Jeff Bezos’ original Amazon book deal raised $16.9 billion in 10 months, more than half in the U.S. alone: ​​report – Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Amazon.com Inc.‘S Amazon The original book business is experiencing a revival; according to a leaked internal document, sales reached $16.9 billion in the first ten months of 2022.

What happened: Amazon’s original business of selling books, which dates back to the company’s founding in 1994, is thriving and overtaking its digital counterpart, e-books, Business Insider reported, citing a leaked internal document. It offers a detailed look at Amazon’s book business and the entire publishing industry.

The 25-page document, marked confidential, was used for a weekly business report at Amazon. It shows that Amazon’s book business generated gross merchandise sales of $16.9 billion in the first 10 months of 2022. This includes the total sales volume of print and digital books, including e-books and audiobooks.

In the US alone, Amazon’s book sales during the same period totaled around $9.5 billion, indicating the company’s continued success in its original business for nearly three decades.

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Despite the rise of e-books since the launch of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader in 2007, the document shows that print books continue to outperform e-books on the platform. The document also highlights Amazon’s “monopoly power” in the book business, which has been the subject of antitrust investigations in recent years.

“Amazon has a written narrative culture, which means that at any given time there are thousands of documents circulating throughout the company, providing information at a specific point in time and with varying degrees of verification and accuracy,” Hamiltonthe Amazon spokesman said, according to the report.

“Our goal is to inspire customers to read more and get the most out of reading. We offer innovative, unparalleled reading experiences, the widest possible choice, opportunities for our customers to read how and when they want, and a variety of affordable ways to read.”

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in July 1995 as an online bookstore and operated it from his home in Bellevue, Washington.

Why it is important: The success of Amazon’s book business is part of a series of significant developments for the company. On Thursday, Amazon’s stock price rose following the announcement that Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now available in Amazon Bedrock.

This AI model, which outperforms competitors such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, underscores Amazon’s investment in cutting-edge technology.

In addition, Bezos has been making waves with his ventures outside of Amazon. In May, it was reported that Bezos had entered the mortgage business, offering high-interest loans to investors. This move underscores Bezos’ continued influence and diversification across different sectors.

In addition, Bezos’ hands-on leadership style was evident when he called Amazon customer support to resolve discrepancies between customer complaints and company data, setting off a chain of events to improve customer service.

Price promotion: Amazon.com Inc. stock closed at $186.10 on Thursday, up 1.80% on the day. The stock was down slightly by 0.42% in premarket trading. Year-to-date, Amazon stock is up 24.12%, according to Benzinga Pro data.

Read more: Elon Musk lures Tesla employees with stock bonuses after his $56 billion pay package gets shareholder backing: report

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This story was created with Benzinga Neuro and edited by Kaustubh Bagalkote