Through the life of the Kindle Reader, Mr. Bezos has had a lot of interviews where he’s been asked about the Kindle, and these have been the main source of otherwise elusive Kindle information. I’ve gone through as many of his interviews as I could find, and listed some of the more important things that have been said. This one covers 2007, and there’ll be one covering 2008 down the line -
Bezos on Kindle, Nov and Dec 2007 –
- Bezos on who he sees buying the Kindle – “Heavy Readers (anyone who has 3-4 books open at a time); Travelers”. [from Erick Schonfeld's Interview + next 2]
- Bezos on subscription costs for blogs/newspapers - ”People will understand the subscription charge is essential to cover the wireless delivery”.
- On why kindle edition books aren’t DRM free – “We’ve made it so the publishers can choose. Publishers are not ready to do DRM-free books”.
- Bezos on Charlie Rose: “Started working on kindle in 2004; eBooks weren’t selling; Books are the last bastion of analog; a lot of converging technologies began to make the kindle a possibility around 2004.” [Charlie Rose website- btw, Charlie Rose is a rock star + next 1]
- Bezos on Charlie Rose: “The book is so highly evolved that it disappears when you’re reading – all that remains is the author’s world. This became our top design objective for the Kindle”.
- Jeff Bezos at the W Hotel in NYC (where the Kindle was revealed on Nov 19th – via CNet) -
“We forget (that the printed book) is a 500-year-old technology, and we sort of forget that it’s even a technology,” Bezos mused. “Gutenberg would still recognize a modern-day book.”
- Bezos: “This isn’t a book, it’s a service”. [The Future of Reading Article by Stephen Levy + next 3]
- (Something that might explain kindle’s lack of sex appeal) Bezos again: “The key feature of a book is that it disappears,”
- Bezos on lending Kindle Editions - He’s open to the idea of eventually doing that (books have a loan period and evaporate after the loan period) with the Kindle.
Ending note for the Newsweek interview -
“This is the most important thing we’ve ever done,” says Jeff Bezos. “It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it. And maybe even change the way people read.”
The stress Mr. Bezos places on making the Kindle unobtrusive is interesting. I wasn’t really aware of how much weight this design aspect/feature was given when designing the Kindle. Also, interesting to think of the book as a technology – I’d never realized that it is, after all, a communications technology.
Filed under: kindle Tagged: | jeff bezos, kindle interview
the printed word is more than “a” technology, it is *the* technology, without which virtually everything we take for granted today would have been impossible. we stand, as it has been said, on the shoulders of giants, and those metaphorical “shoulders” are in actuality, books. the printing press was the technological innovation that changed… well, everything.
[...] Snippets about the Kindle from Mr. Bezos’ interviews in 2007. [...]