From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2017 13:29:08 -0700

Nancy Herther of the University of Minnesota Libraries has an
excellent piece on the Against the Grain Newschannel site, published a
few days ago, which brings together a lot of detail for a broad view
of what Amazon is doing and where it's going.  Two URLs, it's in two
parts:

http://www.against-the-grain.com/2017/05/jeff-bezos-amazon-part-1-put-the-customer-first-invent-and-be-patient/

http://www.against-the-grain.com/2017/06/atg-newschannel-original-jeff-bezos-amazon-part-2-moving-from-book-sales-to-the-cloud-and-beyond-is-there-no-stopping-this-behemoth/

My takeaway was that Amazon now so dominates the bookselling industry
that there is about to be room for a niche business that actually
sells books.  They are handling the commodity bookselling business
well, but they are doing fewer and fewer of the things that actual
bookstores do to add value.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU