This note considers Amazon.com, the dominant online book etailer.

It covers -

• introduction
• studies
• development

It supplements the broader discussion of online retailing and marketing mechanisms and issues.

     introduction

[under development].

     studies

We're due for an adulatory biography of Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. There was an intelligent profile in the March 1999 Wired and one in the May 2001 First Monday.  Lenny Riggio and Barnes & Noble featured two months later.

Amazon is described - superficially and without sparkle - in Rebecca Saunders' Business the Amazon.Com Way: Secrets of the World's Most Astonishing Web Business (Oxford: Capstone 1999). For us, spray-paining 'dot com' and 'etail' onto every page is not a substitute for analysis or hard information.  We recommend instead Robert Spector's more insightful Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: Harper 2000).

Sandeep Krishnamurthy has published an Amazon.com case study (PDF), perhaps more insightful than Mikey Daisey's memoir 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com (London: Fourth Edition 2002) or James Marcus' Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut (New York: New Press 2004).

     development

[under development]





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