Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

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

With Amazonia, James Marcus adds to the ever-simmering stew of Amazon.com analysis a new, almost quaint perspective: that of an employee hired for his expertise in literature. Marcus traces the company's familiar climb, plummet, and re-ascent, but this time we witness the pyrotechnics from the book-strewn hallways of the editorial department. After an abbreviated heydey, editorial talent lost cachet at the burgeoning Internet behemoth, replaced by metrics worship and automated innovations like "truncating widgets." Despite the demoralizing shift, Marcus makes evident the loyalty editors continued to display, a "quasi-religious devotion? almost impossible to explain to outsiders." The concept of making history was just too intoxicating for most to abandon (as were the stock options). Marcus's writing has enough genuine humor and self-deprecation to squelch any accusations of "optimizing for optics," or worse, whining. Aside from a few sections that feel somewhat adrift (oblique mentions of an imploding marriage and an extended Emerson sidebar) the prose is driving and the voice engaging and remarkably fair. For anyone who worked at Amazon.com in the early days, reading Amazonia is akin to leafing through a high school yearbook (I was an Amazon editor from 1997-2002). Nostalgia is inescapable--even for the irritations of the time, like All Hands Meetings (pep rallies) and the exaltation of MBAs (the popular kids). The thing about yearbooks, though, is that we're really only interested in our own. Whether outsiders will be as captivated by this surf down virtual memory lane is questionable. For alums, it's a lasting keepsake. --Brangien DavisRead More

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  • Product Description

    The entertaining story of the first five years of Amazon.com, recounted by employee number 55.

    "Americans with an eye cocked toward the markets were asked to believe that Amazon, a two-year-old bookseller, was worth more than the combined values of Sears and US Steel."—from Amazonia

    James Marcus was hired as a senior editor at Amazon.com in 1996, giving him a ringside seat for the company's explosive rise and dismal wallet-busting swoon. Now—as the e-commerce giant makes an astonishing comeback—he tells all. Unlike the recent crop of dot.com memoirs, this is no tale of a bankrupt and brokenhearted entrepreneur. Marcus came aboard as a self-described "token humanist," and his take on the new economy juggernaut is predominantly a cultural one. Why, he asks, did Jeff Bezos's brainchild become the key symbol of Internet euphoria? How did the company change as it morphed from a miniscule start-up to a global, multibillion-dollar leviathan? Was the Web breaking more promises than it kept? And finally: What could an editor do to resist being transformed into a hyperventilating shill?

    In answering these questions, Marcus takes us to meetings, job interviews, trade shows, and corporate retreats. We spend a freezing holiday season at the warehouse, and a considerably warmer afternoon at the company's summer picnic—where Bezos himself mans the dunk tank. Amazonia is a work of rare wit and razor-sharp observation, and a superlative guide to America's lost world of the nineties.

  • 1565848705
  • 9781565848702
  • James Marcus
  • 5 August 2004
  • The New Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 224
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