Amazon Unbound

By: Brad Stone

Narrated by: Pete Larkin

Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

From the best-selling author of The Everything Store, an unvarnished picture of Amazon’s unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.

With the publication of The Everything Store in 2013, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone revealed how the unlikely Seattle start-up Amazon became an unexpected king of ecommerce. Since then, its founder has led Amazon to explosive growth in both size and wealth. In less than 10 years, Amazon has quintupled the size of its workforce and increased its valuation to well over a trillion dollars. Whereas Amazon used to sell only books, there is now little they don’t sell, becoming the world’s largest online retailer and pushing into other markets at warp speed. Between Amazon’s 40 subsidiaries - like Whole Foods Market, Amazon Studios in Hollywood, websites like Goodreads and IMDb, and Amazon Web Services cloud software unit, plus Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post - it’s almost impossible to go a day without encountering their goods. Amazon provides us opportunities to shop, entertain, inform, communicate, store and, one day, maybe even travel to the moon. We live in a world run, supplied and controlled by Amazon.

In Amazon Unbound, Stone offers the must-listen follow-up to his best seller The Everything Store, detailing the seismic changes that have taken place at Amazon over the past decade as it became one of the most powerful and feared companies in the global economy, led by one of the most powerful and feared leaders in business. He shows the acquisitions and innovations that have propelled Amazon’s unprecedented growth and the turn in public sentiment that criticises Amazon’s monopolistic practices. As he charts the company’s meteoric rise, Stone probes the evolution of Jeff Bezos - who started as a geeky entrepreneur but who transformed to become a fit, famed, disciplined billionaire, a man who runs Amazon with an iron fist but finds his personal life splashed over the tabloids.

Definitive, timely and revelatory, Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.

©2021 Brad Stone (P)2021 Simon & Schuster Audio

Did it need to be so long

Really enjoyed it. Lots of insights, great quality insights… just felt about an hour too long

Simple story of Amazon

Amazon Unbound is a simple but nitid description of Jeff Bezos's Amazon empire, one of the richest companies ever created in history. The book covers Bezos's ascent to power from his early days of as a technological innovator to the most recent achievement in the world of business and management.
As Amazon is one the biggest company worldwide, I was interested to understand how Amazon and Bezos have become so influential and valuable. Amazon is s multinational retail company that does not produce anything - apart from few things called Amazon Basics. It has become famous for its capabilities in organisation - some would say also exploitation - of the online retail business without creating any specific products apart from Alexa.
As I "read" this book as an Audiobook I found it quite pleasant to read. However, if I had listened to it as an Audiobook, I would have not gotten this work. Through this work, It was interesting to understand how Amazon and Bezos's lives achieved this incredible importance but I also believe that most of this information is already known to the general public through articles in journals and newspapers.

A relevant and worthwhile sequel

Thanks to Brad Stone for another well researched interesting story, this time of the most recent Amazon years. Great narration from Pete Larkin. At times great audiobooks are undermined by the narrator, but in this case Pete Larkin’s emphasis, intonation and emotional synchronization with the content enhanced the experience.