The Biography and Achievements of Jeff Bezon

      Jeffrey P. Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother was still in her teens, and her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. She remarried when Jeffrey was four. Jeffrey's stepfather, Mike Bezos, was born in Cuba; he escaped to the United States alone at age 15, and worked his way through the University of Albuquerque. When he married Jeffrey's mother, the family moved to Houston, where Mike Bezos became an engineer for Exxon. From an early age, Jeffrey displayed a striking mechanical aptitude. He also developed intense and varied scientific interests, rigging an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room and converting his parents' garage into a laboratory for his science projects. In high school in Miami, Jeffrey first fell in love with computers. He entered Princeton University planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers, and graduated with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He stayed in the finance realm with Bankers Trust, rising to a vice presidency. At D. E. Shaw, a firm specializing in the application of  science to the stock market, Bezos was hired as much for his overall talent as for any particular assignment.      J      Jeff met his wife, Mackenzie. Mackenzie drove while Jeff typed a business plan. The company would be called Amazon, for the seemingly endless South American river with its numberless branches. They set up shop in a two-bedroom house, with extension cords running to the garage. Jeff set up three Sun microstations on tables he'd made out of doors from Home Depot for less than $60 each. When the test site was up and running, Jeff asked 300 friends and acquaintances to test it. The code worked seamlessly across different computer platforms. On July 16, 1995, Bezos opened his site to the world, and told his 300 beta testers to spread the word. In 30 days, with no press, Amazon had sold books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries. By September, it had sales of $20,000 a week. Bezos and his team continued improving the site, introducing such unheard-of features as one-click shopping, customer reviews, and e-mail order verification. The business grew faster than Bezos or anyone else had ever imagined.
        Amazon moved into music CDs, videos, toys, electronics and more. When the Internet's stock market bubble burst, Amazon re-structured, and while other dot.com start-ups evaporated, Amazon was posting profits. In 2010, Amazon signed a controversial deal with The Wylie Agency, in which Wylie gave Amazon the digital rights to the works of many of the authors it represents, bypassing the original publishers altogether. This, and Amazon's practice of selling e-books at a price far below that of the same title in hardcover, angered several publishers, as well as some authors, who see their royalty rates threatened. But it appears that the advent of electronic reading devices is increasing the overall sales of books, which can only benefit readers and authors alike. By mid-2010, Kindle and e-book sales had reached $2.38 billion, and Amazon's sales of e-books topped its sales in hardcover. With e-book sales increasing by 200 percent a year, Bezos has predicted that e-books will overtake paperbacks and become the company's bestselling format within a year. Having already revolutionized the way the world buys books, Jeff Bezos is now transforming the way we read them as well.