Rating: 
Summary: How to Make Millions in Your Spare Time 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.
Rating:
Summary: Well written, funny, and has very modern economic setting
Review: This great story was almost over before I showed up. James Marcus started working for Amazon.com in 1996, a year in which it did $15.7 million worth of business. Options were granted then, but "You couldn't exercise and sell a single share until you vested, a process that began precisely a year after the options were granted. In my case, that meant September 9, 1997: prior to that date, I might as well have owned a strongbox full of Monopoly money." (p. 69). The value of the options grew to fantastic figures. "Whatever you did, the market kept behaving like a Roman candle, so it made no sense to park your cash in some chicken-feed bank account: that was the equivalent of losing money, throwing it out the window." (p. 77). "Until, that is, March 10 of 2000. On that date the NASDAQ hit its all-time high, closing out the day at 5,048.62, and then commenced a long, ruinous slide, which would eventually siphon $3.8 trillion from our collective pockets." (p. 80). Dropping back to May 15, 1997, the day of the initial public offering of Amazon.com stock, there was a crowd of employees waiting for an announcement from Jeff Bezos on the amount of capital raised, which heard the preliminary question:
"Who had written the most book reviews in a single week? (The winning total was 137, although I don't recall who the culprit was.)" (p. 70).
I could write that many reviews in a year, but it would be difficult to convey what each of those books had been worth to me if I tried to do it in a single week. Someone younger than myself might be able to see the need for so many reviews as an opportunity to show how fast their fingers could type, but a business based on the activities of such frenetic consideration of the work of ten, or even a hundred, different authors needs the skills of a literary man like James Marcus to describe it adequately.
Reviewers who seriously wonder who cares if their opinions have any legs should try doing an internet search for whatever name they put on their reviews to see if any Amazon.com partner sites are reproducing their views as authentic information. James Marcus doubted that this would be going on after he took a card at the Book Expo America in Chicago in June 1997 from a woman who worked at R.R. Bowker who wanted to use their reviews, "treating us as responsible critics rather than hyperventilating shills." (p. 91). Back then Jeff "was demanding enormous sums for our humble content" but it might have had so much potential that he was waiting for some offer that was sure to make him a billionaire. The key was to find a way that fed in more business. "The middleman, the genius of capitalism, was being engineered out of the picture. If you had a taste for jawbreakers, you called it disintermediation. If not, you just grinned and counted your money." (p. 91). There is no index for checking how completely this book covers financial topics, but near the end, an opposite picture of Amazon.com is presented. "Even our cachet on the Web itself had begun to evaporate; tech purists didn't like it when we enforced our patents for one-click shopping or the affiliates program. We were stifling innovation, they claimed, behaving like the bullies who dominated the traditional corporate landscape." (pp. 221-222).
Best of all was that customer reviews finally started to matter. "A certain percentage of them were dumb as a post, of course, . . . Amazon now had 15 million registered customers, and many of them liked to share their opinions. Some of them couldn't stop sharing their opinions, as if their existence depended on it: they were nothing if not critical." (p. 224). Managing customer reviews was a new system to produce some winners. "Visitors were encouraged to vote on the reviews they read. The scores were then tallied, run through some mysterious algorithmic wringer, and used to rank every single customer reviewer." (p. 225). The way it works, "Quantity equals quality. It's the statistical fallacy all over again, applied like a mustard plaster to my own line of work." (p. 226). The author's own Jim Kibble reviews ranked above mine and won a $50 gift certificate, which I never did.
If economics does not provide much humor for your life, you might consider buying this book for its description of the Nisqually Earthquake of 2001, 6.8 on the Richter scale, which certainly caught me by surprise. Among the damage, "And across the street in F.A.O. Schwartz, a million or so pieces of candy had vacated their bins: gummy worms, lollipops, twizzlers, gumballs, caramels, and those little necklaces made of Sweet Tarts." (p. 240). But work turned into a scheme "to carpet bomb the entire planet with email." (p. 247). To redeem himself, James Marcus hand-complied a Classics list including something by the Marquis De Sade, sent out mailings, and in six weeks got nearly 25,000 hits and sold 3,956 books. (p. 251). I'm glad I found this book, but the burn-out that comes with being too long in a rapidly changing situation makes being a kindred spirit wearing at times. Lit lovers will find a lot more here to like than I did.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written glimpse of Amazon.com circa 199x.
Review: Unlike Mike Daisy's sarcastic take on life at Amazon.com or Robert Spector's more serious look at the business of Amazon, James Marcus takes you to right into the soul of the company during its early days. Serving as a memoir to the era, rather than a definitive work about the company, Marcus accurately captures the essence of the rise and fall of the dot.com culture from the inside. From descriptions about the unconventional hiring practices, to the eclectic mix of personalities and the nuances of dot.com "etiquette" you can live or, as in my case re-live, the craziness of working for a company while it creates its own corporate structure...in 5 short years. I also like the fact that he decided to talk frankly about the acquisition and dissolution of our paper wealth, as this was a topic that permeated the culture. However, while I was reading, I kept wondering whether anyone who didn't work at Amazon.com during its early days would find it as satisfying to read? I can think that if they choose to read it they will find an entertaining, well-written book that from a personal level captures the culture of Amazon.com and incorporates the economic boom and bust of the late nineties. For me, as a former employee from 98-02, the book will as "my" memoir. A place I can go to for window back into the things I loved about working there and the changes that occurred as it became more corporate and the culture shifted.
Rating: 
Summary: More
Review: What begins as an intriguing insight into the insides of Amazon.com turns into a mish-mash of snippets of Amazon's inner workings, office politics and Marcus' own need to display his well developed literary vocabulary.
There are more literary references on each page than the page itself can fit. Yes Marcus, we know you are well read, and we know you read many books during your time at Amazon.com, but I honestly didn't understand a word you were writing about half the time. Chapter 14 - the 'Emerson Jag'? You lost me there.
To potential readers: a lukewarm book with only half the Amazon.com content it deserves. For those very interested in discovering the 'Juggernaut', this story wont leave you with much.
|
