge fan of wasabi so I’ve never attempted to buy it, but here in Australia, our two main supermarkets – Coles and Woolworths – tend to stock identical brands, of things that ‘sell well’. Thus we have aisles of breakfast cereal but all that abundance is basically from just a very few manufacturers.
If I want things that are different, I’m much more likely to find them at the small, local independent supermarket.
Perhaps this is lack of true choice is simply a function of how things work here. I honestly don’t know.
In the early days, Amazon didn’t warehouse the vast quantity of books. They relied on jobbers like Ingram and Baker & Taylor. They still rely on jobbers today to fulfill many of their orders. The consumer would never know if the book was shipped from Amazon or from one of the jobbers in an Amazon box.
Any link that can be eliminated in the shipping chain saves money. Amazon wins. Ingram wins. The consumer wins.
Absolutely
I had absolutely no idea how Amazon did it. All I knew, or cared about, was that they had /everything/. I guess it built trust, in me and millions of other readers too.
This ‘drop shipping’ isn’t unique to Amazon, I (and many others) did the same with technology equipment in the late 90’s – open up a website and contract with a handful of large distributors who run dozens of warehouses across the country, and boom – I looked like a giant company while I was actually in my pajamas shipping out millions of dollars of gear a month that I never laid eyes on.
I read an interview with Bezos where he described the very early days of Amazon, when orders trickled in slowly. He ordered books from a warehouse each day, but the warehouse required a minimum order before they’d ship it. Many days, Amazon didn’t have sufficient orders to meet the minimum. Bezos knew he had to ship orders promptly or watch Amazon die before it ever got going, so he found a way around the minimum order.
The warehouse, it turned out, would ship a partial order if they were out of stock for anything on the order. Bezos discovered an obscure history book that was never in stock and might even have been out of print. It was still in the catalog, though, so he used that book to pad orders that wouldn’t haven’t qualified, otherwise. Sometimes he ordered two different books and half-a-dozen of the out-of-stock history book. Bezos got the books he wanted and canceled the unfilled part of the order.
Apparently, the warehouse either never figured out what he was doing or never cared. I don’t know the title of that obscure book, but without it, Amazon might have died on the vine.
I started ordering through Amazon almost as soon as they opened their store in Germany.
Because they were the best way to buy English language books here. The local book stores could only order the very expensive British editions, and it took them 3-6 weeks to get them into my hands. I usually browsed second hand bookstores for those books.
Amazon had the cheap US versions, and they arrived in a day or two, with FREE shipping. Just no comparison at all. And my TBR stack grew and grew. Now I read ebooks, but it still has the best selection of English language books.
I read ebooks now too, and guess where I buy them? 😀
Germany does have the Tolino, but you have to go book store websites to buy ebooks for it (or sideload). And those stores charge impressive prices for ebooks, unless they have been published by indies. (My books are on there, just to offer variety.)
I still prefer Amazon, even for ebooks. More choice and better prices. More indies.
Das verstehe ich. The easiest way for me to get books in German or Portuguese is through Amazon. After that, gutenberg.org.
I think we are at a point where a more apt comparison is between Amazon and Google. And there is probably a longer list of new things Google has tried and then abandoned after a while. Amazon also seems to keep tweaking their new things until they work….with the exception of the Fire phone, which was not really a “new” thing to start with.
Not only is Google another company that believes in trying new things, it even subsidizes its workers spending time on ideas of their own, which Google can monetize and sell if they turn out to be worth something.
having worked there, not really.
in theory they encourage people to work on other projects, but that depends on your manager’s approval.