Over the past twenty-plus years, Amazon’s gone from bookstore to everything store. Here are all the companies
Gizmodo is 20 years old! To celebrate the anniversary, we’re looking back at some of the most significant ways our lives have been thrown for a loop by our digital tools.
If you’ve ever tried to research how the Big Bad Tech Monopolies of our time got so big and bad, you’ll find that these stories are typically pretty straightforward. Google, for example, started as a search engine company in the mid-90s and spent decades buying and bullying competitors until it swallowed just about all of the search engine market. Facebook started as a social network, and then copied or bought out the competition until it became the most popular social network on the planet. But Amazon… well, Amazon’s a bit different.
When a younger (and less bald) Jeff Bezos opened the platform to the public in 1995, he promoted it as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore”; it was an e-alternative to the Barnes & Nobles and Waldenbooks people knew and loved. In 2022, it moved on from a bookstore to an “everything store,” but even that doesn’t fully describe the scope of what Amazon is.
The same company also controls a third of the world’s cloud computing tech while also being a market leader in home security systems. It develops vaccines and drones and is equally cozy with law enforcement and luxury clothing brands, and owns the leading platforms for gamers, movie buffs, and deeply dehumanizing on-demand labor. In 2019, the company’s sprawling worldwide warehouse presence took up more than 38 Pentagons-worth of physical space. Over the past two years, that footprint’s nearly doubled.
In other words, this company is big—arguably too big—in a way that makes keeping tabs on all of Amazon’s brands and businesses a near-impossible ask. So we did it for you.
Using public records, we’ve done our best to catalog the brands, businesses, and subsidiaries that Amazon’s bought and built up as part of its relentless quest to take over anything and everything it can.
A quick disclaimer: in order to keep things from sprawling into something as long as a textbook (and just as boring), we’re only including the company’s many, many businesses here in the U.S. This blog won’t go into the company’s international footprint, which—at least from our research—seems to stretch into at least thirteen other countries. In 2017, for example, Amazon bought one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the Middle East before also gobbling up one of the region’s premiere delivery startups soon after. Amazon also owns a payment processor in India, a solar energy station in Japan, and an ocean freight operation in China. But just getting your head around Amazon’s U.S. acquisitions is an overwhelming feat. Okay, take a deep breath, and let’s dive in.
Amazon’s Book Businesses
It’s not a coincidence that Bezos picked books as the basis for what would eventually become a hulking e-commerce empire. As he succinctly put it in one 1997 interview, there were (and are) simply Too Many Books for any given brick-and-mortar store to reasonably carry—but not too many that a newfangled online storefront like Amazon could handle. That same year, the company boasted a whopping 2.5 million book titles available for purchase on its platform, netting $148 million in profits for the soon-to-be public company.
Even at the time, those numbers were downright quaint. But they still dwarfed online sales from rivals like Barnes and Noble, who tried getting a leg up on Amazon in 1998 by partnering with Bertelsmann, a major German publisher, in a multi-million dollar deal that put a raft of European titles up for sale on Barnes and Noble’s website.
Just a week after those two announced their team-up, Amazon announced its first-ever acquisitions: a trio of internet upstarts that were bought for a collective $55 million in cash. One of these companies was the Internet Movie Database (more on that later). The other two—Bookpages and Telebook—were some of the leading online bookstores in the UK and Germany, respectively. By the time Amazon later rebranded the two companies as Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de, the Barnes and Noble site was bringing in about a fourth of Amazon’s online earnings, and Bertelsmann didn’t have a website at all.
Around this time, Barnes and Noble was also striking up partnerships with digital marketplaces selling used books that were rare, or out-of-print. So naturally, this meant Amazon would end up buying one of the biggest players in this space. For an estimated $200 million in stock, Amazon announced in 1999 that it was taking over Exchange.com, an e-tailer that, itself, owned two platforms specializing in hard-to-find media: MusicFile specialized in rare records and CD’s, while Bibliofind specialized in rare books.
In 2008, Amazon further cemented itself in the indie book world by acquiring AbeBooks, another one of these marketplaces that boasted 110 million rare, used, and out-of-print titles for sale. In 2011, AbeBooks bought out its biggest European competitor, ZVAB, bringing thousands of booksellers and tens of millions more rare titles under its (and Amazon’s) wing in the process. Pretty soon after, Amazon acquired another European rare bookseller, The Book Depository. Next it bought the hugely popular online comic store Comixology which has proven to be one of its most controversial purchases as increasingly vocal fans have melted down over changes to its app.
Each of these buys paved the way for a future where buying a book online typically means buying it from an Amazon property. But that wasn’t enough. In 2005, it acquired BookSurge, a small-ish print-on-demand supplier catering to small-ish independent publishers. Not long after, Amazon told these same indie outfits that it wouldn’t sell their wares unless BookSurge was the one printing them out; when these publishers revolted, the company straight up yeeted the buy button from these bookseller’s Amazon pages.
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