261 pages
2004
ISBN: 1565848705
The New Press

I imagine most people should like James Marcus' Amazonia, a nonfiction (mostly) account of the rise and pseudo-fall of Amazon.com through the eyes of its earliest employees. That being said, Amazonia is really for people who are interested in dot.com mania, books and bookselling. The strengths of the book come from the content, rather than the writing. Not to say that the writing is bad, it's fairly good - unpretentious, open, clear - yet the true interest generated by the book is the writing about the subject and the culture of making money off of art.

James, employee #55, was hired in 1996 to be one of Amazon.com's first 'editors' (a position I imagine now completely obliterated from the corporation). He stays, through ups and downs, until his stocks finally divest sometime in 2001. His place in time and in the Amazon corporate structure provides an excellent viewpoint for a litany of perverse things we're all interested in: A corporation and CEO bent on world domination, the conflict of business vs art, the impossibly fast growth of the company, including the obligatory discussion of hitting the stock-market jackpot where profits have nothing to do with revenue or reality.

The most interesting parts of the book for me were seeing how Amazon was a profit-driven venture from the very beginning - books, service, reviews and Amazon's portrayal as a celebration of literature were merely tools on the path to 'getting big fast' and 'monetizing eyeballs'. Additionally, the increasing conflict of the editorial department - comprised of bookish sorts whose job it is to review books and make Amazon look like it knows/cares about books - and, increasingly, the business department who see every person as a limitless resource of 'cashflow' and use hilarious terms like 'pulling profit levers', 'monetizing eyeballs' and refer to prices as 'price points.' It obvious who will win in the end - do artists ever win? The status quo is predictably upheld, but the journey and insight are quite entertaining.

It's perhaps unfair to say that the content is more important than the writing, since it's Marcus who organizes and puts the content together in a way that is an entertaining read. What I mean, however, is that Marcus (not overly much, I should add) discusses his personal life - which I imagine is meant to draw us in to his personal journey - but, frankly, it's not that interesting. Additionally, he devotes an entire chapter to Ralph Waldo Emerson for no apparent reason other than that he was reading RWE at the time and somehow thought, but completely failed to convince me, that Waldo served as some sort of analogy/metaphor for Amazon.com. When he focuses on what's going on inside, the book really shines.

Amazonia discusses a lot of things I cover in Game Quest (my novel coming out this Spring) - in fact, I wish I'd had access to this book when I was writing/editing that book. In the end, while not a perfect book, I'd recommend this book to most people, but I think undergrounders or people interested in how art is treated by commerce and, in turn, by the general public would be most interested in it.