here's a time capsule.

The CC BY-NC-SA version of Cory Doctorow's 2008 book Little Brother featured dedications to bookstores at the start of each chapter. The second chapter starts with a dedication to Amazon.com.

This chapter is dedicated to Amazon.com, the largest Internet bookseller in the world.

Amazon is amazing— a "store" where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly invented new and better ways of connecting books with readers.

Amazon has always treated me like gold — the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! — and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days).

Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.

Cory Doctorow