Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer and one of the nation's biggest book sellers, is one of the iconic companies of the Internet era. It was founded in 1994 by Jeffrey P. Bezos, a former financial analyst for the New York hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Company who, legend has it, set...

In November 2007, the company made the leap from selling others' products to selling its own, as it introduced the Amazon Kindle, an electronic book reader with the capability of downloading books wirelessly. A few other companies, notably Sony, had been selling electronic book readers, but...