I'll tell you what the book is about but not in a form that will enable you to turn it into a book report.
It's about how Bezos became an entrepreneur and the tactics he uses. He's a calculating machine who analyzes business strategies by making lists of alternative strategies, then evaluating them to see where to go next. He never got anything but an A in school, and graduated from Princeton with a 4.2 or 4.3 GPA.
His mother was a hard-working woman from an affluent family who got pregnant with Jeff when she was a teenager. The father was an aspiring juggler and unicycler. They divorced after a few years and she remarried, a young man who came from Cuba as a refugee and worked his way through college. Jeff never met his biological father and doesn't care.
He was a brilliant child, although one teacher said he wasn't the leadership type. He used to build his own inventions in his garage, but I think most didn't work. He tried to build a hovercraft from a Hoover vacuum. Although his parents started out with little money, Jeff spent summers at his grandfather's sprawling ranch in Texas, the Lazy G. He learned to brand and castrate cattle, rebuild a tractor, and said he learned self-sufficiency from that. He idolized his grandfather, who was a scientist at NASA and DoD, as I recall.
He first decided he wanted to become an entrepreneur after college, but didn't know what business to start. Then he discovered the Internet and its amazing growth, and decided he could sell stuff online. Then he evaluated what products to sell, and books came out as the most likely to sell. Then he made lists of where to locate and Seattle came out on top. That's how he makes decisions.
His philosophy is to do everything to make the customer happy, and success will follow. That means cheap prices first. If you can't find a book Amazon will find it for you. He ran the company at a loss for the first several years, investing all revenues into growth. In the tech crash of 2000 he had to prove the could make a profit, and in a few years managed to do so. After he had proved himself and the market recovered, he started investing in growth again, and now runs Amazon at a loss. Some stockholders are pissed off about it, but he owns enough stock that they can't do anything about it.
That's one of Amazon's big advantages. Most companies manage quarter to quarter, trying to squeeze profits out of customers and failing to invest sufficiently in the future. That's why Amazon will last.
But Bezos will squeeze every dime he can from suppliers (such as book publishers), will undercut competitors' prices until they give up and sell their company to him or go out of business. He has no concerns about putting bookstores out of business. He's a tough businessman.
He consistently pays employees very low wages. He runs Amazon like a cult, telling everyone they are helping to change the world. More senior employees worship him, partly because they believe his vision and partly because they got stock options and made it rich. Lower echelon employees work long hours at low pay and never get stock options. Most don't last long.
Some employees intensely dislike him, even some who got rich from stock options. Early employees say he gave orders but expected them to do everything and gave little input on the details. Although he was known as a great programmer before starting Amazon, he never did any programming after he started the company.
After books he decided he could sell anything online and expanded into every market he could think of. He even considered selling insurance online for a while. Some of his new ventures fail.That's the sign of a true entrepreneur.
He has built an incredible automated warehouse system that uses robots and automated inventory tracking systems. He also has an awesome computer system to run the company, fulfill orders, track customers, analyze buying habits, etc. He discovered that he could lease his excess computer capacity to other companies, especially startups, and became one of the first Cloud Computing companies. He also set up his system so that anyone, from independent manufacturers to independent retailers to individuals, can list and sell products through Amazon, with Amazon conducting the transactions.
Now he's less interested in expanding sales of physical goods and wants to do everything he can electronically. He put together a team to create the Kindle, the first successful ebook reader, so he could sell electronic books and get rid of shipping costs. That team also created the Kindle Fire so he could provide customers with all kinds of computer services, information, movies and TV programs.
Amazon is unique in that it is in so many businesses. Like Wal-mart, it is a retailer of physical goods. Like Salesforce.com, it's a cloud computing company. Like Apple, it designs and sells electronic products. Like eBay it's a place for other people to sell goods.
Bezos will succeed because he focuses on customers, is not afraid to experiment, is not afraid to ignore shareholders, has an incredible analytical mind, and is ruthless with competitors.
His real passion is science fiction, space, and the future. To fill those passions, he has a separate investment group, independent of Amazon. That organization has funded Blue Origin, which is building a vertical take-off and landing rocket, and wants to eventually get to the point where we can colonize other planets, a passion he has had since high school. He funded a thousand-year clock, a giant device that will keep time for centuries.
Most of the following happened after the book was published:
Despite his success, he's no Steve Jobs. Apple innovates. Amazon, like Microsoft and Google, copies what Apple does and sells lower-cost versions of Apple's innovations. The original Kindle ebook reader is the one exception, a product that was not a cheaper clone of something Apple pioneered. The recent Kindle phone was a dismal failure because Bezos departed from his cheap clone strategy of creating devices that will sell in volume to people who can't afford Apple products. It was high-priced and he tried to innovate with things like a "3-D' display that just gave people headaches.
Bezos is extremely smart, if unimaginative, and ruthless. He's been fighting with publishers to lower the price of ebooks. A product like this always has a perfect price-point. Too high and you don't sell enough, too low and you give away profits without increasing sales further. Bezos thinks he can find the perfect price point and that traditional publishers can't. He's undoubtedly right about that. Companies from a previous generation of technology are afraid to change. Hundred-year-old publishers found the right price-point for paper, but as that business gets tougher, they want to keep ebook prices as high as possible. Hence the war with Hachette (look it up) to lower the wholesale price of ebooks. He compromised, but eventually Bezos will win and find the right price for ebooks, and publishers will fall in line.
He bought the Washington Post so that he could learn how to distribute news online, shipping to the Kindle. (That distribution deal was announced earlier this week). Here's an article in Politico in which I speculated why he bought the Washington Post after the acquisition was announced last year:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/will-jeff-bezos-be-good-for-journalism-95258.html
He likes to try to crowd source. In addition to hiring professionals to produce movies and TV-type shows, he offers money to aspiring writers to find new ideas from unusual sources. Anyone can submit a manuscript or pilot program, and Amazon might fund and produce it for them. He is reaching deals with publishers, networks and movie studios to allow amateur writers to write fan fiction without violating copyrights so they can sell them as ebooks.
He is possibly the best entrepreneur in the world, although not as imaginative as many others. His analytical mind allows him to make the right decisions (he focuses on the customer not because it's "the right thing to do" but because he knows it will bring success). He has perseverance, brains and tons of money. I'm not sure Amazon will continue to survive after he's gone. But then, neither will Apple now that Jobs is gone.
Now that you know what an interesting story it is, download the ebook yourself and write your own book report. It's designed to be a quick read, short and lively, for people who don't normally read bulky biographies. You can do it in a day.