Jeff Bezos made this speech back in 1998. Amazon first opened its doors in 1995, so this was still very early in its life. Still, enough time had passed that a lot of lessons were learned, business strategies evolved.
Often, publishers are surprised to find out that we allow negative reviews to appear on our website. You should read the reviews for the book Tenth Justice, which is a new beach book. Our customers have just destroyed that poor book. If you were thinking of buying it and you came to our website, you’d think, “Well, maybe I’ll look for something else.” On the other hand, there’s a book called Endurance; it’s a book about a guy named Shackleton, whose boat, while on an Arctic expedition, got crushed in an ice flow. He had to spend six months with his men, 28 men, hiking out of Antarctica, and they made it. Not a single man was lost.
It’s one of the greatest stories of all time of endurance and human spirit. There are dozens and dozens of customer reviews about it; this is an old book, originally published in 1956. For months, this book has been on the top 100 best-selling books on Amazon.com, strictly fed by these customer reviews. I challenge you to read the customer reviews on that book and see if you can resist buying it.
Terrific read.
