Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut

by James Markus

My rating: 7/10

With Amazonia, James Marcus adds to the ever-simmering stew of Amazon.com analysis a new, almost quaint perspective: that of an employee hired for his expertise in literature. Marcus traces the company’s familiar climb, plummet, and re-ascent, but this time we witness the pyrotechnics from the book-strewn hallways of the editorial department.

After an abbreviated heydey, editorial talent lost cachet at the burgeoning Internet behemoth, replaced by metrics worship and automated innovations like “truncating widgets.” Despite the demoralizing shift, Marcus makes evident the loyalty editors continued to display, a “quasi-religious devotion… almost impossible to explain to outsiders.” The concept of making history was just too intoxicating for most to abandon (as were the stock options).

Marcus’s writing has enough genuine humor and self-deprecation to squelch any accusations of “optimizing for optics,” or worse, whining. Aside from a few sections that feel somewhat adrift (oblique mentions of an imploding marriage and an extended Emerson sidebar) the prose is driving and the voice engaging and remarkably fair.