Rating: 
Summary: A fascinating account from an employee insider
Review: Amazon.com came to epitomize the rise and fall of the dreams and hopes of the .com world, and AMAZONIA: FIVE YEARS AT THE EPICENTER OF THE DOT.COM JUGGERNAUT probes inside the world's most famous online merchant to examine the history of the bookselling giant. Chapters provide a first-hand account from the perspective of one employee, also include insights on Amazon's unusual caste system, and follow the rise and fall of Amazon's employees in a volatile online world. A fascinating account from an employee insider who was there to watch it all.
Rating: 
Summary: Dull re-visit to already covered territory
Review: As a current Amazonian I looked forward to reading this book by a former colleague. Unfortunately, Mr. Marcus' work falls far short of expectations. Covering much of the same ground as Mike Daisey in "21 Dog Years..." and Robert Spector in "Get Big Fast," the author brings neither Daisey's sweaty sense of humor nor Spector's euphoria about e-commerce to a look at the first years of Amazon.com. Marcus seems light on the facts (he messes up more than a small number of time frames) and bored by his subject matter. As a writer I expected a better story and as an insider I know that there is more that he could have told. Sadly, this is not the definitive book on Amazon.com.
Rating: 
Summary: Good inside story.
Review: I liked this book. It was a good inside view of how Amazon operated and grew.
I must admit that it brought back memories of my own experiences during the dot-com boom. During a similar timeframe (about four years), I saw gameplans change frequently and before I left saw the generalist, non-tech people like myself replaced by the techno-elite. These phenomena seem to have been more widespread than I realized at the time.
The author does go off on some diversions here and there during the story, but for the most part I was able to get a feel for what it was like to have worked at Amazon during that time.
I would recommend this book to others. The writing and language makes it very easy to get thru quickly.
Rating:
Summary: Amazon.com in history
Review: I've been using Amazon since 1999, but never thought terribly much about what was going on behind the scenes. So it was neat to be able to see who was responsible for the content of the site, day-to-day operations, and all the little things that I took for granted. I read first with trepidation, because the cover makes it look far more dire -- the frowny interpretation of the logo suggests that the author was unhappy with the company and will write accordingly -- but in actuality, he seemed more than fair, and there didn't seem to be any sour grapes about it. I gave 4 rather than 5 stars because of the oft-mentioned Emerson tangent... I'm afraid I haven't as much patience for literary diversions as some (though I am a voracious reader, go figure), but would certainly recommend this as a good, quick read about Amazon's early days.
Rating:
Summary: Case History of Innovation and Editorial-Business Conflicts
Review: If you read the business press after a start-up has blossomed, everything is very neat and tidy. The actual process of becoming a healthy company is much messier than that, filled with unexpected changes, false moves and painful retreats. Amazonia is the first book I have read about Amazon.com that captures the process of its development from an insider's perspective as the company grew from a fledgling in books to a powerhouse across many product categories.
At the same time, the book does an even better job of capturing the inherent conflicts between editors and those seeking to optimize profits in any publishing related enterprise. Being an on-line bookstore that turned into on-line mall only served to make the conflict sharper and more painful for the editors.
I must admit that I liked Amazon.com much better when it was a book-only site. The commitment then to having quality reviews by excellent editors made the site seem like visiting a knowledgeable independent bookstore where you knew the people could be trusted to give you good advice. Putting in the editorial reviews now on books is only a partial substitute for that element of Amazon.com's past. The silly recommendations of the software just clutter up the pages now. I was very glad to see that Mr. Marcus dealt with this issue so well. Amateur reviewers will be intrigued about what he has to say about us.
Finally, the book looks at how the wealth that a successful start-up creates affects those who work for the company. Like many early employees (Mr. Marcus was #55), he left when his original, pre-IPO options were all vested. The price he paid for that wealth in his personal life isn't fully clear, but you get a sense that working at Amazon.com didn't help matters.
Although Mr. Marcus has a powerful story to tell and can turn a phrase and a sentence quite well, the book's organizational structure leaves a lot to be desired. I graded the book down accordingly.
Casual fans of Amazon.com will enjoy reading about the background behind all of those decisions that puzzled us at the time. What were they thinking? For those who are newer Amazon.com fans, the book has considerable early history covering 1996-1999 that will entertain and enlighten.
Rating:
Summary: The people who got paid to do these reviews
Review: It's another insider memoir of the dot com boom and bust. Amazonia is better than most both because the author is actually a writer, and because he was employee #55 at Amazon.com.
Employee 55 was James Marcus, a free-lance writer who was hired as a Senior Editor in 1996. He was one of the first hires in the rapidly expanding editorial department that would provide content for the site -- book review, blurbs, author interviews and more. He was hired for his literary capabilities and not for his technological expertise, as he recounts with trepidation the first time he "flipped the site" where all the new files and pages are uploaded at the end of the day.
A good deal of the book deals with the low-level conflict between the Editorial Department, who would have loved nothing better than extolling their favorite books, and the business side, which was of course interested in maximizing the number of books they sold, not the quality. As Marcus says in recounting his first day at work
Over the next five years I would write thousands of reviews, articles, interviews, and miscellaneous bits of copy for Amazon, and was proud to sign my name to just about all of it. Sthill, there's something poingnant, and telling, about the fact that I spent my first afternoon there engaged in hack work. For even as the company blew millions and millions of dollars on content -- even as Jeff hired an editorial staff larger than that of most magazines, and gambled that this SWAT team of eggheards would be good for something -- it was clear that art and commerce weren't necessarily the comfiest of bedfellow. You could, like me, ignore the potential friction. You could aim your work at some ideal, book-besotted reader and let retail take care of itself. But when you were writing something for Amazon -- where, incidentally, nobody ever told me to make nice to a single title -- you couldn't avoid the suspicion that your opinions were succumbing to the gravitational tug of the marketplace.
Nowadays, Amazon's home page, if you are identified as an Amazon customer, is uniquely tailored to your past buying habits and suggestions for future purchases based on some data-mining algorithm. But in the 1990s, the home page was crafted by humans, and ultimately by Marcus, who became the Home Page editor. If you visited back then, you would see book suggestions from him and his co-workers, as well as links to editorial features written by them. In the early days, editors did even more, including customer service. And during the Christmas rush the editorial department, the techhies, and even Jeff Bezos would pull shifts down at the warehouse, helping to get the orders out.
Most of his book is a straightforward tale of how Amazon went from 55 employees to 8,000 in a little more than a year; how they crested the boom, and fell with the crash. He captures the feeling of a company that grew so fast, and then has to watch wave after wave of layoffs hit. He left Amazon in 2001, so he doesn't cover Amazon's recovery, although he acknowledges it in an Epilogue.
There are some organizational oddities to the book. He takes most of the coverage of his, and his co-workers, stock options and segregates it into one chapter. Although he wasn't vested, and thus couldn't exercize them all, at one time he had options worth some $9 million. While he doesn't give the final amount, his take appears to be far, far less than that. He spends a little more time throughout the book talking about the fact that, while you had the paper profits from your options, you had to live on a comparatively meager salary in pricey Seattle. I think he also spent more time talking about Ralph Waldo Emerson than he does about his marriage breaking up, which he treats almost as an aside.
Many of us writers on the web have hitched ourselves to Amazon in some way, in the hopes of making some money. Blogcritics is one example, and many of us have websites that belong to the Amazon Associates program. Reading this book won't help you make more money from it, but it does give you some appreciation for how Amazon got to the position it is in today.
This review originally ran at Blogcritics.org
Rating:
Summary: Rediscovering the 90's with a great read
Review: James Marcus's Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut is a surprisingly quick and absorbing account of the author's five-year stint as an editor at Amazon.com. Hired in 1996, in the early days of the e-tailer's historic march to world domination (Marcus was employee number 55), the author watched the value of his stock options explode in value during his tenure, and he saw his job as a provider of editorial content become increasingly marginalized as Amazon turned to "personalization widgets" to automate the content of its pages.For an Amazon enthusiast like myself (I placed my first order--for a copy of Alison Weir's The Wars of the Roses--relatively early, in October of 1997, and have handed over bagfuls of money to the company since), Amazonia offers a titillating view of life behind the web site. Have you ever wondered, for example, what a professional Amazonian's take on the reviews of Harriet Klausner (Amazon's top-ranked reviewer) might be? But the book also reminds us of our recent history, which, given the frenetic pace of change in the computer age, seems very long ago indeed--those early days in the mid-90's when the average man on the street was only vaguely aware, if aware at all, of the wonders of the world wide web. Remember PlanetAll, for example, an online datebook service Amazon acquired back when PDAs weren't ubiquitous? I remembered, but vaguely, once Marcus jogged my memory. Reading Amazonia, then, is an experience akin to reminiscing with a rediscovered friend from grammar school. It's also a great read.
Rating:
Summary: A Lament of Heady Times Passed
Review: The relationship between art and commerce has a long and conflicted history. In the newspaper game, for example, the battle between the marketing people and editorial continues to rage to this day. In this case, it's a conflict over space; advertising usually wins out over the extra hundred or two hundred words demanded by the journalist. The half page Mercedes-Benz spread takes precedence over editorial and content. In the late eighties, in an effort to maintain journalistic integrity, the "advertorial" was born. Promotional copy on a product or particular brand was no more in the guise of `real' editorial, either it was journalism or advertising copy, and the twain shall never meet. However, this emphatic separatism has mutated, they have merged, and it is now extremely difficult to distinguish between the two.
James Marcus was hired as a senior editor at Amazon.com in 1996. This was a heady period of mind-boggling expansionism and astonishing innovation. Marcus was hired on his skills as a `literary' man, a journalist and critic by trade; he was hired to input his literary insight, his ability to write reviews and articles about books, possibly to guide readers to the pulse of the literary world. But as Amazon evolved, these literary aspirations, Marcus's underlying purist literary sensibilities, clashed with the gruesome reality that Amazon was a business and in the business to sell books, a lot of books. Did he maintain his "literary integrity", honestly assessing a book on its literary merits, or did he "sell out", turning his 45 word reviews into mere advertorial? Only he can answer that. More than anything else, it is the story about the early days at Amazon itself, the genius of Jeff Bezos, and his mission to hire the smartest people from around the world, to turn Amazon into the phenomenon it has become, that makes this book a fascinating read.
There is a distinct air of lament in this narrative, a disenchantment perhaps, over a fortune lost or a goal not achieved. Marcus sermonizes in parts of the book, at times imparting a condescending tone, and he is also transparently careful not to tread on anyone's toes. Only a fool burns their bridges, however, that hint of bitterness is difficult to ignore.
There is no doubt that James Marcus looks back at his time at Amazon, helping to blaze the trail, working along side extremely intelligent people and contributing to the companies meteoric rise, as a privilege and an experience he'll never forget. This sentiment comes through as well.
If you have any interest in the history of Amazon from one man's personal perspective, this text would be well worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Neither Fish nor Fowl
Review: There are two ways you may be approaching Amazonia: as a business book or as a personal memoir. To me, it didn't quite succeed as either.
If you are looking for the compelling entrepreneurial business story of how Amazon rose to become the leader of ecommerce -- sort of a how-to -- keep looking. (Robert Spector's book is closer, though it is very light also.) Mr. Marcus is admittedly unsophisticated about business. In fact, his core attitude is disapproval over how Amazon transformed from a free wheeling literary magazine-cum-bookstore where men and women of letters played a large and interesting role (good), to a business where numbers-driven analysis ultimately took over (bad). Business decision makers are generally portrayed unsympathetically and with little insight into the tradeoffs they were making. So if you're looking for insights into marketing, investment, inventory decisions, etc., you would be better off trying to find old stories from Barron's or Fortune.
As a memoir, it is not very personal and unlike, say, Liar's Poker, it doesn't have a cast of exciting secondary characters to bring it to life. As to his personal life, the focus is completely on what happened at work and at least one of the characters at work is a fictional composite. So as a book about an individual's progress through life, there's not much here. The major personal issue is that he had misgivings about being a commercial (blurb) writer instead of a literary artist, which tension is never resolved. He also touches on a sense of guilt over making a certain amount of money, which is also unresolved and not incredibly interesting to begin with. Perhaps it could nevertheless have been interesting if, as in Liar's Poker, there was a fascinating rogue's gallery of secondary characters to enjoy. Not so. The workers at Amazon appear to have been very busy but not particularly fascinating.
In general, compelling stories about people who are somewhat uncomfortable with the life decisions they've made and don't really do anything about it are rare because that's just not a compelling narrative structure.
Rating:
Summary: How to Get Rich Reviewing Books
Review: There was no way I was not going to read Amazonia. I love memoirs, I love Amazon.com, and a story about a book reviewer who gets rich reviewing books for Amazon, well that sounds just fine to me.
The first half of Amazonia is fast and fun. James Marcus gets his first "real" job as Amazon.com is taking off, when it is still an upstart company staffed by enthusiastic and smart people (Jeff Bezos asked all potential employees what their SAT scores were). He is hired as an editor, but finds he spends a lot of time working on web pages and packing books. It's okay though, because everyone has a stake in the company's success.
By the second half of the book, Amazon.com has become a grownup company where everyone speaks in management cliches and tries not to brag about all the cool stuff they are buying now that they are fabulously rich. Marcus spends all of his time at work or with people from work and his marriage is on the rocks. No wonder. He has become an Amazon.com bore.
Marcus describes the giddiness of the early Amazon.com years well, as the young employees throw themselves into a project that is as likely to go belly up as it is to make them millions. It's a huge gamble and you want them to succeed as much as they do themselves.
Marcus, a great fan of literature, goes off on egghead-y tangents from time to time. If you are not a modern literature geek, then these parts are easily skipped. He also gets rather involved in the technical aspects of the web site a bit more than seems entirely necessary.
Amazonia brings to mind David Denby's recent American Sucker, but Marcus avoids the worst of Denby's wallowing in self-pity, and doesn't dwell on his foundering marriage and only hints at an affair with an Amazon colleague.
Amazonia is a fun book for people who like rags-to-riches stories, especially those who dream of making their fortunes at something as unlikely as book reviewing.
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