One of these things is not like the other

In 1994, getting university press books was sheer hell. Grad students bogarted all the best ones at the Yale Library, and the bookstore--well, if they didn't have it in stock (and back then, chances were they didn't--the old Yale bookstore branded itself as the region's best place to buy cheap mass market remainders), you could place at special order to arrive six-to-eight weeks later.

Amazon changed the game. Now we could get academic books whenever we wanted, and the old Yale bookstore died.

One was commerce to serve a charity. The other, a commercial start-up. But for my money, the real social enterprise was Amazon.

Via TechCrunch, Jeff Bezos' Usenet job solicitation from 1994: