Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut [Paperback]

James Marcus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2005

Employee #55's story of the first five years of Amazon.com, which "brims with fascinating Amazoniana." (The Los Angeles Times)

In a book that Ian Frazier has called, "a fascinating and sometimes hair-raising morality tale from deep inside the Internet boom," James Marcus, hired by Amazon.com in 1996, when the company was so small his e-mail address could be [e-mail], looks back a decade later at the ecstatic rise, dramatic fall, and remarkable comeback of the consummate symbol of late 1990s America.

Observing "how it was to be in the right place (Seattle) at the right time (the 90s)" (Chicago Reader), Marcus offers a ringside seat on everything from his first interview with Jeff Bezos to the company's bizarre, Nordic-style retreats, creating what Jonathan Raban calls "an utterly beguiling book." For this first paperback edition, Marcus has added a new afterword with further reflections on his Amazon experience.

In the tradition of the most noteworthy and entertaining memoirs of recent years, Marcus offers us a modern-day fable, "a clear-eyed, first-person account, rife with digressions on the larger cultural meaning throughout" (Henry Alford, Newsday).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With Amazonia, James Marcus adds to the ever-simmering stew of Amazon.com analysis a new, almost quaint perspective: that of an employee hired for his expertise in literature. Marcus traces the company's familiar climb, plummet, and re-ascent, but this time we witness the pyrotechnics from the book-strewn hallways of the editorial department.

After an abbreviated heydey, editorial talent lost cachet at the burgeoning Internet behemoth, replaced by metrics worship and automated innovations like "truncating widgets." Despite the demoralizing shift, Marcus makes evident the loyalty editors continued to display, a "quasi-religious devotion… almost impossible to explain to outsiders." The concept of making history was just too intoxicating for most to abandon (as were the stock options).

Marcus's writing has enough genuine humor and self-deprecation to squelch any accusations of "optimizing for optics," or worse, whining. Aside from a few sections that feel somewhat adrift (oblique mentions of an imploding marriage and an extended Emerson sidebar) the prose is driving and the voice engaging and remarkably fair.

For anyone who worked at Amazon.com in the early days, reading Amazonia is akin to leafing through a high school yearbook (I was an Amazon editor from 1997-2002). Nostalgia is inescapable--even for the irritations of the time, like All Hands Meetings (pep rallies) and the exaltation of MBAs (the popular kids). The thing about yearbooks, though, is that we're really only interested in our own. Whether outsiders will be as captivated by this surf down virtual memory lane is questionable. For alums, it's a lasting keepsake. --Brangien Davis --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

With Amazon.com firmly established as one of the leaders in e-commerce, it is easy to forget the company's early roots as a struggling online bookstore. Marcus, who was employee 55 and one of Amazon's first editors, provides a captivating, witty account of how the fledgling e-retailer transformed itself from a startup that generated $16 million in sales in 1996 to a behemoth with revenue of $5.3 billion in 2003. The early days of Amazon, Marcus recounts, were full of a do-it-yourself attitude, with everyone at the company encouraged to try different ways to drive customers to the site. In Marcus's case, it was writing and assigning reviews, the content designed to make people decide what to buy. But although Amazon founder Jeff Bezos began as a firm believer in the power of content, his philosophy gradually changed to what Marcus calls the "culture of metrics," in which everything connected to the site could be measured. And as Amazon added more and more products, the importance of content slipped away. It's clear Marcus's most satisfying time at Amazon was in the early years, even if that meant picking and packing books during the holiday rush. There is even a bit of nostalgia in his tone, which people in the book industry can especially appreciate: once upon a time there was a company whose employees scrambled to sell books over this new thing called the Internet. Today the company has become a software and retailing machine dedicated to selling as many widgets as efficiently as possible.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595580247
• ISBN-13: 978-1595580245
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,304,075 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Marcus was born in the literary hotbed of Paterson, NJ, and grew up in the New York area. He is the author of "Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut" and a half-dozen translations from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova's "The Duel." His work has appeared many publications, including the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon, the Nation, Raritan, the Paris Review, and the Village Voice, and his essay "Faint Music" was selected for "Best American Essays 2009."

He is Deputy Editor at Harper's Magazine, after a three-year tenure at the Columbia Journalism Review. He blogs about books, music, and miscellaneous stuff at House of Mirth. A collection of essays from CJR called "Second Read," which he edited and introduced, will be published by Columbia University Press in November.