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Comment by ww520 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I still remember when Amazon started as an online bookstore selling books and people kind of laughed at the idea, and the time Amazon kept losing money and refused to post an earning and people got mad. Amazing long game.

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Interestingly, it seemed at the time that books were just about the least exciting things being sold on the Internet, and the shipping costs looked fatal to the business. You could buy just about anything, and everybody was going out of business trying to compete on big ticket items like electronics and movies and games and beanie babies. Not much competition on books online (anybody remember the “Duwamish book store demo” from Microsoft?). It seems to me that he looked way out and thought about how things would be done 20 years hence, regardless of what made sense at the time, and chose to start on the piece of that future with the weakest competition.

There was competition. Bookstacks.com had been in business with a telnet-only interface for more than a year before Amazon.

As noted by others, the shipping cost-to-item-average-cost ratio is precisely why Jeff chose books to start with. But yes, he also looked way out (even if he couldn't see as clearly as some people seem to think he could).

My understanding was that it was also about the long tail. With millions of titles in print, and a minimum selection of thousands to make a decent bookstore, you can't print a decent catalog and mail it. Before Amazon, the biggest mail-order books business was the Book-of-the-Month Club. Perfect case for an online catalog.

Shipping books was/is one of the cheapest things to ship, as they need minimal packaging, and the USPS offers a special media mail rate. This allowed him to work out all the logistics behind the scenes, and then make incremental improvements to handle other products.

When I was working in Tokyo in the 90's, English technical books were somewhat hard to come by and fairly expensive so co-workers would often pool together to do bulk purchases. There was one book site that I don't remember the name of now that almost always beat Amazon when it came to purchase price plus shipping at least in the beginning so we would always comparison shop. Maybe not sexy but online bookstores were certainly something of a lifeline in our case and I would often look forward to the arrival of a book order like a kid waiting for Christmas.

By his words[1] it was because books had a large possible inventory, allowing him to build a store larger than any one physical store could manage.

Though i imagine a lot of reasons justified books.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM

I think AWS ended up subsidizing the rest of the company. Amazon stumbled backwards into a highly profitable business that allowed them to continue playing the long game to create a monopoly in distribution.

I was a (young) kid when I overheard a news report making fun of an internet bookstore calling itself Amazon.

It's amazing what he's been able to do. Good for him.

Amazon's stock went up like a rocket since its IPO. Wall Street didn't laugh at Bezos.

Even then the P/E has only been ridiculous for a few of those years - the stock is valuable, but the company walks the walk too.

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