De Machine: now available in English

De Machine, the award-winning Dutch book about the 25-year history of Dutch-American hotelwebsite Booking.com, has been translated to English. The English-language edition is published under the title "The Machine - Under the Spell of Booking.com" and available for purchase in Europe as an ebook from retailers like Amazon, Kobo, iBooks and Google Books. 

Booking.com, one of the richest and most successful internet companies in Europe, has been a mystery for 25 years. Everyone is familiar with the website, but no one knows the people and the stories behind this deeply Dutch company that now rests in U.S. hands. Until now. Three journalists from the major Dutch NRC daily newspaper present a detailed reconstruction of the dark internet fairy tale of Booking.com, from an idea built by a group of engineering students in Twente in the late 1990s to its development into the largest and most powerful hotel booking platform in the world.
 
This is the never-before told story of Booking's rise, zenith and moral decay; of extravagant parties, runaway internet experiments, duped shareholders, manhandling managers and boardroom squabbles. Above all, it is the story of a company that built the supreme online money-making machine, but in the eternal quest for more, forgot the human beings behind it. De Machine won the acclaimed 2022 "De Loep" prize, a Dutch-Belgian award for best investigative journalism work and was shortlisted for the distinguished Brusseprize as well.