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Why Amazon Started With Books, and How It Ended Up Running the Internet

Companies and Brands You Know • Beginner Investing • 7 min

Amazon began in the mid-1990s as an online bookstore founded by Jeff Bezos — books were a deliberate early choice, since they were a standardized product with an enormous available catalog, well suited to an early online retail model with limited existing competition in that specific category. Decades later, Amazon spans e-commerce across nearly every product category, but the part of its business that generates a…

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