This Sunday night CNBC shines the light on Amazon with the premiere of Amazon Rising. From the press release: CNBC tells the story of a shrewd visionary named Jeff Bezos who bet his fortunes on the exploding internet and created one of the most admired and feared companies in the world. Today, Amazon sells everything from accordions to zippers – nearly $80 billion worth a year – and has changed the way we shop, bringing goods to our doorstep faster than we ever imagined. Correspondent David Faber reports on a powerhouse that has upended the publishing and retail industries, and...
Goodreads gone….bad
viaNow that Amazon has swallowed up Goodreads it's safe to say most roads from the book social network universe now end in Seattle. With the exception of LibraryThing the rest are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the e-commerce giant.The only road left not ending in the Emerald City goes through Portland, Maine. Though Amazon, through their acquisition of ABE books in 2008, owns a minority interest, there is still plenty of independent light emanating from Tim Spalding and the LibraryThing crew.It was late in 2007 when I first started covering the then emerging book social network field. Being a bookseller, living in...
Pinterest meets Amazon at Scroll.Am
Scroll.Am homepageImagine taking a Pinterest-style scroll through the Amazon product database.Scroll.Am, was developed by Amsterdam-based designer and med student Jonathan Bouman. Bouman, who derives his motivation from his love of mashups, scrolling and Amazon, built a similar site last year which provided a nifty way to scroll Reddit.Every product leads with a visual and all the data and sharing opportunities you need is just a mouse-over away. Books category home page Clearly applicable to non-new books as well. With a little tweaking you could see it as a formidable online-catalog format for booksellers. The idea of wrapping the image with the necessary related content and delivering...
Amazon by the Numbers
At 80 million monthly visitors one "could fill 60 Disneylands." Just imagine if just half of those visitors went to an independent bookshop, either online or in store, and god knows what the trade can do with half of the $9 billion in book sales. They're not kidding when they pronounce Amazon the "undisputed giant of online retail," but of course, as we all now, bigger does not automatically equal better... via Mashable
April 3rd, 1995. Amazon sells its first book
April 3rd, 1995. A day that will live on for a long, long time, for it marks the beginning of the end of bookselling and publishing as we know it.It was on this day the first book was bought from Amazon by a customer.The book was Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas HofstaderIt was purchased by a John Wainwright who worked for a technology company in the Bay Area.The purchase did not go unnoticed, for Amazon has named one of the buildings on their new Seattle campus, The Wainwright!More at Quora:Amazon Company History: What was the first book ever...