Interviews

Totally Hooked: The Weird and Wonderful World of eBay
From the May/June 2002 issue of Book magazine.

Like a lot of eBay's casual users, journalist Adam Cohen has amassed a small collection of items he found on the site, bid on, and ended up winning. He wears auctioned eyeglass frames and an auctioned watch, and keeps at home an auctioned Turkish carpet that bears a woven image of John F. Kennedy with, according to Cohen, "slightly Middle Eastern features." But Cohen's relationship to the Internet's single most visited commercial web site is anything but casual. He recently finished work on The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, a comprehensive history of the electronic auction house and an exploration of its vast, influential, and occasionally bizarre community.

The project started in late 1999, when Cohen, the coauthor of a biography of former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley and then a writer for Time magazine, was asked to put together an article on eBay's meteoric success (a break, he says, from pieces about Clinton-Lewinsky). The company was just four years old at the time and relatively unknown outside of the antiques-and-collectibles crowd. "I didn't know much about it at all," Cohen admits. But it wasn't long before he decided he was dealing with a story as interesting -- and complicated -- as anything he had worked on before.

After visiting eBay's headquarters in California, Cohen flew to Paris, where he met with Pierre Omidyar, the company's idealistic founder. Omidyar, a French-Iranian American, created eBay from his Silicon Valley home in 1995, in part as an attempt to sell a broken laser pointer that was gathering dust. It wasn't long before many of the Internet's early aficionados found the site and started using it to trade computer parts, knickknacks, and even cars. A few months after he began taking tiny commissions on each of the site's sales, Omidyar found himself in an enviable but awkward position: He was sitting on a virtual mountain of nickels and dimes, but he was the father and grand arbiter of a growing and diverse community of buyers and sellers.

With more than 40 million registered users, that community has now surpassed the population of several large nations, among them Poland and Spain. The number of those users who have quit their jobs and now make a living solely as eBay traders is now measured in the hundreds of thousands. (Cohen traveled all over the country, meeting many of them.) "eBay has a life of its own," he says. "It's a confirmation that even though the Internet bubble burst, there is a lot to the Web. It's proof that if you have the right idea, it'll work."