Dubbing him "Amazon's Hit Man," Bloomberg Businessweek featured an in-depth look at Larry Kirshbaum, v-p and publisher, Amazon Publishing, beginning with the story of a book trade party in 1997 to which Kirshbaum, "then the powerful head of Time Warner Book Group, brought a guest: a young online bookseller named Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose ambitions would eventually end up affecting the lives of everybody at the party."
"It was one of those moments in your life where you remember everything," Kirshbaum recalled. "In fact, I think Bezos still owes me an umbrella."
Nearly 15 years--and uncountable industry changes--later, "in the middle of this stew of rancor and mistrust sits Kirshbaum. He was once the ultimate book industry insider, widely known and almost universally liked. He has a well-honed instinct for big, mass-culture books and was thinking about e-books--and losing money on them--long before almost anyone else in the industry. Many of his former peers now consider Kirshbaum a turncoat. In interviews, more than a dozen publishing executives said he had gone over to the dark side; some said they'd conveyed that sentiment to Kirshbaum directly," Blooomberg Businessweek wrote.
"I have a message I really believe in," Kirshbaum countered. "Which is that we're trying to innovate in ways that can help everybody. We are trying to create a tide that will lift all boats."
Bloomberg Businessweek suggested that Amazon may be positioning its publishing division "for a world that is still a few years away, in which a majority of books are distributed electronically. In that world there could be even fewer traditional bookstores than there are now, and Amazon may look a whole lot more appealing to prominent authors. And Larry Kirshbaum could once again be one of the most popular guys in New York."
