Company lawyers later changed the name to the Small Publisher Negotiation Program

An article very critical of Amazon, Cheap Words by George Packer. Not necessarily wrong but certainly one-sided and therefore incomplete. Love this passage though, illustrating the interplay when imaginative entrepreneurialism meets with corporate risk management.

Sales meetings in Seattle were now all about payments, not new books, and the size of orders was predicated on algorithms, rather than on the enthusiasm of the publishers’ sales staff and Amazon’s own buyers, who were rebranded as “inventory managers.” Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” (Company lawyers later changed the name to the Small Publisher Negotiation Program.)