I just finished reading this great memoir written by James Marcus, which details the 5 years he spent working for Amazon.com from 1996-2001. The book is a great read, as James clearly knows many more words than I do, and uses them all cleverly to describe the sights, sounds and spirit of early Amazon. From there, he talks about the amazing phenomena of watching Amazon grow to manage 1% of all book sales, the perceived threat of Barnes & Noble, payola for home page book placements, and the decline towards the end of his tenure, where certain ventures Amazonian didn’t quite turn out.

I felt as though I was sitting next to him as he watched the influx of the MBA’s, when he recounted the growing pains of the Amazon auction site. A few passages:

On MBA’s and the jargon (p130):

Perhaps the first sign that the wind had shifted was the mad profusion of jargon. Sure, you had always heard the odd bit of economic Esperanto: the price of an item was its price point, and the tasks you needed to accomplish were deliverables. The copy we editors so diligently produced was verbage, a corruption of the already insulting verbiage. The more common burn rate indicated the wads of cash we were spending. These phrases at least had the advantage of simplicity. But now entire sentences had to be translated back into English. Pulling on revenue levers meant making more money. If we leveraged our verbage correctly, the division would soon reach an inflection point (translation: we would make more money). The main thing in any case was to monetize those eyeballs. Yes, that last operation had a surrealistic ring to it - it suggested a visit to Salvador Dali’s optician - but it actually referred to making the most of our enormous customer base.

On the cracks in the early Amazon auction algorithms (p181):

Let’s say you wanted to buy a copy of Peter Gay’s Mozart. In a prominent spot on the detail page, you found links to several related auctions. Alas, the composer’s quill pen and peruke were not up for sale. Instead you were invited to bid on a silver pendant in the shape of penis. If that didn’t tickle your fancy, there was also a collection of old magazines, with titles like Thrust, Blueboy, and Cummin Up. The third item seemed to be a jar of lubricant. There was, I confess, a certain thrill to solving these mysteries. In this case we had the author’s surname to thank. It was some time before I could bring myself to look at the detail page for Moby-Dick.

All in all, it is a great read. I was particularly drawn to the depiction of founder Jeff Bezos. Also, I have had the distinct pleasure over the past year working directly with James at AOL, and while James was working at Amazon.com, I was working at the Evil Empire, also known as Barnes & Noble. Small world, eh?