One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com [Formato Kindle]

I guess it really depends on how much you already know about Jeff Bezos and the history of Amazon - that will probably determine whether you enjoy the book, IMHO. I knew very little, so I got a good, quick oversight into Jeff Bezos as a businessman, and into Amazon's early days. It discusses his strengths and questions his weaknesses as a business leader quite extensively. The traits that made him successful are probably his acute decision making abilities (why he chose books instead of CDs at first, why Seattle over CA, etc), long-term perspective, and a unique ability to execute decisions to precision.

Both sides of Amazon's book business - customers who want lower prices, and publishers who want to keep authors in business, are discussed at length. Amazon may have been portrayed, willingly or unwillingly, in a poor light here. I think Amazon is doing what is right by their customers and what any business would do in order to keep a competitive edge in the marketplace. It's a free market economy and any company is welcome to step in and help publishers get a higher price if they are able to do so - Amazon is not stopping them. There are two sides to the debate, both sides with their own merits, but I think the author spends more time on Amazon's ruthless negotiations with publication houses.

While there is lengthy discussion about the early days of Amazon, the ongoing battles with publishers, and Blue Origin, not much has been discussed about the current market Amazon is operating in and its projected path forward. Cloud computing, for example, is discussed only fleetingly.

The book reveals nothing new in itself, except maybe the early years of Bezos that I wasn't familiar with. If you're reading about the history of Amazon for the first time or know little about the subject, this book is probably a great starting point because it puts together bits and pieces of information that are fragmented all over the internet. However, the book seems to lack thoughtful analysis or insight into the company that would blow readers away. It's cut and dry from that perspective. Reading it on the Kindle, I didn't keep track of when the book would end, but when I realized that it had ended, I was puzzled, it felt incomplete. Sort of like eating an appetizer and realizing that that is it, there is no main course on the way.

I worked at Amazon for several years and have quite a lot of respect for the company and Bezos. This book doesn't do either justice. It's a tiny, large-margin book that has hardly anything you couldn't find by looking over a handful of shallow old Time magazine articles. Only a few people are interviewed, and hardly any information is given about what it's really like being in the company. The first thing I did when I got the book was to look in the index for the names of influential people I knew. Almost none of them was mentioned. Instead, the book quotes a couple early contributors repeatedly and then rehashes well-known stories. Even the quotes from the couple people I mentioned are so lacking in insight that I wonder whether they come from quickly written e-mails responses instead of face-to-face interviews. This reads to me like something rattled off in a week with hardly any research. I want to compare it to 'In the Plex' which is a terrific book about Google. The author of that book spent a huge amount of time in the company, had access to numerous important past and present employees, and gave you a great sense for Google's history and what it's like to work there. 'One Click' is a lazily written book that offers no insights, no new information, and pretty bad writing. I hope someone does a better job with this story someday.

This book came recommended along side Isaacson's Steve Jobs. This is NOT, by any means, a biography, or ANYWHERE CLOSE to the level of insight Isaacson puts in to his book. The only reason this book receives 2 stars, and not 1, is that it does not claim to be a bio.

It is, at best, a high level overview of 'stuff' around the growth of Amazon.com. It jumps back and forth, and doesn't provide any in-depth analysis or research. In addition, it seems that the book is based completely on secondary research. It doesn't appear that any more than a handful of people directly participated in any form of primary research for the book, and pretty much all the quotes by Bezos were from the public domain.

If the author was talking about the "rise of Amazon.com", a more 'timeline'-based approach would have been good to have. The book jumps around a fair bit, and really doesn't get into anything in any level of detail.

To sum this book - "Bezos is ambitious. He started with books. He made a loss. The markets crashed. He focused on profits. He got into other areas. He invested in technology. He's a geek. His quarterly earnings are as follows (some basic numbers), he loves space travel." That's pretty much it, IMO. Since I got it from the Kindle Store, I cannot even resell it...