The sales of books, music, and movies accounted for 74 percent of Amazon’s annual revenues that year. If those formats were inevitably transitioning to digital, as Apple’s accomplishment seemed to demonstrate, then Amazon had to move quickly to protect itself. “We were freaking out over what the iPod had done to Amazon’s music business,” says director John Doerr. “We feared that there would be another kind of device from Apple or someone else that would go after the core business: books.”
