After liveblogging Amazon’s Kindle announcement earliertoday, I was able to sit down with Jeff Bezos for a quick one-on-one. Here is the Q&A:
Q: Who do you see buying this device?
Bezos: Heavy readers. Anyone who keeps three or four books open at the same time. It is heavy to carry all of those books around. People who are really busy. The traveler is another constituency. it id designed to be usable by someone who does not even want the complexity of using a computer. It is closer to being an appliance.
Q: Would you take this to the beach?
Bezos: Yes. I would treat it like Blackberry. I wouldn’t bury it in the sand. But it is much better than trying to read a newspaper on the beach with the pages blowing everywhere.
Q: Do you really think anyone is going to pay to get newspapers or blogs on this device when they can get the same thing for free on the Web?
Bezos: The convenience of having your newspapers pushed to you full text—newspapers and blogs—is fantastic. People will understand the subscription charge is essential to cover the wireless delivery. 99 cents a month for a blog, a third of the cost of a latte? To get the wireless convenience of having that blog resident on your device and updated at all times? [Ed.'s note: Some blogs, like TechCrunch, are $1.99 a month. We remain skeptical that anyone will pay for these, but hope to be surprised].
Q: Would you consider opening up this service to other devices so that I can get my Amazon e-books on my Tablet PC or my iPhone?
Bezos: In principle, I think that is a very good idea. [Ed.'s note: Nothing to announce at this time].
Q: What about getting rid of the DRM [digital rights management]? You came out with a DRM-free music download service. If that is the right thing to do for digital music, why not do it for digital books as well?
Bezos: We’ve made it so the publishers can choose. Publishers are not ready to do DRM-free books. We worked with the music labels for years to get them to the point where they would be able to do DRM-free music. It is up to the publisher. [Ed.'s note to publishers: Don't make the same mistake the music companies made by limiting how people can consume your books].
Q: How important is this for Amazon, and what is your time horizon for measuring its success?
Bezos: We have invested significantly. In terms of meaningfulness, this could be one of the most meaningful things we have ever done. . Things we have done in the past have taken years to come to fruition, but we are very patient.
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This thing looks absolutely terrible. Like something from 1987.
I finally understand the difference between a good company and a great company.
A good company releases a product and then gradually improves releasing new versions until they end up with the product which the orginally envisioned. (Microsoft)
A great company is a company that can release a first product exactly how they envisioned it. (Apple)
Either Mr. Bezos lacks vision, or he runs a good company.
btw, why not have ad supported blog content on the kindle, to keep it free?
very strange scrolling-wheel-selector jammy. who came up with that? how does this thing compare to the sony one in terms of initial price, DRM, cost of books, and extras? i’d like to see a comparison, please point me to one if you find one…
Where is the good looking, color, touch one?
Looks about as fun to use as an ATM.
People, it’s not supposed to be “fun to use” or Apple eye candy. Is a book “fun to use?” Is a newspaper? A dictionary? No, they are highly evolved media that serve the purpose of conveying the written word to the reader in an unobtrusive, easily consumed format. And that looks exactly like what this thing will do. Do you look at a Bible and say “oh, this is SO 1623 A.D.”? Pipe down and buy one if you’re the target demo; if not, then move along folks, there’s nothing to see.
I think I’d buy one if I could transfer the huge number of PDFs and text files that I already have onto it, but there’s no way I’ll be paying for a new copy of a book or a document I already own — and unlike iTunes, it isn’t quite so easy to “rip” your existing book collection onto it.
Oh, by the way, that thing has been hit with the ugly stick
is the creator blind?
I love Bezos and amazon, but this looks awful… It looks like a big ugly Newton.. DRM for blos i can get for free and news i can get get for free? No way
I think it looks awesome, awesome design. Though I hope the european version will have HSDPA, WiFi and some way to connect a larger keyboard to enter longer texts. I also wish it had an open RSS aggregator (why not with Amazon powered personalised RSS feed recommendations, micro-payments per blog post and ebook customized add-supported blog posts) and native open formats support. Also I wish this had a wacom stylus touch-screen interface also like the iRex Iliad.
I hope Amazon can add all that to it before releasing it in Europe in a couple of months.
Well, it may be ugly…but as someone else said on another post, Blackberries are ugly too. perhaps this is a prototype, which will be refined–but the basic idea behind it is pretty good. It would indeed be very nice to have a couple of books stored on the device, ready to read–vs. carrying a couple of tomes around. But how would we get those books in there? and could we upload books we already have, thus making them more portable? As it is, this may end up being something like “books on tape,” or be great for academic use. As for putting blogs and newspapers on it–why? is that really a good or logical use for this device? or will a rush to incorporate RSS feeds, etc. be a bit too much and make it seem more like a dumbed-down version of a blackberry/iphone/laptop, etc…
Very excited about this new device. Hopefully Sony and Amazon will get into a bit of a war over this and we can see some really great devices come out.
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