>3/ Cannibalize yourself. Steve Kessel was running Amazon’s media business in 2004 (books/music/DVD’s). Books alone generated more than 50% of Amazon’s cash flow. Jeff fired Steve from his job and reassigned him to build Kindle. Steve’s new mission: destroy his old business.

- In 2015 Amazon's free cash flow was $529M [1], printed books contributed ~$250M to that

- In 2019 total ebook revenue in the United States $983.3M (overall and not only Amazon's). [2]

Was Kindle 'distraction' worth it? I love Kindle and eBooks but did Bezos really make the right call when Amazon was just about beginning to recover from the severe dotcom crash?

[1]https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/free-c...

[2]https://goodereader.com/blog/digital-publishing/ebook-revenu...