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

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New Press, 2004 - Business & Economics - 261 pages
"James Marcus was hired as a senior editor at Amazon.com in 1996, giving him a ringside seat for the company's explosive rise and dismal wallet-busting swoon. Now - as the e-commerce giant makes an astonishing comeback - he tells all. Unlike the recent crop of dot.com memoirs, this is no tale of a bankrupt and brokenhearted entrepreneur. Marcus came aboard as a self-described "token humanist," and his take on the new economy juggernaut is predominantly a cultural one. How did the company change as it morphed from a miniscule start-up to a global, multibillion-dollar leviathan? Was the Web breaking more promises than it kept? And finally: What could an editor do to resist being transformed into a hyperventilating shill?" "In answering these questions, Marcus takes us to meetings, job interviews, trade shows, and corporate retreats. We spend a freezing holiday season at the warehouse, and a considerably warmer afternoon at the company's summer picnic - where Bezos himself mans the dunk tank. Amazonia is a guide to America's lost world of the nineties."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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About the author (2004)

James Marcus was employed as Senior Editor at Amazon from 1996 to 2001. The executive editor of Harper's and an award-winning translator, he has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the Village Voice, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, the New York Review of Books, Lingua Franca, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.

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