Tracking e-commerce company Amazon, the nonfiction drama "Fulfilling the Order" shows people's lives under the influence of the tech giant

At present, online shopping has become a necessary skill for each of us, with the popularity of smart phones, more and more consumers have changed their shopping habits, choosing to buy goods and services online. People can easily understand tens of thousands of goods through various online shopping platforms, compare their prices and quality, and the next day they can go home with the touch of a finger.

For the increasingly convenient online shopping, American journalist Alec McGillis has done more in-depth research, he spent more than ten years to investigate the world's largest online shopping platform Amazon, and online shopping industry chain upstream and downstream of different people to talk, written a non-fiction book "The Order: Everything and Nothing." Through Amazon, this book shows the significant impact of online shopping patterns on society. Recently, the simplified Chinese version of this book was introduced by the New Classic Culture.

Amazon (AMZN) has announced that it will stop operating its Kindle e-bookstore in China on June 30, which means that the company has basically withdrawn from the Chinese market.

Despite losing ground in China, the company, founded in 1994, remains one of the world's largest online retailers and providers of cloud computing services. In the United States in particular, Amazon dominates its retail sector. At the same time, Amazon has created a large number of jobs in the United States, as the second largest private employer in the United States, its logistics centers, distribution centers and data centers and other facilities, providing jobs for hundreds of thousands of people.

However, Amazon's outsize influence has also generated some controversy. Some people are concerned about its impact on the traditional retail industry and market monopoly, and some people question its tax strategy and harsh labor conditions. The book is journalist Alec McGillis's comprehensive examination and dissection of the company, exploring the social, economic and political implications of Amazon's expansion in the United States. The book delves into Amazon's labor model and labor conditions, and their impact on American communities, focusing on Amazon's monopoly position in American retail, and using it as a lens to show an America that is divided geographically and hierarchically by capital.

In order to show a different perspective of Amazon, the author Alec McGillis visited many cities and towns in the United States, interviewed drivers, delivery workers, sorters, manufacturers and other ordinary people at different positions in the industrial chain, and also delved into the world of activities of politicians, lobbyists, and corporate executives, and wrote about the diverse life under the Amazon empire with wonderful nonfiction techniques. And with real data and sociological perspectives to show the huge rift in social division.

The Los Angeles Times praised that reading the book was like watching The American TV series The Wire, "Only skilled journalists can weave data and anecdotes together so effectively."

By moving geographically from the political center of Washington to the industrial town, the book takes a top-down scan of America's first-tier cities and towns, focusing on the company's enormous impact on small businesses, the real estate market, the employment environment, and the news industry.

In the author's book, Amazon is not just a company, but a revolutionary business model in which everyone is involved. Online shopping has brought the convenience of "one-click order", but also brought a series of chain reactions: the real economy continues to decline, traditional communities have fallen; Small and medium-sized retailers face unfair competition; Labor is trapped in a demanding efficiency system. The era of e-commerce economy is coming, and businesses, workers, and buyers are all spared. Through this book, the author shows how algorithms dominate life and how capital invades everyday life.

After publication, the book was recommended by many media in the United States, including the New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement and American Public Radio. At the same time, the book has been translated into many languages, sparking a global discussion about Amazon and online shopping.

Although Amazon has pulled out of China, the company and its impact still have important implications for us across the ocean.

From the perspective of the drawbacks of the Internet, "Fulfilling the Bill" describes the collective dilemma of the contemporary people. As the subtitle of this book, "All things and Nothing," suggests: We live in an age of all things, trapped in a life of almost nothing; We get 30-minute take-out, next-day delivery, and the convenience of seven-day returns for no reason, but lose the dignity of labor, the freedom of choice, the right to public participation, and the connection and humanity that once existed in the neighborhood.