The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

Investor Bill Miller from Legg Mason often discussed the digital transition with Bezos when the two got together. “I think the thing that blindsided Jeff and helped with the Kindle was the iPod, which overturned the music business faster than he thought,” says Miller. “He had always understood this stuff was going digital, but he didn’t expect to have his CD business eviscerated like that.” Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. “It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,” said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business a few years later. “We didn’t want to be Kodak.” The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn’t bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier. Bezos was apparently contemplating a dedicated electronic reader as early as 2003—around the time Gemstar pulled the Rocketbook from shelves. Andreas Weigend, Amazon’s short-lived chief scientist, remembers Bezos speaking to his technical team about such a device and saying, “It’s for one-handed reading.” Upon imagining what the other hand might be doing, Weigend started to laugh out loud, and then everyone else in the small conference room did as ...