Jeff Bezos messed up yesterday. Apparently.

Although the first I knew that his bookshop had failed to deliver Napoleon's Last Island to my sister on the other side of the world, was when Amazon emailed to say they were refunding the whole delivery charge to my credit card.

I'd enjoyed Tom Keneally's charming yarn of the emperor's incarceration on Helena and his interaction with Betsy Balcombe - daughter of the household which was first to accommodate his entourage - and thought she would too.

And she did, the book arriving a day late (on a Saturday) but still ahead of her birthday.

"Amazon's amazing," my sister remarked.

And they are: How many companies have put right what others might regard a minor error even before you've noticed it?

The word of course, is culture, and it's what has defined Amazon - and a few other notables - and is defining what Bezos is doing with the Washington Post.

Lately that's involved the development of newsroom tools such as Bandito - which automatically tests headline options - a new CMS and of course the bot which made its debut reporting Olympic results.

My conspiracy theory about Google - you know, that they're going to conquer the world as we know it (silly me!) - has reservations about the work they're doing with the search giant. But that's "coopertition" with "frenemies", right?

Rich though he is, Bezos (and Amazon) is a minnow by comparison with Google, and didn't build his business by picking a fight with those bigger than him (or did he?).

WaPo has worked with Google on Accelerated Mobile Pages - getting page load-times down under a second - and moved on to Progressive Web Apps, hopefully learning enough in the process to become independent of it.

One outcome may be the Fuse technology that caches ad content ahead of a download so that it renders virtually instantly. All of which may seem insignificant when processing and transmission speeds have increased, just as the have in recent years.

But at the moment, it speaks of a culture which wants the best possible experience for readers and advertisers, and sees a future for news publishing as a result.

Some of this will also develop into a technology business which will benefit not only newsmedia companies, but everyone involved in any stage of publishing (which is all of us).

It comes from within: from a culture of which we should all take note, while there's time.

By the way, you might like the book, and Amazon will be happy to deliver it - on time or your money back. Like me Betsy ends up in the Australian bush, although that's not in the yarn Keneally tells.

Peter Coleman