The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Another ruthless e-mogul bestrides the world in this lively study of the Amazon founder and his quest to sell books and all other conceivable merchandise over the Web. While he doesn't have quite the rabid nuttiness of a Steve Jobs, Bezos in this portrait is cut from the same cloth: a vicious and occasionally unfair competitor; a penny-pinching slave driver of a workforce divided into unhappy employees and super loyalists; and a man full of messianic zeal about the consumer conveniences flowing from the world of e-commerce, brimming with bold initiatives that only sometimes pay off, who largely delivers on his promises to cut costs and increase consumer choice, without registering how profoundly his actions are altering the Republic of Letters and society at large. Stone, a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, explores Amazon's technology breakthroughs with its Kindle e-reader and cloud-computing initiatives, but mainly tells a surprisingly traditional story about monopolistic retail, hinging on price wars over diapers, disputes with toy suppliers, carefully cultivated economies of scale, and the nuts and bolts of getting goods into customers' hands (the book's detailed account of Amazon's maddeningly complex distribution and shipping operations is engrossing). Stone's vivid profiles and lucid analyses of business dynamics make for an entertaining, insightful, behind-the-scenes account of the e-commerce revolution. Photos. (Oct.)