Honestly, this book reads more like a marketing pitch than an even-handed look at Amazon's history. It has a very pro-Amazon standpoint. That would be fine if it said it was going to do that. Instead, this book pretends to be even-handed, despite the fact that it's obviously not.

BEZONOMICS by Brian Dumaine (an award-winning Fortune magazine writer) describes the various facets of Amazon's business, including its online retail operations and focus of its Prime program, its cloud computing resources, and forays into businesses as diverse as media streaming, healthcare, and voice recognition technology (Alexa and Echo). While discussing warehousing, robotics, and machine learning, Dumaine explores "How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It." He acknowledges three main principles – customer obsession (as evidenced by low prices, fast delivery, and big data manipulation), extreme innovation, and long-term investment – and asserts that Bezos "has created the next-generation corporation."

Early on in BEZONOMICS, Dumaine comments that "when a person creates one of the most valuable companies in the world and has more money than every other human on earth, their life doesn't lend itself to a tidy story line." Given all of the challenges with COVID (note the new advertising campaign, as one small example) just since this book went to press, that is certainly true. Dumaine writes, "my hope is that readers of this book will grow to understand this complexity and recognize the ways Amazon both helps or harms business and society." He supports his research with over ten percent of the book devoted to notes and bibliographic source information. Readers will likely pause to contemplate the attention to detail (e.g., reference to Amazon-branded packing tape) and broader integration of Amazon into everyday life. In fact, Dumaine refers to a poll where Amazon was amongst the top institutions in which Americans believe – he says, "51 percent of American households attend church, 52 percent have Amazon Prime memberships." We also own the older, award-winning text titled The Everything Store by Brad Stone and given the size, management intensity, and far-reaching impact of this company, there will be many more analyses of Bezos and Amazon.

I reviewed Bezonomics by the Entreprising Rubric.

It scored 61% in total, and the breakdown was as follows:

Arguments: 58%
Practicality: 35%
Enjoyability: 65%
Readability: 70%
Resources: n/a
Rhetoric: 80%

I didn't mind reading this book, but I found it disappointing given its title and description.

There aren't many people not ordering from Amazon on a consistent basis and this book offers evidence as to why that is true. Jeff Bezos' obsession with customer satisfaction and success has merged into the biggest company online. The innovative ways that Amazon meets the needs of its customers is top notch, such as two day shipping and has led to other companies trying to either meet or beat the standards of Amazon. I really enjoyed this behind the scenes look at the business end of such a globally dominant company and the insider information was especially interesting.

3.5/5 Stars
This book is definitely out of my comfort zone, and if I didn’t work for Amazon I honestly wouldn’t have picked it up. However, I’m glad that I did. I definitely learned more about Amazon and got a peek at how things operate on the outside of working in the warehouse. The foundation I guess you can say of the company.
This book is certainly “Pro” Bezonomics. It seemed that all of the content was praising the company for their accomplishments in AI advancements, speed of service, etc. As it should be, but the information began to get repetitive. The praise and acknowledgement are all well deserved, but it felt biased. For example: The author included a few opinions of the company from employees, however all the opinions seemed to rave about how great the company was. It needed to include those negative opinions from employees to add a different perspective. And towards the end it did dive into a few negatives of how quirkily it’s evolving, and got some political opinions on the company. I just wished there were a few more Cons to the company. I was also hoping this would talk more about the warehouses and the employees that operate it. There is a brief chapter on it, but it’s primarily focused on Bezos and AI development. So I was a bit disappointed in that.
Throughout the book there are a lot of acronyms, which from personal knowledge is something they LOVE creating, so that was a bit hard to keep up with whilst reading. I was surprised at how much I learned, not just about Amazon’s future “expansion” plans, with Jeff Bezos’ backstory, and how hard he had to work to get where he is today. And to think that Amazon started out as a bookstore is astonishing! Would definitely recommend it if you want an understanding of how Amazon came to be.

Bezonomics is a fascinating read! The book gives readers an understanding of how Jeff Bezos (one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs) thinks, what his values and priorities are, and his goals and visions for the future. We also get an inside look at one of the world's largest and most ubiquitous companies, and are shown how Jeff Bezos has changed the business world forever.

I have always been intrigued by how people think, and this read really fed my curiosity. Who doesn't want to know how Amazon became so successful and globally known; how it operates; what it's like to work there? Jeff Bezos is one of the most visionary and long-term thinkers that I've ever read about. I highly recommend this book!

My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for allowing me to read an e-copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. All opinions stated here are my own.

When reading a book sometimes it’s all
About timing. I just started this book after I finished another Amazon/Bezos focused book and it changed my perception of this book. I tried to get into it and plug along but I couldn’t hear new concepts or ideas that were different from the other book.

I read through most of the book and decided to put it down. I need a clean break from amazon topics before I can pick this book back up and give it a fair chance. I will return one day and update this post!

I was disappointed that this book seemed, to me, to be very one-sided and pro-Amazon. Even when the author shared the arguments against Amazon's policies, he would include snarky parenthetical bits. I will not be covering this for Book Riot.

The dudebro book of 2020. Some of the writing seemed amateurish and awkward, but it’s nothing a glib narrator can’t handle, because let’s face it: this is a book for businessmen to listen to while traveling. Excessive and tiresome repetition of the phrase “AI-driven flywheel” plagues the narrative.

I wasn’t sure at first what the book was trying to be. A guide to getting rich like Bezos/competing with Amazon? An exposé? “Bezonomics” is a basic guide to what Amazon is up to (a lot); a report of what customers, third-party sellers, employees, business rivals, and politicians say about Amazon; and a treatise on Dumaine’s confidence that Amazon will just keep “disrupting” stuff until they take over every retail sector—but didn’t we think that same thing about Walmart in the ‘90s?

Come on. Amazon is going to keep “spinning its flywheel” faster and faster until I’m banking with Amazon, asking Alexa to connect me with my doctor, and trusting Alexa and various robots to send me edible bananas? I think the very idea is bananas. Also, I have been ordering books from Amazon for 20 years, and its omniscient AI is trying to sell me books on John Adams today, because I bought my son textbooks related to politics seven years ago.

The Internet of Things might turn out to be a passing fad, when people come to regret paying $50 for a light bulb and decide they don’t have the financial resources for a deluge of internet-connected “smart” stuff. The larger fad in society is to disconnect, to limit screen time, and to engage in unplugged experiences with people and in nature.

I enjoyed the parts about businesses that are thriving by creating a special customer experience online and in-store that Amazon can’t match, to which Dumaine should have devoted more pages. Maybe the part about Bezos being a space lunatic could have been edited out to make room for more examples of other outlier business success. Trader Joe’s has nothing to fear from Amazon’s Whole Foods acquisition despite knowing nothing about customers except what they buy. Why and how?

The subtitle led me to expect more specifics about business strategies. How are the world’s best companies learning anything from Bezonomics? Unless by “best” Dumaine means the biggest companies, such as Walmart, I didn’t glean many specifics. Pour billions into sophisticated algorithms and hope they work? Perhaps all of the algorithms that work best are the ones that are more than a decade old (make suggestions related to past purchases) and Amazon, Walmart and other behemoths should quit wasting their money and focus on customer service, quality product curation, and nicer design. My favorite online retailer, Sephora, is mentioned in the book, and they offer a special shipping plan to their Insiders. If Sephora were a wreck like Amazon, I, an Insider, would not have bothered with it.

Dumaine gives ample and fair coverage to privacy and sociopolitical concerns, and even talks about the ecological impacts of mammoth online retailers running giant server farms. Dumaine asks whether Amazon should be broken up, as two Democratic Presidential candidates have called for, and intelligently covers both sides of the debate. The book would have been incomplete without this discussion.

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley and was encouraged to submit an honest review.