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Kindle Notes & Highlights
What counts is being creative and imaginative.
you got to be
always obsessively curious.
I wonder what he would be like in this day and age
People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns that exist across nature.
touch everything I hate philosophy
Our teachers and parents, becoming impatient, tell us to stop asking so many silly questions.
nah what's th beauty in that
As a kid, Bezos read dozens of science fiction novels each summer at a local library, and he now hosts an annual retreat for writers and moviemakers.
avid reader
Jeff was a voracious reader with an
adventurous mind. His grandfather would take him to the library, which had a huge collection of science fiction books. Over the summers Jeff worked his way through the shelves, reading hundreds of them. Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein became his favorites, and later in life he would not only quote them but also occasionally invoke their rules, lessons, and lingo.
the power of books
“Space, the final frontier, meet me there!” he concluded.
and now he went to the moon
of detailed algebra to explain—in his head. “That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos says. “I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.”
haha shit
Realizing that it was prudent to start with one product, he chose books—partly because he liked them and also because they were not perishable, were a commodity, and could be bought from two big wholesale distributors.
it all started with a book
I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”
yes. you have to take the risk
He eventually decided to name what he hoped would be the Earth’s largest store after the Earth’s longest river.
dang and if is now. taking over the internet
At first Jeff and MacKenzie and a few early employees handled everything, including packing, wrapping, and driving the boxes off to be shipped. “We had so many orders that we weren’t ready for that we had no real organization in our distribution center at all,” Bezos says. “In fact, we were packing on our hands and knees on a hard concrete floor.”
you learn from failure
He knew that creating Amazon Prime was what he calls a one-way door: it was a decision difficult to reverse.
good risk for customers
Star Trek chatty home computer, and an intelligent personal assistant.
soon we will have devices clean for us job wait that is already happening
I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said ‘No, thank you.’” In a sweet irony, Bezos was able to trounce
now we got it
Is that person a missionary or a mercenary?”
and the big focus he does is have people who serve or missionaries
energy usage has grown so much that it will soon, he thinks, strain the resources of our small planet.
it already is
humans in the solar system; then there would be a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts.”
the greatest minds are not always men. women are not creative!
So Bezos did some soul searching and, as always, relied on intuition as well as analysis.
I like that
1. Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,”
2. Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer.
“We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
3. Avoid PowerPoint and slide presentations.
4. Focus on the big decisions.
5. Hire the right people.
Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group he or she is entering? Along what
dimension might this person be a superstar?
good questions to ask
From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value.
yes and that is still the focus
store open 365 days a year, twenty-four hours a day.
bam that's the catch babe it's open whenever
We are planning to add music to our product offering, and over time we believe that other products may be prudent investments.
build up over time
We significantly improved the customer experience, with innovations like 1-ClickSM shopping, Gift Click, storewide sales rank, and instant recommendations.
in 1998? Damn
As we do not need to build physical stores or stock those stores with inventory, our centralized distribution model has allowed us to build our business to a billion-dollar sales rate with just $30 million in inventory and $30 million in net plant and equipment.
it's all online
Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation.
see we made bezos rich. I argue this heavily.
Over the last five years, we’ve cumulatively used just $62 million in operating cash.
insane
“I have one hundred shares of Amazon.com. What do I own?”
that would be close to a million dollars now
selection and convenience. In July, as I already discussed, we added a third customer experience pillar: relentlessly lowering prices.
alright I like the focus
For seventy-two of the one hundred books, our price was cheaper. On twenty-five of the books, our price was the same. On three of the one hundred, their prices were better (we subsequently reduced our prices on these three books).
you also save so much time
If you want to save money and time, you’ll do better by shopping at Amazon.com.
valid but we got to wait for the orders though.
Though negative reviews cost us some sales in the short term, helping customers make better purchase decisions ultimately pays off for the company.
and the customer
It’s thinner and lighter than a paperback and can hold two hundred books.
yes still the best creation made for reading books
We don’t have electronic book signings, and similarly we can’t provide a comfortable spot to sip coffee and relax.
but you provided a great reading device
Most important, Kindle makes it more convenient for readers to buy more books. Anytime you make something simpler and lower friction, you get more of
save space too. one of.the many reasons I love the kindle
Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.
I think I have read more with my kindle books than a physical book
In 2005, we launched Amazon Prime. For $79 per year,* Prime members get unlimited express two-day shipping for free and upgrades to one-day delivery for just $3.99.
big change and has been the Sam price since
The Kindle list is chock-full of books from small presses and self-published authors, while the New York Times list is dominated by successful and established authors.
true it's hard to get on there
including an investment of millions of dollars to make the entire Harry Potter series available as part of that selection.
Damon I didn't know it would be this expansive
Doing it proactively is more expensive for us, but it also surprises, delights, and earns trust.
that is worth the amount of money
We integrated the very impressive Goodreads into Kindle, introduced FreeTime for Kindle, and launched Kindle in India, Mexico, and Australia.
goodreads!
In addition to Prime Instant Video, Fire TV gives you instant access to over two hundred thousand movies and TV episodes available a la carte, including new releases like Gravity, 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Frozen, and more. As a bonus, Fire TV also lets you play high-quality, inexpensive games on your living room TV. We hope you try it out. If you do, let us know what you think. The team would love to hear your feedback.
now the rocku has been the game changer. I rarely see Fire TV's.
