Amazon didn’t exactly trounce its initial competition. Barnes & Noble is still around (though Borders is gone). Bookstores are still around, unlike, say, video rental stores or music stores. Amazon didn’t surpass Barnes & Noble in total revenue as a company until 2004.33 Amazon didn’t even become the biggest book retailer in the world until 2007.34 But it didn’t really matter, because just as had been the plan all along, while the incumbent booksellers raced to copy Amazon, Amazon was already moving toward new horizons. Jeff Bezos didn’t care if Amazon ever definitively “won” in books,
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