Amazon.com/Definition

Originally an online bookseller and now a diversified electronic commerce and cloud computing provider, Amazon.com was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos and went operational in 1995. It began providing third-party electronic storefronts in 2000.

Book sales and publishing
It contracted with traditional publishers for deeper-than-usual discounts, in exchange for waiving its right to return unsold materials.

Amazon has become an electronic publisher as well as a retailer. It developed the Kindle book reader.

Information services
Under its World Wide Web operations and development resources, it offers Amazon Web Services, which include:
 * Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ]] (Amazon EC2)
 * [[Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
 * Amazon SimpleDB
 * Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
 * Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS)
 * Amazon Mechanical Turk
 * Amazon CloudFront