A book, another book, another book, more and more books, oh god so many books, CDs, a DVD player, DVDs, picture books, story books, audiobooks, headphones, earphones, earbuds, more earbuds, a Ben 10 costume, a mad hatter costume, usb cables, more usb cables, garden hoses, jewellery, fifty self-seal envelopes, a laptop, an eight-piece set of crockery, ring binders, glue, dog leads, dog bowls, whisky, gin, tequila, running shoes, a tent…
“This is going to be interesting.”
It was October 1998 and I had just made my first and second purchase from the newly launched Amazon UK (The Sweet Forever by George Pelecanos and Daniel Woodrell’s ‘country noir’ Tomato Red). As fairly obscure hard-boiled crime titles they were not available at any local bookshops, but there they were, along with several hundred thousand alternatives, all deliverable to my desk at Penguin Books where I worked as the Personal Assistant to Penguin’s Managing Director.
At the time I was one of a very small number of people who had ‘the internet’ on their work computer. Despite Penguin having launched its own website in 1995 in many ways it was still a very analogue company. Manuscripts were annotated by hand. Email had not replaced the fax machine as the communications channel of choice. Some editors still used dictaphones. No-one apart from the IT Geeks, the nascent web team and me had a browser installed.
Thousands of miles away from High Street Kensington, visionaries, evangelists, technologists and entrepreneurs on America’s West Coast had ignited the fuse of a revolution that would transform reading, writing, publishing and bookselling, changing how we experience the world and how we interact with and connect to each other. It would change me. It changed everything.
I’d first used the Internet in 1993, logging onto gopher servers at London’s City University and trying to access early web pages which included Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web (later Yahoo) and the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, the world’s first known webcam. This offered a grainy image of a coffee pot at Cambridge University’s computer lab, built to save the computer scientists a trip to the common room to check the availability of fresh coffee. Such was the paucity of what we now call ‘content’ it became a landmark of the early web, featuring prominently in Jerry and David’s web listings, though I do not remember whether it was classified under ‘News’ or ‘Entertainment’.
1993 also saw the launch of Wired magazine, the first place I remember treating the internet as a cultural phenomenon and not simply as a technological advance. Wired launched on newsstands in America as Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President with Al Gore, widely attributed with coining the phrase ‘Information Superhighway’ as his VP. Wired didn’t look like other magazines - its colourful, cyber-chic design was a riot of neons and metallic inks and it didn’t read like anything I’d come across before either, featuring articles on digital surveillance (!), phone hacking (!!) and digital libraries (!!!) in its launch issue. Savvy, counter-cultural writers including Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson welcomed the coming digital revolution with gleeful relish while simultaneously foreshadowing the threats to privacy and freedom that would become obvious many years later. Despite the fact that when it launched there were no web-browsers, no mobile phones and only 10 million people connected to the internet worldwide (half of them in the US), Wired almost instantly established itself as the chronicle of a coming transformation. The new order, whatever shape it took, was going to have its cheerleaders.
Reading imported copies of Wired, bought from the basement magazine racks of the long-departed Tower Records megastore, gave me the feeling that a tsunami was coming, rearing up on the horizon and bringing waves of disruption with it. Something that could wash away the dust, the dead matter, the old ways and leave the soil cleansed and fertile and ready for the sowing of interesting new crops. A couple of years previously, I’d read and loved Douglas Coupland’s Generation X - identifying with and lamely aping his jaded, ironic self-absorbed twenty-somethings. Now, thanks to Wired, I’d become aware of something shiny and new and powerful - the world wide web would soon make the ennui of GenX seem trite and superficial.
But while I kept up with digital news through my reading of Wired and later Wired UK (launched with The Guardian in 1996), I spent most of the mid-90s offline, working a series of McJobs of my own to earn enough money to go travelling around Mexico and American Southwest. I swapped a cheap film camera for a Jose Cuervo hooded sweatshirt. I learned how deep to bury my own shit in the desert. I criss-crossed the border to play pool, eat tacos and drink Tecate in a Sonoyta cantina. I read Douglas Coupland’s second novel Microserfs on the sunbaked roof of a Flagstaff youth hostel. And I spent a month in San Francisco, blissfully unaware of the wonders that were being dreamt up and built in office buildings and university dorms just a few miles away from the North Beach bars I caroused in, hoping for the spirit of The Beats to touch me, even for just one night.
But it was 800 miles away that the company that would most profoundly affect my life - perhaps all of our lives - was being birthed. The Amazon origin story is by now fairly well known. Deciding to take a punt on the exponential growth of web usage, Wall Street banker Jeff Bezos quit his job and drove from New York to Seattle, clutching a list of five products he believed could be efficiently sold on the internet. Choosing books from his list (the other candidates were computer hardware, computer software, compact discs and videos) Bezos chose the name Amazon because it was the biggest river in the world, sounded ‘exotic and different’ and because it started with an ‘A’, meaning it would feature prominently in the alphabetic internet listings that predated search engine discovery.
‘The World’s Largest Bookstore’ opened its virtual doors on July 16 1995, operating out of Bezos’ Seattle garage. In its early days, every sale was celebrated by the ritual ringing of a bell. But this soon became an unnecessarily irritating mark of success as within two months Amazon was recording over $20,000 of sales a week and the booksellers and publishers of New York were beginning to take notice. Amazon’s advantage over the bricks and mortar retailers was that it didn’t hold any stock at all, instead using wholesalers to supply inventory. So while the largest bookshops could only hold around 80,000 titles - those likeliest to sell - Amazon could offer its customers the choice of pretty much any book in print, nearly a million different items at launch. The novelty, not to mention benefit, of being able to search for and instantly buy any book a reader’s heart desired and have it delivered to their door within days was a clear upgrade on being told “We can order that in for you” after a fruitless excursion to a traditional bookshop.
I don’t know how aware I was of Amazon when I started working in publishing in early 1997. I’d returned from Mexico and had used my typing skills (honed while training as a journalist) to land myself a job as a secretary at Penguin, joining at a time when the company and the industry were about to go through a period of transformation. Working as a secretary in a publishing company is not like working as a secretary anywhere else. Of course letters and emails need to be sent, meetings arranged, lunches booked and coffees poured. But being a secretary in publishing is - semi-officially - a form of apprenticeship. As an editorial secretary you are expected to be a voracious reader and you are the first filter for unsolicited manuscripts that come into the office. Your taste and judgement will be assessed, your awareness of commercial and industry trends noted.
So I spent much of my first few weeks at Penguin delighting in the fact that no-one would sack me for reading at my desk, sending my boss to the wrong meetings and trying to learn about publishing from reading the trade magazines, which is where I first learned of this new online bookstore and the stir it was causing amongst American publishers and booksellers.
The Bookseller (‘covering the publishing and bookselling businesses since 1858’) first mentioned Amazon in September 1996, noting that Barnes & Noble and Borders, the two major US bookselling chains, were aware of the challenge coming from Amazon and would be establishing ‘internet bookstores in cyberspace’ at some point in the not too distant future. In November it ran a two-part special on ‘The Cyberspace Race’ which was very bullish on the growth potential of online book sales. “Serving the Internet retailer should be an item at the top of the strategic list at every publishing house,” The Bookseller sagely opined.
That year Amazon sold $16million of books, dwarfed by the $2billion sales of industry giant Barnes & Noble. But by the end of 1997 the precocious upstart, newly IPO’d and flush with investment, was the third largest retailer of books in America selling $147million of books in the process, an astonishing 800% growth. In Great Britain the fear was that Amazon would open a UK storefront and start importing US titles, potentially undercutting British bookshops and allowing readers to get their hands on popular American titles in advance of their UK publication. It is hard to read The Bookseller’s 13 June 1997 headline ‘Amazon Shares Prove a Flop’ without detecting a hint of glee.
Amazon would be coming, everyone knew but, like their US counterparts, British booksellers believed that their physical presence, their expertise and their relationships with publishers and bookbuyers would enable them to prevail in cyberspace as they had done in bricks and mortar retail. There were also some homegrown online bookstores for Amazon to contend with, bookpages.co.uk and the Internet BookShop (or IBS as it was unfortunately known) being the most noteworthy. But everyone was really waiting to see which of the big traditional retailers developed the best cyber-offering to, in the words of The Bookseller, ‘make the internet respectable’.
I like to think that I might have browsed Amazon.com from my desk outside the boss’s door at Penguin - but on a PA’s salary the cost of getting a book delivered from the States was a significant barrier and really I had no shortage of reading material closer to hand. I like to think that I’d have raised an eyebrow when reading Barnes & Noble’s pompous allegation that Amazon “...wasn’t a bookstore at all. It’s a book broker” in their failed attempt to stop it calling itself the World’s Largest Bookstore.
But I definitely remember walking into my bosses office excitedly waving the May 1st copy of The Bookseller whose front page was filled with the story that Amazon.com had bought into the UK, acquiring Bookpages.co.uk along with a German internet bookshop and the Internet Movie Database (once called the Cardiff Internet Movie Database, now better known as imdb.com). While it wasn’t clear if or when bookpages would be rebranded as Amazon, Jeff Bezos said that the company would move fast to “quickly offer UK and European customers the same combination of selection, service and value that we provide to our US customers.”
I don’t know if many others shared my excitement at this news. People don’t go into publishing because they love technology. They go into it because they love writing and books and they love bookshelves and libraries and they love bookshops. Years later as Penguin’s ebook publisher I was challenged by a bookseller during a radio panel debate: “That’s all well and good Jeremy,” he said in answer to something I’d said about accessibility, “but you can’t smell an ebook!”. Amazon UK would soon start selling proper sniffable printed books, but there was something a little vulgar about the whole business of internet bookselling and definitely something tawdry about Amazon, its hyperbolic claims, its brass-necked ambition and its complete lack of sentimentality about the trade it seemed so determined to overthrow.
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One hot Saturday night a few weeks later I noticed a girl through the crowd outside a busy pub and something clicked. I hadn’t realised I had a thing for Betty Page lookalikes, but the precise fringe and artfully applied Egyptian style mascara drew me across the the pavement and when my friend returned from the bar drinks in hand, he found me deep in conversation with a stylish French woman, here for a few days for work. Much much later that night, after more drinks in an underground Soho bar and an incident with a malfunctioning key that in hindsight seemed scripted by Richard Curtis, Manon came back to my shabby Brixton flat where she stayed for the next two nights before heading back to Paris, both of us whether this this might be the start of something rather than merely a pleasant, but unplanned, interlude.
The day after Manon had gone, still amazed that I had encountered such an exotic, glamourous woman I left a message on her answering machine - Manon didn’t have an email address then and neither of us had a mobile phone - hoping that we might see each other again someday. On Friday morning I received my first and last personal fax at work. “Get on the Eurostar and join me in Paris” was the single breath-taking sentence. I still have that page of thermal paper though, unlike the memory, the message has long since faded. I spent a good forty-five seconds considering the sliding doors possibilities before skipping out of the office to fetch my passport and head to Waterloo for the most magically romantic weekend I will ever spend, a choice that set the course for everything good that followed.
This set the pattern for the rest of Summer 1998 - every other weekend one of us would take a three hour Eurostar and we’d spend two or three nights together, exploring each other’s cities, meeting each other’s friends and falling in love. During the week I worked distractedly, counting down the hours until I had to get a train or head to Waterloo to meet Manon. Impatient as I was for Amazon UK to launch, Eurostar delays were of more pressing concern that summer.
I had to wait until October 20 before Amazon UK officially opened its doors and I could make my first purchase. Apparently I was charged £1.95 plus 50p per book for the privilege of being an early adopter. Not a bargain by any stretch of the imagination but clearly not prohibitive enough to stop me buying another book the next day and another five days later. Those were my only purchases from Amazon UK that year, making 1998 the only year that I spent less than £50 with them.
Since 1998 I’ve spent over £25,000 with Amazon, making over 2000 purchases in the process. Well over half of these have been books. We have only returned 52 purchases, all but one processed flawlessly. We own two Kindles, on which we’ve spent 645 hours ‘flipping’ 81, 850 pages of 384 ebooks. My family and I have talked to Alexa over 15,000 times, asking for thousands of songs to be played, setting hundreds of timers. We’ve watched 50 days worth of Prime Video and listened to 980 hours of audiobooks on Audible, an Amazon company.
I know all of this because I’ve downloaded all of my data from Amazon, folders and files and spreadsheets detailing every purchase, every delivery, every return, thousands of searches for products that I didn’t end up buying, every question ever asked of Alexa, hundreds of .wav files with audio of those echo queries. On my laptop lives a complete record of more than 25 years of online shopping, a chronicle of need, convenience, boredom, whim and fad.
Since opening an Amazon account I’ve moved house three times, got engaged, got married, had three children, pivoted careers, taken up photography, been hospitalized twice, started running, endured a global pandemic, got a dog - a not atypical early 21st Century experience. And all the while I’ve been browsing and buying, recording not just a purchase history but also a personal history, a story of reading, technology, parenting, homemaking, adulthood, global pandemic and frivolous, easily gratified consumer desire.
And it’s not just me. Today Amazon accounts for over 5% of retail sales in the UK, £1 of every £20 spent. It connects customers to an inventory of more than 350million items - calling Amazon ‘the Everything Store’ is not an exaggeration. From enjoying the daily sales “of a medium sized branch of Waterstones” as a colleague told me in the early 2000s, Amazon now sells over half of the books bought in Britain. For a mere ‘book broker’, they haven’t done too badly. When Amazon bought bookpages in 1998 the original owners were compensated in Amazon stock, then worth $0.40 a share. Today, those same shares are worth over $181 apiece.
So the story of my Amazon purchases also holds a mirror to the rise of the most impactful business in history and the consequences for all of us, the transformation in what we buy, how we shop and how we are sold to. Napoleon called England ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ but thanks to Jeff Bezos that description no longer rings true. Instead we are a nation of warehouse workers, delivery drivers and people who wait for delivery drivers. Our lives are out for delivery, one fully-primed, arriving by 1pm, 5* reviewed order at a time.