Hardback: When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. - Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, 30 May 2010.
Amazon is increasingly a daily presence in modern life. Millions of people regularly direct their Web browsers to its eponymous website or its satellite sites, like Zappos.com and Diapers.com, acting on the most basic impulse in any capitalist society: to consume.
Amazon.com started off modestly as an online bookseller but its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with simply being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become 'the everything store', offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To achieve this end, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked.
Until now.
Today, it is a smorgasbord of selection, offering movies, garden tools, furniture, food, toys, music, electronics, jewelry, software, clothes, apparel, sporting goods, automotive parts - you name it - and the occasional oddball items like an inflatable unicorn horn for cats and a thousand-pound electronic-lock gun safe that is available for delivery in three to five days. The company has nearly perfected the art of instant gratification, delivering digital products in seconds and their physical incarnations in just a few days.
Amazon cleared $61 billion in sales in 2012, its seventeenth year of operation, and will likely be the fastest retailer in history to surpass $100 billion. Even the name has informally entered the business lexicon, and not in an altogether favourable way. To be Amazoned means "to watch helplessly as the online upstart from Seattle vacuums up the customers and profits of your traditional brick-and-mortar business."
In writing this book, Brad Stone has enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, to give readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Even compared to tech's other elite innovators - the likes of Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg - Bezos is a very private man. 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 that Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.
The Everything Store (2013) is the revealing, definitive biography of the technology juggernaut that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and changed the way we shop and read for ever. It is the tale of how one gifted child grew into an extraordinarily driven and versatile CEO and how he, his family, and his colleagues bet heavily on a revolutionary network called the Internet, and on the grandiose version of a single store that sells everything. It is a long-anticipated, honest account of the company of our age, and a deeply personal look at the iconic entrepreneur who founded it.
The Everything Store is the winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Awards 2013.
About the author: Brad Stone has covered Amazon and technology in Silicon Valley for such publications as Newsweek and the New York Times. He is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and lives in San Francisco.
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