But Bezos quickly decided that an everything store was a bit too grandiose, and so he instead began investigating product categories that might be suitable as a proof of concept. He weighed roughly twenty different possibilities, including computer software, office supplies and CDs. He settled on books as the best test case because, as Brad Stone put it in his history of Amazon called, not coincidentally, The Everything Store, books were “pure commodities; a copy of a book in one store was identical to the same book carried in another, so buyers always knew what they were getting.”
