Ultimately, Amazon is a weather pattern that disturbs everything around it.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world - and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales.
There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.
Amazon is a marvelous conglomeration and delivery system for products of every imaginable function. But the book 'business' is really not the same as the sale of lawn rakes or adapters for telephones.
Amazon is certainly not a perfect company. However, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, politicians, and labor unions are also on a continuum of consciousness, and none are perfect either. It is easy to judge and find fault with any company if that is what one's ideological biases wish to see.
Like most people, there are things I love about Amazon. It's cheap, it's fast, and it's at my doorstep. But Amazon will never replace the important role my local indie plays in my community.
The Amazon is not just a set of trees. It is a set of 25 million people. If we don't create real economic opportunities for them, the practical result is to encourage disorganized economic activities that results in the further destruction of the rain forest.
The difference between Amazon and us is Amazon is more like an empire - everything they control themselves, buy and sell.
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
Amazon is such a big player in publishing, but a lot of authors feel this connection to their publishing house and their editors who helped them get their books out there, so their loyalties tend to go that way.
Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.
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