Fortune has a very, very interesting interview with Mr. Bezos and some of the answers are worth highlighting.
Bezos on Kindle vs iPad
When asked if the iPad (in addition to the B&N price cut) played a role in the Kindle price-cut -
No. The iPad… I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category. The Kindle is for readers.
That’s a pretty straight answer though it’s doubtful it’s going to stop Apple from pretending the iPad is an eReader.
Apparently Books are going to survive as is
This is a particularly interesting comment given the recent addition of Kindle Enhanced Editions for iPad and iPhone -
I think the definition of a book is changing. It’s getting more convenient. Now you can get a book in less than 60 seconds.But in some ways, books are also staying exactly the same. The whole narrative isn’t changing.
Mr. Bezos also brings up the whole ‘it disappears in your hand’ point and considers that to be another reason books aren’t changing. It does feel like he hedges a little bit because he doesn’t give a straight ‘we will always have text only books’ answer. If you feel that books are all about the narrative you are left with a lot of different possibilities.
Bezos on the Fight for $9.99
This was perhaps the most revealing answer. Do read the whole interview to get the full gist.
Basically, when asked whether the Agency Model was hurting Amazon and whether it was shifting sales away from Agency Model Publishers we got some solid answers -
First of all, there are a bunch of publishers of all sizes, and they don’t all have one opinion. There are as many opinions about what the right thing to do is as there are publishers. So you’re seeing that some of them are being very aggressive on prices, pricing their books well below $9.99. Others are trying to do everything they can to make prices as high as possible. And what you’re going to see is a share shift from one group of publishers to this other group of publishers
Do you expect a significant share shift? When do you see that happening?
It’s a significant shift and we’re seeing it already.
Bezos on Experimenting and Close Following
The last few questions are very interesting and talk about Amazon’s strategy of trying out a lot of different experiments and going with the winners. It comes up after a discussion of Amazon’s excellent Cloud Services business (which is discussed at length) and how Amazon started it 6 years ago and how they want to be the electric grid of cloud hosting services.
Mr. Bezos says that Amazon is a company that tries out a lot of different things and then goes with the winners. He talks about how some companies prefer ‘close-following’ – letting other companies find the winners and then quickly copy and follow them into the space – and that there’s nothing wrong with it. He ends by saying that in a fast-moving arena like the Internet it’s not very easy to follow closely and that Amazon’s ‘exploration and inventing’ strategy is way more fun.
Filed under: kindle Tagged: | bezos on kindle, jeff bezos on kindle
