The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

But Amazon included the books of many mid-tier publishers in its lending catalog without asking for permission, reasoning that it had purchased those books at wholesale and thus believed it could set any retail price it wished (including, in this case, zero). In the imbroglio that ensued, the Authors Guild called the lending library “an exercise of

“When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘that will never work!’ And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.”

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked.

The talks lasted more than seven months, and the acquisition was finally announced in January 2011. Amazon ended up paying close to two hundred million pounds, or about three hundred million dollars—roughly the same amount Google had offered despite the fact that Lovefilm had expanded its subscriber base and its digital catalog of movies in the int

Now the Lovefilm board members would witness the same ruthless tactics observed by the founders of Zappos and Quidsi.

“They went from having a financial interest, where they thought they might make a financial return on their investment, to a strategic interest,”

Bates and Joy seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Wüsthof was walking away and vowed to acquire Wüsthof knives through the gray market. They also threatened the company, as Arnold recalls, saying that every time a customer searched on Amazon for the Wüsthof brand, Amazon would show advertisements for competitors like J. A. Henckels, another kni

As of this writing, Warehouse Deals has a selection of more than sixty Wüsthof products at steep discounts. Third-party merchants, mostly other authorized Wüsthof retailers, also sell their knives on Amazon, often through Fulfillment by Amazon, which allows the products to qualify for Prime shipping. So even when partners flee, the groundwork that

“But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people’s products.”