Ex Amazon Exec Reviews The Everything Store

Shelf Awareness

The reviews on Amazon of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone (Little, Brown) continue to pour in. Following a long, withering review posted two days ago by MacKenzie Bezos, Jeff Bezos's wife, Shel Kaphan, an Amazon executive during the first five years of the company's existence, chimed in with his own four-star review.

As AllThingsD reported, in the review, "Kaphan said he wasn't planning to review Stone's work, but decided to after reading the negative review by MacKenzie Bezos and mixed reviews by current Amazon exec Jonathan Leblang and former Amazon exec Rick Dalzell, which are now the first three reviews readers see when they visit the landing page for Stone's book."

Kaphan wrote: "I spent considerably more time in the Amazon work environment during those years than MacKenzie Bezos did. By and large I found Mr. Stone's treatment of that which I know firsthand to be accurate--at least as accurate as it is possible to be at this great a remove, and with no contemporaneous documentation of the early chaotic days or access to certain of the principals."

He noted several errors that don't "change the story materially" and said Stone had allowed him to review the chapter of the book focused on the period when Kaphan was at the company--and had made changes based on Kaphan's comments. (Jeff Bezos refused to be interviewed by Stone for the book.)

Kaphan concluded: "There is plenty more that could be written about, and maybe someday somebody will. If and when that happens, I can only hope it is also 'unauthorized' and not sanitized by a corporate PR department, and that some real investigative journalism is done, like Mr. Stone did here."

AllThingsD noted, too, that the negative reviews by current Amazon family likely have helped boost the book's sales: The Everything Store is ranked #82 in sales this morning on Amazon.