Josh Kopelman Quotes

Some of the most innocuous inventions have proven earth-shattering, with reverberations felt around the planet. The Internet is the poster child for disruptive technology, but even such inventions as Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPod have rocked their respective industries by changing how we entertain ourselves.

Every year we are greeted by a host of new apps that will 'change the way we think' about ordering takeout, 'fundamentally transform' our shoe purchases, or 'revolutionize' the way we edit photos.

Jeff Bezos was one of those best and brightest who came to N.Y. to work in finance. He didn't need to know anything about retail bookselling to start Amazon.

Instead of reading a paper, we now read the news online. Instead of buying books at a store, we buy them on-line. What's so revolutionary? The Internet has mainly affected our leisure life.

If you look at the first commercial transactions on the Internet, few of the early companies necessarily survived intact, but the ideas they invented became the industry.

It's easy to forget the ever-plodding eBay with all the noise made by the more lithe and lively Web 2.0 companies.

Retail is undergoing a massive change, and there is a chance for new leaders to emerge and older brands to reinvent themselves.

Booksellers initially thought of Amazon as their best friend. They were coming in, and they were challenging Barnes and Noble, and Borders, which were the big, dominant corporations of the day, and that they would disrupt them and make them less powerful, but they could never envision that Amazon would overtake them all.

Ultimately, Amazon is a weather pattern that disturbs everything around it.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

When we launched the WineLibrary website in 1996, I didn't even own a computer yet. I just understood that there was an opportunity here to market in a different way.

Cars did not kill off horses. Digital publishing will not kill off books.

I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.

The thing that's been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is - I think then, and I think now - that if we didn't do this, someone else would have done it.

You cannot underestimate the impact the Internet has had on British fashion.

The world of digital media is being transformed. A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies.

The Internet creates as well as destroys. Social networks, search advertising, and cloud computing are multibillion dollar industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. They are products of the same force that has rendered the Postal Service's core business obsolete.

The power of digital distribution over physical retail outlets is you have a chance to create a global audience.

Is Amazon truly the best online buying experience? Absolutely not. Is eBay the best platform for auction? Probably not. Are dating sites like match.com really a reflection of the way people date? Probably not.

I would think that most of the online business will be conducted by traditional retailers and that over 90 per cent of the e-retailers will, in fact, all go out of business.

There certainly was a lot of potential in the air for doing a magazine which focused on the way business, in particular, was being transformed by the Internet.

I buy a lot of books I've found via the Internet, whose existences I'd otherwise never have known about.

When I first started doing work on how the Internet is affecting commerce, like a lot of people, I was really excited by this nearly perfect market.

There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.

It's a great thing to live in a digital age. It's convenient; it's fast.