Here is a link to the book review that Paul wrote earlier in the week for the Wall Street Journal about “Delivering Happiness,” the memor by the founder of Zappos.com that has spent the week among the Top Ten best-sellers at Amazon.

In addition to what’s in the WSJ review, which mostly lays out Tony Hsieh’s improbable journey from a failed venture selling earthworms to his fabulous success selling millions of pairs of shoes every year, there are a few things worth noting. The book is generally a quick, easy read. It is quirky, but enjoyably so. Hsieh does spend too much time exploring all the aspects of the Zappos culture, as though it’s right for everyone, when it clearly is not. He also falls into the trap that is common among memoirists, of quoting himself at full length. We don’t need every one of the words in his long memo announcing the acquisition of Zappos by Amazon last year; sure, some of it is funny, and those parts need to be quoted in full, but most of the rest could have been summarized with no loss. The book does contain some underdeveloped, but potentially very interesting, sections on how to apply lessons from poker to the business world and on how the “science of happiness” could inform relations with employees.

Oddly, Hsieh doesn’t discuss a crucial change in the business model, which has seen Zappos go from just selling shoes to selling clothing and accessories. We’ve seen in our research that such moves into supposedly adjacent markets often fail to turn out as planned; did that happen here? Hsieh also glosses over what appear to have been extremely thin profit margins before the acquisition by Amazon. While the companies didn’t provide figures, various analysts estimated at the time of the acquisition that Zappos was earning perhaps just $20 million on $1 billion of annual revenue. He does say the company thinks it is generating lifetime customers and advocates through its free shipping and its policy of letting people return, for free, any shoes they don’t want. But it would have been interesting to see more of the dollars-and-cents aspects of the free-returns decision, especially as long as Hsieh recommends so fervently that others imitate his devotion to customer service.

As the review says, though, social media like Facebook and Twitter are making customer relations even more important than they’ve been in the past, whether someone has a complaint and trashes a company or whether a customer has a great experience she wants to share. So, the book is worth reading just for what it shows about the benefits that can come from wowing customers.