11 Books on Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon

Summer 2024 marks 30 years since Jeff Bezos started Amazon from his garage. Anyone looking to learn more about Bezos, compete with Amazon, or both can find food for thought in these 11 books — some admiring, some critical — that explain the principles and tactics behind the company’s success.

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post by Martin Baron

Collision of Power

Though not about ecommerce, Baron’s book offers insight into Jeff Bezos’s leadership style. The author began his eight-year stint as the Post’s executive editor just before Bezos purchased it in 2013. He provides an insider’s view of how reporting decisions were made through tumultuous news cycles.

Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets by Jason Del Ray

Winner Sells All

Evolving from a bookseller to a general retailer put Amazon on a collision course with Walmart. Del Rey chronicles the ongoing battle that has placed billions of dollars and millions of jobs on the line with outsized impacts on consumers, retailers, and the future of shopping.

The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman by Carmine Gallo

The Bezos Blueprint

There’s no disputing Amazon’s influence. This book aims to distill the methods its leaders use to write, collaborate, innovate, and pitch — and present them as tools that others can apply in their own organizations.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

Amazon Unbound

Stone, a Bloomberg journalist, revisits the subject of his 2013 bestseller, “The Everything Store,” which chronicled Amazon’s rise from startup to billion-dollar company. This time he explores how the company and its founder transformed from an upstart to a global power.

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr

Working Backwards

Both authors joined Amazon early on and spent more than a decade as senior executives working closely with Jeff Bezos. They share their experiences to create an exciting story and a practical business guide.

Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos intro by Walter Isaacson

Invent & Wander

The book compiles speeches, interviews, and annual shareholder letters for insight into Bezos’s evolution, along with plenty of case studies.

All In: How Obsessive Leaders Achieve the Extraordinary by Robert Bruce Shaw

All In

Drawing on extensive research, Shaw compares business titans Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Travis Kalanick “warts and all” to tech trailblazer Steve Jobs, illustrating their impressive achievements and the downsides of the “all in” leadership style.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World’s Best Companies Are Learning from It by Brian Dumaine

Bezonomics

Dumaine combines a lively history of Amazon’s rise with speculation about where it will go next — advertising, health care, banking? He also delves into how other companies worldwide borrow from Amazon’s model and offers tips for “Amazon-proofing” your business.

199 Best Quotes from the Great Entrepreneur Jeff Bezos by Olivia Longray

199 Best Quotes

This is a compilation of Jeff Bezos’s thoughts on family support, Amazon, Blue Origin, space colonization, leadership, motivation, failure, and success — organized in four thematic sections, with links to sources.

The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon by Steve Anderson with Karen Anderson

The Bezos Letters

Business analyst Steve Anderson calls Bezos’s annual letters to shareholders a “hidden roadmap” business leaders can follow to make their companies more efficient, powerful, and successful, distilling them into key growth principles such as “Obsess over Customers” and “Promote Ownership.”

The Everything War by Dana Mattioli

The Everything War

A scathing critique of the practices that led to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filing its antitrust suit against Amazon last year, this book asks whether Amazon’s ecommerce and cloud computing businesses have grown too big to regulate. I included the book in my “10 New Business Books for Summer” roundup. The book is longlisted for the “Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2024” award.