A review by rick2
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone
4.0
It’s good. It’s definitely better than the first. Documenting Amazon while so much of it is still changing and hidden from the light is the sort of Herculean task that one has to admire. However, as such a task, one is doomed to fail. There’s simply so much to Amazon that the cursory glance this book takes, while better than most, still falls short of a real portrait. It’s like flying over the Midwest and saying you understand Ohio and Kansas.
As is the case with so many of these tech companies, it’s a sort of Cronenberg monstrosity that has grown from a cuddly garage sized startup, into a respectable large company, and now into the multi limbed krakennesque behemoth that you see today. The sheer scope of Amazons operations is insane, and no book can truly cover it. There are hundreds of books written about fulfillment by Amazon and this book touches maybe 5 pages of it. AWS gets mentioned in passing, but without much depth. I’ve paid my rent several times over with KDP and it’s not even mentioned at all.
That said, for a reasonable view of Amazon from 10,000 feet, read this book. This was a good overview of the unwieldy monster that seems to have snaked a limb into all of our lives.
As is the case with so many of these tech companies, it’s a sort of Cronenberg monstrosity that has grown from a cuddly garage sized startup, into a respectable large company, and now into the multi limbed krakennesque behemoth that you see today. The sheer scope of Amazons operations is insane, and no book can truly cover it. There are hundreds of books written about fulfillment by Amazon and this book touches maybe 5 pages of it. AWS gets mentioned in passing, but without much depth. I’ve paid my rent several times over with KDP and it’s not even mentioned at all.
That said, for a reasonable view of Amazon from 10,000 feet, read this book. This was a good overview of the unwieldy monster that seems to have snaked a limb into all of our lives.