The New York Review of Books is offering a free review of a book about Jeff Bezos’ life, written a decade ago. Bezos didn’t like the book, so he forbade readers from preordering it on Amazon. It’s time for Brad Stone to update his book. The past decade has shown new sides to Bezos’ character.
Free from the Archives
Today is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s sixty-first birthday. For our July 10, 2014, issue, Steve Coll reviewed The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s account of both Bezos’s life and Amazon’s transformation from an upstart digital bookstore into the kind of corporate behemoth that saw fit to prevent customers from preordering Stone’s book in paperback, or from preordering other titles from Stone’s publisher.
Steve Coll
Citizen Bezos
“The real problem of ‘the Age of Amazon’…does not concern antitrust economics or consumer prices. It concerns the future of reading and writing. There is no evidence that high retail book prices today discourage reading. The problem is the opposite: because of the digital revolution, the price of information has collapsed in a very short time. Free news, stories, YouTube videos, games, and other content generated by users but enabled by online aggregators and pirates have undermined the leverage of authors and publishers who depend on copyright protection to make a living.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Amazon is very sneaky and duplicitous, it’s constantly trying to get you to enroll in Amazon Prime when all you’re trying to do is to order a particular item which you can’t find anywhere else, (online or brick and mortar stores). You really have to be on your guard when using Amazon which I rarely use. Although, the billionaire owners of the giant brick and mortar stores aren’t morally superior to Bezos. They all belong to the robber baron class who try to keep worker wages at a minimum.
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That they do. And it’s even trickier to get out of Prime, they put some very sly stuff in to make you think you have left….but oh no you actually have not pressed all of the ‘Are You Sure?’ buttons.
For reasons of logistics and age me and my wife (joint age 178) tend to use Amazon / Kindle quite a bit.
Avoiding the Prime Traps or whatever they are calling Fast Delivery at that time is the closest we get to Computer RPGs…..quite challenging too!
Still keeps our minds sharp! 😀
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And their search engine can’t cope with requests unless you make those…verrry…verrry simple.
My wife predicted years ago that they were over reaching themselves beyond just books and music.
How long before they go the way of those ‘grand old’ department stores under the weight of ‘the latest thing’?
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Amazon is now selling and delivering groceries. It also fills prescription drug orders. I can’t think of any retail item that you can’t buy on Amazon. Except automobiles.
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Coming soon, Diane.
A partnership with Elon, & Amazon selling Teslas.
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I daresay they are working on it.
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I once subscribed to The New York Review of Books until I stopped because I didn’t have the time to read all of the very long interesting articles. It took so much time, that I had no time to read or write anything else. The problem was I wanted to read them all and reading just one takes a lot of time.
So, I let my subscription expire, to free up that time so I could read other books and write posts for my blogs and the books I want to write. That was years ago.
There are only 24 hours in a day, and we’re supposed to sleep for a third of that time each day. Then there is eating, et al.
I started reading this piece in the NYRB, and then as it went on and one, I started to skim.
As compelling and well written as it was, I had to quit, so I could start my day before the day ends. It’s already 11:20 AM, and I’m not even shaved and dressed yet. I’m still wearing the bath robe I put on when I got up about 9:30.
The NYRB should seriously consider adding a 150 to300 word elevator summary before each long piece starts that answers the who, what, where, when, how, and why so readers who don’t want to read all day get the basics?
Over time I stopped subscribing to all the other paper printed publications I once read and only have one left. That one is National Geographic. I read each issue while eating because it is printed on paper. When I finish eating, I mark the spot where I stopped reading so I can pick up where I left off the next time I eat. I usually finish each one about the time the next issue arrives in my USPS mailbox.
Unless we can find a way to adapt, we can’t compete with WOKE and MAGA slogans. I’m not suggesting no more long pieces like NYRB published but add that elevator long summary before the long piece, so readers who don’t have that much time to set around and read all day without getting much done still learn something useful that isn’t a four-letter slogan that got FELON47 re-elected.
It took me 12 minutes to write this comment. Now I’m going to go shave and eat my breakfast sometime after I was supposed to eat lunch.
Maybe I’ll have to skip a meal and cram to get all the other stuff I planned to do today done.
My house is too cold and I’m going to add a radiant wall heater to my bedroom today to cut my energy bill. Instead of heating the entire house so I don’t freeze to death at night, I’m going to save money by only heating my bedroom that doubles as a home office. Then I have to audit my Facebook ADs to make sure they are working so readers are finding my books on Amazon as long as I have books on Amazon since Bezos might decide to censure them because three of them are not friendly to FELON47, who now owns Bezos and Facebook and X and Google, and most of the corporate media.
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Lloyd: I hear that . . . (and I read your whole note, though I didn’t time it). But I cancelled the New Yorker and the Atlantic for those same reasons you cite in your note–it was just too-too much to take in, and I always felt I was missing something I should have read. Though I hunt down particular articles from those publications when I see them referred to here and there. WAPO is out.
The thing about the Review is I am also writing and have found its articles almost always broaden my understanding about the things I am writing about, especially about historical contexts; so, I kept it, and I have also cited articles from there in my work. I have stacks of them with notes on the front page that refer to specific prose that, when I read them, it was manna and seemed to jump off the page at me. I think that’s because the people who write the articles are themselves in love with learning (like you and me, I think) and write from a vast and deep background in their fields. Who better to do such reviews.
I also spend those hours reading because, as I get older, I think it keeps the tracks in my brain from clogging up. I actually can think better when I have immersed myself in several articles, especially at 2:00 in the morning when I wake and, otherwise, tend to brood about past stuff.
I also read many of the links that I find here on Diane’s blog. For me, and at my age, what a joyful way to live. CBK
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Lloyd: About WAPO: I lived in the Washington DC area for many years; and we had the Sunday Post delivered every week. Back then, they had a book-like thick section called Book World, where Michael Dirda edited it for a long time.
I had gone back to college in my early thirties after having a dismal early education, and I read those “Worlds” from front to back throughout each week for several years. I credit them with my learning to love to read good prose and for understanding how a certain turn of phrase can liven up a room, not to mention a mind. CBK
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Speaking of books. did you see the article in the Guardian about Comer’s book?
On Friday they said that in Comer’s book he quoted that Bob Woodward had said some bad things about the Biden family.
Key Republican claims Bob Woodward told him Biden was financially corrupt | Books | The Guardian
Then on Saturday they received an e-mail from Woodward that says he tape the conversation and never said anything of the kind. He calls it “misstatements” I call it lies.
‘He is peddling stories’: Bob Woodward denies Republican’s claim he said Biden was corrupt | Bob Woodward | The Guardian
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