In the beginning, it was just books — and Jeff Bezos had a reason for that hyper-specificity. Out of all the different products you might be able to sell online, books offered an "incredibly unusual benefit" that set them apart, Bezos said. "There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far," said Bezos. But in the book space, there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, [and] more than 1.5 million in English alone." "When you have that many items, you can literally build a store online that couldn't exist any other way," he explained.

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Persons: Jeff Bezos, Bezos, —, Brian Roemmele Organizations: Libraries Association