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Time to Deliver

Jan 17

3 min read

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For the last few months I've been working on a book idea that has been rattling around in my head for a couple of years or so.


The origin of the idea goes back more than twenty five years, to Wrights Lane in Kensington, where I had recently started my first grown-up job as the assistant to the Managing Director of Penguin Books.


This frontline role meant that I was one of a handful of people in the company who had 'the internet' on their computer which meant that I was one of a handful of people in the company aware of (and excited by) the impending UK launch of Amazon, which at that time called itself 'The World's largest bookstore'.


And so, on October 20 1998, I ordered a copy of Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell, paying £1.95 to have it delivered to my desk at work a few days later. Given that I ordered the book within minutes of Amazon's UK launch, this was almost certainly the first Amazon UK purchase to be delivered to the Penguin office.

In a very real way, my early adoption of Amazon paved the way for the rest of my career inside and outside publishing. Two years after buying my first book I became Penguin's ebook editor and then their first Digital Publisher, launching a range of publishing initiatives and innovations that eventually took me from publishing to adland where I worked as a creative director for a number of years. Since 1998 I've moved home four or five times, fallen in love and married, raised three children, changed jobs and careers, been hospitalized, ran a half marathon, endured a global pandemic and bought a dog - a fairly conventional 21st Century adulthood. And since 1998 I've spent nearly £25,000 on nearly 2000 purchases from one store. Amazon. Not a staggering amount, I don't think, especially considering how much we all turned to online shopping during the Covid lockdowns. But buried in all these purchases is the story of my 21st century adulthood. In the spreadsheets of data I've downloaded from Amazon I can trace the contours of family life and its ups and downs. They reveal good times of gratuitous spending and fallow periods where belts were tightened. I see passions and enthusiasms blooming before wilting away. Needs fulfilled and whims indulged.


This has been the writing project I've been working on, an attempt to make sense of the last twenty-five years through the lens of my purchases and my relationship with Amazon. An effort to tell a story not just about me and my family, but about all of us and about how our lives have been changed by Amazon, the most impactful retailer the world has ever seen.


The book has yet to find a publisher and might never be finished. But among the thousands of purchases made since 1998, among the books, the headphones and earbuds, the telephone answering machines and Ben 10 costumes and USB cables, among the dog leads and false moustache kits and ring binders and tents and groceries and oh god so many books, are purchases that tell stories about a particular time or place or person or experience. Little vignettes of the average life of an average family and the things they bought, delivered by Amazon and now, on this blog, delivered to your inbox.


So welcome, nice to meet you etc etc. Hope you enjoy reading about some of the things I've bought. Get in touch if you want to know more about the book or want some pointers on how to access and analyze your own Amazon data. You never know what you might discover...


Jan 17

3 min read

1

6

0

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Words&Ideas © 2024 by Jeremy Ettinghausen

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