To Carr and other execs, the idea was perplexing. Prime, originally $79 a year, guaranteed Amazon customers that their purchases would show up in two days without an extra shipping charge. Bezos now wanted to define Prime as something different and less transactional: an all-access entry pass to a library of digital content. “I didn’t get it at first,” Bill Carr said. “But what I had learned at that point of my career is that when Jeff comes up with a novel idea, you listen carefully, ask a lot of questions to get clarification of how to think about it, and then come back to him later with
...more