Book Purists everywhere are probably scandalized. Thought it’d be interesting to look at some past interviews and see how they hold up now – First off is a MarketWatch interview with Jeff Bezos conducted on May 28th, 2008.
This an interesting interview overall, with Mr. Bezos talking to Stacey Delo at MarketWatch, and saying some interesting things -
- The main important feature of a book, in his opinion, is that it disappears in your hands while you’re reading it.
- Kindle owners’ favorite feature seems to be WhisperNet. To be able to get a book within 60 seconds.
- Physical books are not going to disappear.
- Sales are well beyond Amazon’s expectations (at that time – now they’re beyond Amazon’s wildest expectations).
- Its interesting to note Mr. Bezos’ focus when he’s talking about price and value for customers (“in difficult economic circumstances, customers disproportionately value that”).
- Another snippet I really liked was -
Taking a 2000 pound car to buy 5 pounds of stuff becomes really expensive.
Does the Kindle make physical books the equivalent of horses?
Well, we’re a long ways away from eReaders that could do that. Kindle 2 is hardly enough of an improvement to be talking about books as outdated. However, in 2-3 years, we might well have eReaders (Apple’s iBook, Kindle 4, Plastic Logic Color) that really make books seem as outdated as horse carriages.
Filed under: kindle 4 Tagged: | jeff bezos, kindle vs book
