I'm pretty sure Amazon was profitable all along - it's just that the profit was all spent on expanding the business. Hence, there was no taxable profit.
Amazon was also able to make money selling products at little or no markup by taking advantage of the float. They'd collect money from the purchaser immediately, and would pay the vendor after 90 days. Then, Amazon would make interest on that money for the 90 days.
I do the same thing on a (very) small scale. I buy with a credit card, and don't have to cough up the money until the credit card bill is due. That gives me free use of the money for 30 days.
Pretty much all businesses do this, it's just that Amazon did it on a massive scale.
Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere.
Amazon has succeeded at beating bookstores in none of these categories - but it has succeeded in greatly lowering the difficulty and impediments in case that a customer wants a specific book, the unfortunate thing for bookstores is that that user flow is extremely common and winning on that flow pretty much got them the market.
W.r.t. the other flows... Amazon is still terrible, did you enjoy The Colour of Magic? Why don't you try Magic Eraser - guaranteed to get stains out of any fabric! Curious if this book is good? Why not try reading one of the hundred shill comments talking about how this book changed their life!
I think the key here is to focus on winning a specific market segment (a significant one) and winning it hard if you can do that you too can be the next amazon.
1. True for mainstream books, absolutely not true for academic special interest titles. Many books simply aren't available - including some still-in-print titles from academic publishers.
2. Ditto. Pricing algos and greed can do insane things to prices. When I needed one out-of-print academic title recently the copies on Amazon were going for four figures. Luckily the author had uploaded a PDF to his web site.
For other books I've looked at, three figures aren't rare. Communicating with sellers directly has sometimes brought the price down to something more reasonable - a sale now being worth more than a listing that may take years to pay off.
3. This part is true - pay, wait, receive. Although it's not infallible, because some of the bigger sellers play an arbitrage game where an algo checks possible sources for tens of thousands of titles and then if found, adds a percentage to create an auto-listing. I've had orders cancelled when this process has failed, for whatever reason.
> True for mainstream books, absolutely not true for academic special interest titles. Many books simply aren't available - including some still-in-print titles from academic publishers.
Sure. But you wouldn't find those at B&N either. Amazon isn't in danger of putting university bookstores out of business.
Also Amazon (or to be fair any Internet book indexing service such as Google) allows me to know about books that I would almost certainly never have known existed in Barnes&Noble days.
> Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere.
The key part is “decent”. Outside of the “walk out” part, none of these advantages apply if you don’t have a bookstore that matches what you’re interested in, which can be pretty difficult outside of mainstream subjects and the latest-Summer-novel-everybody-buys. There’s no discovery system that I know of that would allow you to find a bookstore near you based on what you like or want to read.
This is why I use Amazon so much: I have a half-dozen wishlists and bought my books here for years, so its suggestions are often relevant. I like to be able to compare prices between new and second-hand books from third-party sellers. Reviews may not always be great, but that’s still better that what you’d get in a bookstore: one single review from the owner, if they did read the book.
Note: I live in France, where the law requires that books are sold the same price in bookstores and on Amazon (you’re allowed to do go down max -5% on the public price). You can also ask any bookstore to get any book for you, most often free of charge. However, this means they get very little profit from it since they have to pay the shipping cost themselves.
So much this -- and it applies not only to bookstores but to retail in general. So many times I've thought "I should give these retail shops some support"; I go looking for something particular I want, spend several hours of my own time only to come up empty-handed because nobody had what I wanted in stock. Example: I read about some really cool Etymotic musician's earplugs. I thought great, there's actually an instrument store near my work. Walked there; nope, none in stock. Or reading about one of those induction cooktops. Went to my local big-box electronics/appliances retailer. Nope, nothing. Pretty much anything that's even slightly niche, it seems like retail just doesn't have it.
As for books in particular - Kindle wins hands-down on convenience and portability for me, over bookstores (the 'walk-out' part is definitely covered). In my particular case, as I'm vision-impaired, Kindle ALSO wins hands-down on usability, because I can make the text any size I want. That's important enough for me that it can mean the difference between actually being able to read a book and not being able to read it.
I think I have 451 Kindle books. I can carry all of those in my pocket on my phone or in my backpack on my tablet, if I want. That's another huge advantage.
I should probably mention that given all that, I _still_ like physical books! I remember walking the aisles of Borders, but that was because they were huge and they had books in the niche I was looking for. I fondly remember a small bookstore that used to specialise in software development and IT books and they had a great selection of game development books. I used to love that place! For me though, that was all before I got a taste of the convenience of Kindle. Getting the book is worth more to me than stopping and having a nice coffee at the bookstore.
> Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere.
Maybe post-Amazon retro bookstores provide this, but prior to Amazon bookstores were mostly garbage. You could only browse what they had, which was far from everything. Prices were also very high. I remember as a kid bringing in pencil and paper to copy down algorithms from books that were simply too expensive to purchase. There were also few if any 'experts' at the book store.
For me, the internet + Amazon (and now 1/same day delivery) is better than a book store in every way.
The only place that I know of now that provides something close to what your are romanticizing about is libraries. People who work there for the most part still care about books and understand their catalog. But, anything even remotely popular will likely be checked out which means I'll end up back at Amazon.
If I try to build up a history of bookstores as I remember them as a consumer, at one point there were many small stores. A mall may have 3-4 book stores, all taking around the same space as any other retail store. There were also 'used' book stores and some niche stores around. When you didn't know what to buy, you browsed the generic stores and pretty much they all had the same content, if you sought out a niche/used store, you'd often get a personalized set of recommendations.
However, the Barns and Nobles and Chapters found out that if you knew what you wanted, and gambled on going to a small generic or even niche bookstore, you often had to put the book on order or get something you didn't want. They capitalized on this by stocking much more books than a smaller place could hope to hold. They still could on the surface handle the browsing public, so they quickly put the smaller generic stores out of business, and forced many niche stores out too.
They still have the issue though, that while a small generic may be able to stock the selection for around 80% of requests, and the larger stores 95%, Amazon immediately would sell you the book, either sending it out to you quickly or seemlessly putting them on back order. Also, in the early days, the unfiltered reviews and recommendations based on the other buyers of the books were great in identifying if you really wanted to buy the book anyways.
While Amazon now is facing issues with recommendations, 10-15 years ago it was hugely different, and provided a seriously better customer experience. What I've actually noticed, is that if any small niche bookstore has survived until now, they actually are starting to provide a real differentiated experience. A small, curated selection of books, that I feel easy to browse and I feel they've been filtered already. I also don't know off hand without leaving this and searching, wether barns and noble is still in business.
I'd consult goodreads.com (ownded by Amazon) to meet your criteria of matching experience with respect to genuine reviews, similar book recommendations, etc.
It's not a flashy service by all means and has definitely been neglected by Amazon since the acquisition; the community makes it what it is, and it is a very high quality community!
I've read that Goodreads has kind of an opposite problem to shill reviews: everything you write about a book is always completely public, so people don't write them.
Bookstores only offered negative value to me, outside of selling me what I wanted. Amazon allows me to purchase stuff without having to interact with another human. Not everyone is extroverted and introverts get drained by human interaction. I don't even have to talk to a human when returning stuff.
The only way you get past that is by forcing yourself to be uncomfortable. It's worth it. It's a learned and reinforced behavior. Much like the child who only eats hot dogs and mac and cheese, and their parents never really made them do otherwise. Now they're in their 30's, living in their house and don't have a job, still eating junk food, but now they have diabetes.
My point was, the more you do it, the better you get at it... kind of like exercise or anything else. By avoiding interactions, it makes it worse over time.
A battery won't get better by providing energy to some device. It gets drained. Similarly, introverts get drained by human interaction, so they need to recharge by staying alone. Extroverts on the other hand get drained by being alone and recharge in company of other humans. Telling an extrovert to not socialize with anyone for a year to get better at it is as much nonsense as telling an introvert to go socialize more to get better at it. That's not how it works.
The more human interaction I can avoid, the better, so I'm recharged when I have to interact with people.
It's like trying to use a tool all the time expecting it to get better instead of wearing itself out. That's not how this works. No matter how good you get at human interaction it won't change the fact that it will drain you, if you're introverted.
The Vimes series is amazing... I think it's a bit above the Moist series but I absolutely love Raising Steam and, to a lesser extent, Making Money - because both characters are coming together. Still, I think my top pitch is somewhere within Night's Watch, Men at Arms & Jingo - I think Guards! Guards! is also quite good but Night's Watch did nearly everything Guards! Guards! did... but did it better.
Honestly, his books are just amazing though, quite worth a read.... possibly skipping to start at Equal Rites since The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were less polished than his later works - but do check out the Tim Curry having movie covering those first two books... maybe bring a power point presentation or two along to appease any power hungry wizards though.
The movie was reasonably entertaining, and a stellar cast. I agree about skipping the first couple books were not as well polished - I'm glad I did not start there.
Yep: one major advantage of bookstores is that their recommendation engines work several magnitudes better, and reliably. I believe they always will, too.
I think it's also possible that at least part of Amazon's success was due to creating/increasing price sensitivity in an era where wage stagnation has become more and more apparent. That is, they are also the Dollar Saver & K-Mart of the Internet.
The segments that Amazon has conquered may be more abstract than those they're usually given credit for. Segments like "poor people."
Surely that's only true for a vanishingly small subset of fields of interest?
I mean come on, Amazon didn't invent obscure topics. Bookstore people would know more specialized stores, though this was naturally less true at chain stores. This was at least as effective as Amazon giving you a list of other books bought by people who bought the one you're looking at.
> Amazon was also able to make money selling products at little or no markup by taking advantage of the float.
Amazon's margin for a long time was rorting the tax system, something they enjoyed via federal regulatory capture. Their competitors were paying state and local taxes. They weren't.
If there was regulatory capture it surely couldn't have been provided by them given they didn't exist yet. They were doing exactly what the tax system was designed to do - promote investment no trickery involved.
One can legitimately argue that the system sucked or could have been done better but it is not exploitation in the sense of a glitch any more than handling moving by selling your furniture, mailing your small items, and then buying new stuff insread of renting a van since depreciation losses would be less than moving expenses.
Catalog precedent was what they used for taxes and even a large company using it to sell everything enmasse wasn't new either - Sears Catalog.
A friend of mine after moving several times discovered it was cheaper to just throw away all the furniture (i.e. give it ot Goodwill) and buy new at the new place than ship it.
At the time Amazon relied on huge 'subsidies' from the book publishers, they had huge trade debts, but the publishers couldn't afford to pull the plug as they'd loose that revenue
Personally, I think companies should have one of two models, growth or dividends. In the end, it really shouldn't be companies paying taxes (or meddling in politics), they should be growing, or paying out dividends that are taxed.
Amazon was also able to make money selling products at little or no markup by taking advantage of the float. They'd collect money from the purchaser immediately, and would pay the vendor after 90 days. Then, Amazon would make interest on that money for the 90 days.
I do the same thing on a (very) small scale. I buy with a credit card, and don't have to cough up the money until the credit card bill is due. That gives me free use of the money for 30 days.
Pretty much all businesses do this, it's just that Amazon did it on a massive scale.