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One of Amazon’s more extraordinary innovations is so-called Kindle Direct Publishing, through which hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of works have been self-published in the last several years.Īll who have achieved success in that system are writers of formulaic genre fiction. So I wouldn’t say that there’s a house style outside of what Amazon self-publishes. Nowadays, authors are under a lot of pressure to serve a market. There’s an aspect of Amazon that is an intensification of certain themes in the history of print capitalism. In another way, that’s always been the case. But for much of literary history, the idea that writers are servants to their readers was anathema. It’s more about an increased sensitivity to what readers want - an imperative to serve the reader and think of them as a customer. It would be hard to say that there’s one house style. Amazon as a self-reflexive, fictionalizing enterprise. So I started thinking of Amazon as a science fiction epic sprung to life, with all of the incredible enthusiasm for technological innovation on the part of Bezos and the company. There’s always going to be a story you tell. That doesn’t disappear, even when you’re constructing an enterprise where the bottom line is at issue. I started thinking of Amazon as a science fiction epic sprung to life.īezos is somebody who, from a young age, was steeped in the American epic - a spacefaring, commerce-building narrative. Bezos himself is an inveterate reader and consumer of science fiction.
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One of Amazon’s first employees, MacKenzie Scott (Bezos’s ex-wife), was an aspiring novelist and ultimately achieved success. I wouldn’t dispute that account whatsoever, but I want to add to it. This was the explanation for why Amazon originally chose to deal in books. They’re relatively durable they’re all roughly the same shape there are so many millions of them that the largest physical bookstore could never have even a tiny fraction and they were already trackable through ISBN numbers. Books just happened to have certain qualities that made them ideal for an internet business in the early days of e-commerce. For a long time, that attachment to books had been treated as merely incidental. The primary fact is that the company began as a bookstore. Bezos was already a rich Wall Street investment banker who then bought a house with a garage so he could enact the classic scrappy-founder myth of the tech industry, starting a business in his garage.Īt a cellular level, what’s the relationship between fiction and Amazon? One of the founding tales of the company - that Bezos started it in his garage - is a well-planned-out myth. Amazon has created narrative and world-building tales about itself, with Jeff Bezos as protagonist. In your book, you write about how fiction is particularly central to Amazon’s view of itself. About half of all paperback and hardback purchases in the United States are made on Amazon, as well as just about every ebook purchase, via Amazon’s Kindle, which has about six million ebooks. Books make up a small amount of Amazon’s total business - less than 7 percent of its revenue comes from books - but they’re foundational to the company.Īmazon started as a bookseller, and it has achieved dominance in that industry.