[mike_hearn]

Well, Amazon started out with almost no capital, so apparently they could have built an online book platform pretty easily. And the capital requirements of selling books online only fell over time as the tech got more widespread.

Businesses like that are everywhere, but the root cause is always the same: they're run by people who do not like or have any interest in technology. And they hire people just like themselves.

[youngtaff]

In the early days Amazon relied on huge amounts of trade credit from the publishers / distributors

Seem to remember that if the publishers hadn’t been lax about Amazon’s delinquent debt the publishers could have forced Amazon into bankruptcy

(Worked for a major US technical / educational publishing house in the late 90s / early 00s)