04.08.2005 Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut By James Marcus Business Memoir (c) 2004 261 pages

And now, for something completely different. I don't believe I've ever read a business memoir before, but this caught my eye at the library, because I'm a book fiend and I wanted to know if Amazon.com was worthy of my business (plus I have links to their pages all over this site). Amazonia is Marcus' chronicle of Amazon from before, during, and after the Internet boom, as Amazon.com's fifty-fifth employee. He worked as a Senior Editor, mostly doing book reviews, but for a time he was also in charge of the webpage and the Literature section.

As it turns out, Amazon.com is about as uncorrupt as big business gets, even at its bottom-line obsessed, multi-million dollar heyday. Jeff Bezos' initial goal to make Amazon a content-based place where people could enjoy hours of their time seems, in Marcus' eyes, to have been almost lost to automatons and the ridiculous store offerings (Chapstick and Barcaloungers). But for the most part, the company was good at checking itself before crossing the line, such as when they tried to eliminate the cheap paperback romance novels because of low margins.

Something I appreciated, as a fellow book lover, was Marcus' passages on books in general. Some of my favorite moments were his comments on literary monogamy (and specifically, his long relationship with Emerson), and the gradual evolution of books' heroes from gods to kings to middle class strivers to "raffish or repugnant antiheroes." Marcus seemed to remain a pure fixture at Amazon, only caring about the books he came across and how to share them with others. If he came out with a book memoir, I would read it. But as far as Amazon goes, after reading this book, I still feel good about shopping there, especially if there are still guys like Marcus around.

3/5 STARS

FAVORITE AMAZON REVIEW by Rob Hardy
No one needs to be reminded that there has been a dot.com boom and bust. There has been a resultant boom (no bust yet) in books about the boom and bust. Can we stand one more? How about one by a serious professional book reviewer who goes to work for Amazon to pump up the "content" of the Amazon.com website? Sure, _Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut_ (The New Press) by James Marcus, has all the trimmings of books already in the genre: weird personalities afflicted by irrational affluence, ever-shifting work routines and schedules fueled by Starbucks, ambivalence about the worth of impersonal e-commerce, and of course, the deflation of stock options that turns paper millionaires into just regular yuppies. _Amazonia_ has a lot going for it, though. It is beautifully written, amused and sad, with an authoritative view from someone who was there at the beginning but no authoritative insistence on what it all means. It has welcome views of one of the most curious of entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos, the irrepressible, inscrutable founder. It is a story of the inside workings of one of the most famous companies on Earth, told by one who was swept up in it but because he was hired for "content," remained a detached outsider as the management types tried new ways of pulling the "revenue levers" (that's official Amazon jargon).
Marcus had been a translator and a freelance book critic. He was interviewed to come on board Amazon in 1996, and was the fifty-fifth employee hired (a further subtitle of the book is "A Tale of Internet Euphoria by Employee #55"); the operation truly was just starting up, because two years later it would have 8,000 employees. He was hired basically to write brief reviews of books that would appear on the site. It would be far more power than he had ever wielded as a book reviewer before, but he didn't like the idea when it was pitched to him: "I'm pimping for literature via the Internet." The wages were paltry, but the stock options were supposed to be spectacular. And on paper, they were. He became, on paper, a millionaire from book reviewing; on paper, during the NASDAQ exuberance, he had stock options worth $9 million. It didn't last, of course, but he didn't do too badly in the end. But it's not about the money. Marcus convincingly recounts how he did not turn into a snooty millionaire or a crestfallen loser, but it's the work, not the prospective wealth or loss thereof, that is what's important here. Marcus's real job, writing the reviews, was one he really liked. He worked there for five years, and wrote thousands of them. Many were "the haiku of book criticism," the 45-word review. He loved calling attention to good titles: "There was nothing more satisfying than nudging a noncommercial title into the limelight."
Of course, the job didn't keep its high attractiveness any more than the stock options did. The vigorously powerful editorial team was derailed by (surprise!) automated computer programs, under the label "personalization." Instead of reviews for the customer to browse, each customer made (by purchasing similar items) a personal store. A personalization engine, rather than an human editor, would make a customer's home page, and Marcus even had a John Henry-like contest to see which was more effective in sales. "Let the rotten little robot trawl through the database for hidden affinities: it wasn't going to beat this steam-drivin' man." Marcus lost. Eventually, personalization, driven by the MBAs Jeff was importing, took over. Reviews by staff of the books themselves ceased to be important, as Amazon shifted the emphasis to reviews written by customers, and customers were invited to vote on the helpfulness of the reviews, and the results produced a ranking of reviewers. In a wry episode near the end of the book, Marcus started submitting customer reviews under an alias, and won a $50 gift certificate prize for his work, which he eventually had to give back. Thus ended his foray into "the vox pop," the new way of doing things, and soon after he moved on to return to the more familiar bricks-and-mortar, paper-and-ink world. He had fun, made a little money, and maybe turned some customers on to good books, but with that all over, there is a mildly rueful tone to this sprightly, funny memoir. He loved literature, he had to do business, and it is sad he could not have found a closer match.

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