It Was Never Really About Books

This is the most important paragraph in Keith Gessen’s big Vanity Fair piece about publishers and Amazon:

The success of Amazon changed all that. It has been said that Amazon got into the book business accidentally — that it might as well have been selling widgets. This isn’t quite right. Books were ideal as an early e-commerce product precisely because when people wanted particular books they knew already what they were getting into. The vast variety of books also allowed an enterprising online retailer to leverage the fact that there was no physical store in a single fixed location to limit its inventory. If a big Barnes & Noble had 150,000 books in stock, Amazon had a million! And if Barnes & Noble had taken its books to lonely highways where previously there had been no bookstores, Amazon was taking books to places where there weren’t even highways. As long as you had a credit card, and the postal service could reach you, you suddenly had the world’s largest bookstore at your fingertips.

You can extrapolate from here and understand, basically, what Amazon is: A giant, product-agnostic logistics operation. It cared a lot about books when books represented a singular opportunity; it cares less now that they don’t. You can imagine Amazon executives reading all these quotes from publishers and thinking, Jesus, what are they talking about? And who are they talking to?

Similarly essential: The video above, posted by Amazon today, showing off the experimental “Echo,” a Siri-like robot stick that sits around your house and answers questions. Like Amazon’s drone delivery videos, it’s meant to play as ambitious — to position Amazon as a company with big ideas for the future, which is otherwise frighteningly ambiguous and fragmented and weird. And Amazon does have big ideas for the future! Big ideas for its future, in particular, in which it wants to sell you more things in more intimate ways. The human behaviors portrayed in this video that don’t involve purchasing products — “So, this thing is listening all the time? Cool. Alexa! Play me some rock music!” — are human-ish at best. Books fit into Amazon’s long-term vision to the extent that the company believes you will be asking your ecommerce log, or your ecommerce tablet, or your ecommerce implant, to deliver them to you by mail or by drone or by app, and not a bit more.