How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now , Emily West examines Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. West shows how Amazon has cultivated personalized, intimate relationships with consumers that normalize its outsized influence on our selves and our communities. She describes the brand's focus on speedy and seamless ecommerce delivery, represented in the materiality of the branded brown box; the positioning of its book retailing, media streaming, and smart speakers as services rather than sales; and the brand's image control strategies. West considers why pushback against Amazon's ubiquity and market power has come mainly from among Amazon's workers rather than its customers or competitors, arguing that Amazon's brand logic fragments consumers as a political bloc. West's innovative account, the first to examine Amazon from a critical media studies perspective, offers a cautionary cultural study of bigness in today's economy.

What happens to the relationship between business and literature when storytelling becomes a privileged form of communication for organizations. Corporations love a good story. Microsoft employs a chief storyteller, who heads a team of twenty-five corporate storytellers. IBM, Coca-Cola, and the World Bank are among other organizations that have worked with storytelling methods. And, of course, Steve Jobs was famous for his storytelling. Today, narrative is a privileged form of communication for organizations. In Portrait of the Manager as a Young Author , Philipp Schönthaler explains this unlikely alliance between business and storytelling. The contradictions are immediately apparent. If, as the philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes, stories are told to pass the time, managers would seem to have little time to spare. And yet, Schönthaler reports, stories are useful in handling complexity. When digital information flows too quickly and exceeds the capacity of the human brain, narrative can provide communicative efficiency and effectiveness. Words and numbers both vouch for truth, are both instrumentalized by management, and are inextricably interdependent. What happens, if narrative becomes ubiquitous? Does the commercialization of narratives have an effect on literature? Through the lens of storytelling, Schönthaler explores the relationship between economics and literature and describes a form of writing that takes place in their shared spheres. Most books on storytelling in the corporate world are written by business writers; this book offers the perspective of an award-winning literary author, who considers both the impact of storytelling on business and the impact of business on literature.