Read The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon for Free Online Page B

his trousers. “We were pre-startup. It was just Shel, myself, and Jeff in an office, sitting around a table with a whiteboard and discussing how to divide the programming work.”
    One of their driving goals was to create something superior to the existing online bookstores, including Books.com, the website of theCleveland-based bookstore Book Stacks Unlimited. “As crazy as it might sound, it did appear that the first challenge was to do something better than these other guys,” Davis says. “There was competition already. It wasn’t as if Jeff was coming up with something completely new.”
    During that time, the name Cadabra lived on, serving as a temporary placeholder. But in late October of 1994, Bezos pored through the A section of the dictionary and had an epiphany when he reached the word Amazon. Earth’s largest river; Earth’s largest bookstore. 3 He walked into the garage one morning and informed his colleagues of the company’s new name. He gave the impression that he didn’t care to hear anyone’s opinion on it, and he registered the new URL on November 1, 1994. “This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away,” Bezos said.
    While the original Bellevue garage would come to symbolize a romantic time in Amazon’s early history—the kind of modest beginnings that legendary companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard started with—Amazon was located there for only a few months. With Kaphan and Davis nearing completion of a primitive beta website, Bezos began to think about hiring other employees—and that meant finding a more professional place to work. That spring, they moved to a small office above a Color Tile retail store in the industrial SoDo (for “south of the Kingdome”) district, near downtown Seattle. Amazon had its first official warehouse in part of that building’s basement: a two-hundred-square-foot windowless room that was once a band practice studio and still had the words Sonic Jungle spray-painted on a jet-black door. Soon after, Bezos and MacKenzie left the Bellevue house and, attempting to recapture the urban energy of their New York lives, moved into a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment on Vine Street in Seattle’s fashionable Belltown neighborhood.
    In the spring of 1995, Bezos and Kaphan sent links to the beta website to a few dozen friends, family members, and former colleagues. The site was bare, crammed with text and tuned to the rudimentarybrowsers and slowpoke Internet connections of the time. “One million titles, consistently low prices,” that first home page announced in blue underlined text. Next to that was the amateurishly illustrated logo: a giant A set against a marbled blue background with the image of a river snaking through the letter. The site seemed uninviting to literate people who had spent their lives happily browsing the shelves of bookstores and libraries. “I remember thinking that it was very improbable that people would ever want to do this,” says Susan Benson, whose husband, Eric, was a former colleague of Kaphan’s. Both would become early employees at Amazon.
    Kaphan invited a former coworker, John Wainwright, to try the service, and Wainwright is credited with making the very first purchase: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, a science book by Douglas Hofstadter. His Amazon account history records the date of that inaugural order as April 3, 1995. Today, a building on Amazon’s Seattle’s campus is named Wainwright.
    While the site wasn’t much to look at, Kaphan and Davis had accomplished a lot on it in just a few months. There was a virtual shopping basket, a safe way to enter credit card numbers into a Web browser, and a rudimentary search engine that scoured a catalog drawn from the Books in Print CD-ROMs, a reference source published by R. R. Bowker, the provider of the standard identifying ISBN numbers for books in the United States. Kaphan