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How 19 years of Amazon Prime has satisfied our need for speed

Just as Engadget was hitting publish on its first posts, I was putting a freshly minted English degree to use working at an indie bookshop in Los Angeles. In seemingly unrelated news, Amazon had just reported its first profitable year after switching from selling books to selling “everything” four years before. (It still sold a lot of books.)

At the bookstore, we focused on our strengths: a varied, multi-talented staff who could size up a customer’s reading tastes and stick a good book in their hands. But mostly, we capitalized on folks who wanted something more from their shopping experience than just speed and convenience, people who didn’t mind if it took a week to get a book, as long as it came with a little local community. The company is playing a part in displaying the very words you’re reading, as Engadget’s site is facilitated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) through Yahoo’s cloud partnership.

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