Amazon continues efforts to reduce its total headcount, with more layoffs being confirmed among its workforce.
Reuters reported Amazon as confirming that it has cut jobs in its Books division, including at its Goodreads review site and Kindle units.
According to the report, the Seattle-based retailer said that fewer than 100 workers were impacted and the move was meant to improve efficiency and streamline operations.
Job losses
“As part of our ongoing work to make our teams and programs operate more efficiently, and to better align with our business roadmap, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles within the Books organisation,” an Amazon spokesperson was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The Seattle retailer had added about 4,000 jobs from last year’s fourth quarter to this year’s first, according to its most recent earnings release.
It should be remembered that Amazon’s Books organisation is the foundational business of Amazon itself.
Amazon was founded on 5 July 1994 and launched on 16 July 1995 by Jeff Bezos, after he left his job at a Wall Street firm and moved to the other side of the United States to Seattle.
Amazon began life in the garage of Bezos, where it initially sold very old technology, namely paper-based books.
Besides its now huge e-commerce and cloud operations, the firm of course had also branched on into electronic books and dominates that market thanks to its Kindle range of e-readers.
Read Silicon UK’s Tales in Tech History article about Amazon.
Cost reductions
Amazon has been making piecemeal job cuts for some time now, after a hiring boom during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Last month Amazon axed 100 jobs at its Devices & Services unit, the group overseeing development of such diverse products as Echo speakers, Alexa voice assistant and Zoox self-driving cars.
Amazon more recently has been conducting small cuts to various groups in recent months, including its Wondery podcast, stores and communications units, Reuters noted.
But the bulk of the job losses came in 2023 and 2024.
At the start of 2023 Amazon began culling its principle workforce, and in a series of redundancies, axed more than 27,000 jobs in total.
Then in November 2023 Amazon cut “several hundred” jobs at its Alexa voice assistant division.
In January 2024, Amazon-owned game streaming service Twitch said it was cutting as many as 500 staff, or approximately 35 percent of the workforce, on top of two rounds of layoffs at the unit back in 2023.
Shortly after that it emerged that Amazon was also laying off several hundred employees in its streaming (Prime Video) and studio operations (Amazon MGM Studios), as well as 5 percent of its workforce of Audible (Amazon’s audiobook and podcast division).
Amazon also said in 2024 that it was cutting 5 percent of staff at its ‘Buy with Prime’ unit.
In February 2024 Amazon also confirmed it was cutting “a few hundred roles” at its health focused units, namely the One Medical and Pharmacy divisions. It came after a small number of staff had been let go at Amazon’s Pharmacy unit in July 2023.
