At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. That kind of think just ins’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. “I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. When you are in the thick of things you can get confused by small stuff,” Bezos said a few years later. When deciding to make the leap from a stable job to a start-up, Bezos came up with what he calls “the regret-minimization framework.”

And, most important, there were three million books in print worldwide, far more than a Barnes & Nobel or a Borders superstore could ever stock. There were two primary distributors of books at that time, Ingram and Baker and Taylor, so a new retailer wouldn’t have to approach each of the thousands of book publishers individually. They were pure commodities a copy of a book in one store was identical to the same book carried in another, so buyers always knew what they were getting. Why Start With Booksīezos choose books as the first category for Amazon because: Anyone who wants to better understand the dynamics of disruption or just gain a better understanding of the website we’ve come to love must read this book.

I really enjoyed Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

The everything store