"And the old models don’t work. So there’s plenty of room and opportunity for new models to be created,"
says Businessweek senior writer Brad Stone, whose book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," coming out in October, needs updating.
We’re so dominated in our world by our media organizations getting smaller and losing money, and yet to him it’s always been clear that this is an opportunity for more experimentation. So this does fit within that framework.
But Stone thinks the acquisition might be less about the monetizing old media on the web and more about "buying a lot of political influence."
And we can’t discard the fact that Amazon hasn’t been an enormous player, at least up until the dispute over sales taxes, and in buying The Washington Post, he has a seat at the table. And I think particularly legislators and anti-trust regulators are gonna be weighing the dominance of Amazon a lot in the years ahead.
Here's Stone's book, which you can pre-order, obviously at Amazon, which happens to be the best way to monetize a blog, through its Associates program, which you know I participate in. (Feel free to enter Amazon
through my portal if you're inclined to buy something and simultaneously express appreciation for my writing.)
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9 comments:
Jeff Bezos went to Princeton and his parents had a spare $300,000 dollars they could loan him to start up Amazon.com. I think Bezos will continue the Post's tradition of being by limousine liberals and for limousine liberals.
I'd say his parents did pretty well with their $300,000 investment. Probably better than their IBM preferred. Even gold.
But that Princeton business has me a little worried. After the soiling it willingly took from Michelle Obama.
On the other hand, if Bezos runs WaPo with Amazon-like efficiency, he'll turn a substantial profit. If not financially, certainly politically.
Is he going to put Hillary on the board? I hear she's looking for work and has one of those reset buttons that hasn't been used too much.
Actually, BPM, what Hillary had was an emergency stop button, not a reset button.
But to keep on topic:
I wonder if Stone will publish his book on Amazon's Create Space? I've published 2 books there so far (Machinery Matters, Packaging Machinery Handbook buy them through Ann's portal) and am currently on deadline for a third (How to Buy Packaging machinery) and it is amazing.
If a book needs updating, it can be done in about 12 hours. Send CC the file, they review it and send it back showing what the book will look like. Approve it and the next book ordered will incorporate the changes.
I also published a book through a conventional publisher last year and it is a very different process. If I needed to update something it would probably take them 3-6 months to do it and another 3-6 months for it to propagate.
John Henry
Someone else said that Bezos will probably drive the Post more to the middle, politically.
Half of Amazon's customers are on the right side of the spectrum to a greater or lesser degree. Do you think he is going to alienate them?
What he may do, and this is not original with me, is use the Post as a giant club to convince politicians to vote in ways that favor Amazon.
"Hey, Congressman. Look at these Tweets of your junk that we found. Sure be a shame if they wound up on page 1 of the Post, wouldn't it?
John Henry
Neither Bezos nor WaPo can know what the future will bring. The only thing for sure is that WaPo will change in some ways not foreseen by anyone.
But I do wonder how some of the present WaPo writers will cope with being owned by a baddie billionaire with no literary or "intellectual elite" credentials.
Brilliant man, I worship the ground he walks on.
WaPo's elite writers better not assume that Bezos can't read. He may have not majored in English-Lit, or dreamed of writing Gone With The Wind, but he's an expert in comprehending the finer print.
Jesus, it would be a wonderful thing if Bezos were to make a taught, efficient businesslike liberal newspaper that specialized in cogent argument, tight logic, amassing an armada of facts.
The liberal point of view isn't worthless. God help us if we lived in a world were nothing but the conservative viewpoint held sway. (Chesteron, maybe: "The purpose of liberalism is to continue making stupid mistakes; the purpose of conservatism is to ensure none of them ever get fixed.")
My biggest complaint about modern liberalism is not its avowed philosophical origin, but the fact that it has degenerated to such mindless mawkish intellectually vacuous high-school sophomoric sloganeering that opportunistic sociopaths -- too numerous to name, you can all think of several I'm sure -- find it the most convenient platform upon which to launch the power-seeking missiles armed with their 50-megaton egos.
Well, that and the fact that it's just so fucking dirty dishwater rote recital dull. Finding a lefty with an actual originally-expressed idea, a novel perspective, a touch of a sense of humor, a smidge of grace and class is like a blindfolded Diogenes looking for Eccentrica Gallumbits without a Viagra prescription, or something like that.
If Bezos can turn that around, present a lefty viewpoint that doesn't degenerate to nyah nyah you're another or some other sordid type of cardboard kindergarten repartee -- launch arguments that don't slay their opponents with sheer boredom -- that would be a solid win.
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