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Don't count Amazon Publishing out, Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, has said.
Giving a keynote at the FutureBook 2013 conference, underway in Westminster today (21st November), Stone, winner of the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, said that Amazon would keep trying new things, and "weaving a rope" to draw customers in.
Stone's book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon is an account of how Bezos set up the online retailer and grew it to the dominant business it is today.
Stone said his favourite Bezos quote—"We don't have many big advantages so we have to weave a rope of smaller advantages"—illuminated the way Amazon does business. He described steps like the Kindle Singles, the Kindle Serials, Text to Speak and Amazon Publishing, as "very small links in the chain".
"When you look at something like Amazon Publishing, you may conclude they're not succeeding, but I would never count Amazon out," he said. "History suggests they will keep trying new things relentlessly and moving to draw out this rope.
"To them, it's still a small company that started in a garage in 2004. They're weaving a rope to draw in customers to their ecosystem in a world that looks very competitive and uncertain."
Follow FutureBook 2013 on Twitter via hashtag #fbook2013.