The Kindle Chronicles

Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research Interview starts at 11:17 and ends at 36:16 "I don't think they [Amazon] really expect the fashion angle to be a big driver of these [Echo Look] devices. They needed a pretext. They needed a reason to put a camera in your home, to see how comfortable you are with that idea, to test whether or not there's a big social outcry about putting c...

Author of The Doctor Is In: Dr. Ruth on Love, Life and Joie de Vivre Interview starts at 13:00 and ends at 41:17 "This is also my philosophy of life: I talk about a turtle. A turtle stays in one place--it's safe. Nothing can happen. It carries its house on its back. If that turtle wants to move, it has to take a risk. It has to stick its neck out. And I like that image of the turtle." Intro Echo D...

Author of Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World Interview starts at 10:33 and ends at 41:35 "Education increasingly wants to measure finite, little bites of stuff, and the digital technology that we are using in our education--and we do have print--is tailored to these quick wins as opposed to a deeper level of learning." Intro My new VR setup: Samsung Galaxy Edge S8 with new Sams...

Painter, art critic and historian Interview starts at 15:00 and ends at 41:14 "I remember your talking on one of your programs about Jeff Bezos's insisting on a one-second [Alexa] response when his staff said, "We can get this down to three seconds," and he said, "That's not good enough." That makes a huge difference. It shouldn't--we're so impatient, I'm so impatient. But the fact that it is more...

Creator of I Love My Kindle and The Measured Circle Interview starts at 6:14 and ends at 43:10 "It would also be able to know what your preferences are--that's one of the biggest things about what we'll see eventually with Virtual Reality. So for myself as a vegetarian, I could walk down that virtual aisle and have things that were for vegetarians maybe have a green outline on them, so that I coul...

Author of "Jerry (from accounting)" Interview starts at 14:56 and ends at 45:09 "I love what Amazon is doing in terms of giving access to a platform in a kind of populist way. I think that is incredibly helpful. I think the distribution is amazing. It creates new readers. I love the $2 price point for a novella. I think that's definitely expanding who can have access to the writing and quality wri...

Co-founder of Ask My Buddy Interview starts at 18:45 and ends at 41:25 "In terms of users or penetration, I would say that Google Home probably represents about less than 10 percent on our network. [Alexa has the rest.] That's just time out there, the commercials. They're just more widely known. Also, I would say the reduction in price, coming out with the Dot for 49 bucks--that was an end all. Th...

David Measer of RPA Advertising and Lisa Pecot-Hebert of USC Interview starts at 25:08 and ends at 49:15 I expected the smaller cities in the U.S. to be places where eventually trends made their way there and that they'd be listening to music that I listened to 10 years ago, or wearing fashion that was old. And it wasn't like that at all. These places, cities that I couldn't even identify on a map...

Author of Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert Interview starts at 10:27 and ends at 41:38 "Billie Jean King is very aware of my Ripper book, and we talked about it when I began all this investigation in 2001, because Billie Jean had been a friend of mine for many years. We talked about this, and she said, 'You need to talk to the people at Amazon about this, because this is a really unusual...

Author of The Kutherian Gambit series Interview starts at 10:15 and ends at 43:51 "When I originally put out Book 1 I had no idea if anyone cared about my stories. I didn't want to invest a lot of time, money, and effort if nobody wanted to read it." News "Site of Amazon's Cloud glitch made it especially disruptive" by Angel Gonzalez at The Seattle Times - February 28, 2017 "The embarrassing reaso...

Author of Four Seasons of Reno Hart and Creator of The Author Biz podcast Interview starts at 10:33 and ends at 42:30 "The power of Amazon Publishing--if you've written a good book and the people at Amazon support the book--there are so many levers and knobs that they can turn to put it in front of the people who will like it. It is astonishing. There's nothing like it." News Amazon discount to ce...

Technology Reporter at Observer.com Interview starts at 10:30 and ends at 42:19 "That's why I call this whole printed book thing fetishism. What's more important? Is literature and writing important or is this object more important? I think literature is more important, and writing is important. I don't really care how people read it. I just really want to push back on this idea that there's somet...

Historian at the Sanibel Public Library Interview starts at 3:01 and ends at 34:30 [On Anne Morrow Lindbergh:] "Going up and learning how to fly--I mean, in that era was pretty impressive. I'm kind of struck by the fact that a lot of times when we look back and say 'Gee, in the 50s it was kind of daring of a woman to do that." It may have been as a wide generality, but there have always been darin...

President of The Future of Publishing Interview starts at 8:19 and ends at 44:04 "I'm convinced that if you want to retain your job in publishing moving forward, unless you're demonstrably technology adept, you're going to lose your job. Yeah, there's room for 100 amazing editors who can't even use a computer, but that's not the run-of-the-mill worker in publishing today. They need to be imbued wi...

Co-Authors of Evelyn's Lighthouse Interview starts at 14:58 and ends at 44:35 Patience: "It was really meant to inspire other younger girls or the readers to read more, because I've always loved reading, and Evelyn loves reading. We really hope that it causes others to want to read just as much as Evelyn does." News Author Earnings Book stats presented at Digital Book World "Despite What You Heard...

Our supper aboard the Silver Meteor en route to Kissimmee, Florida News "How Netflix Lost Big to Amazon in India" by Abhishek Madhaven at Backchannel - January 12, 2017 Tech Tip "Is Amazon's Newest 5% Credit Card Worth the Hype?" by Nick Clements at Forbes - January 13, 2017 Interview with Kindle Owner Robert Millonig (Starts at 17:51 and ends at 27:35) The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution...

CEO of Open Road Integrated Media Interview starts at 14:22 and ends at 41:41   Links for Interview with Paul Slavin : Open Road Integrated Media website Paul Slavin's 2016 year-end letter to employees Early Bird Books newsletter BookBub BookGorilla Upstairs at the White House by J. B. West Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T. J. Stiles The Big Picture: On the Origins of...

Author of Books for Living Interview starts at 19:07 and ends at 43:15 "One of the reasons I come back to Lin Yutang is a marvelous story he tells, in 1937, about being in the most famous tea house in China. And the tourists there are so busy taking photographs of themselves drinking tea that they don't enjoy the tea. And I thought to myself, 'We blame too much on the machines.' Constant connectiv...

My Wife Darlene, Claire and a new quilt   Interview ‪starts at 12:28 and ends at44:58 "What's great about Audible is you still get to hear a story. You're not reading it, but you're still getting a story . And for me sometimes when I get stuck on stuff in my studio, it's just keeping me in the room long enough to get past it. And Audible does that." News "Alexa Devices Top Amazon Best-Seller List...

Author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book Interview ‪starts at 12:44 and ends at 32:05 "There's often a false division between audiobook listeners and print book readers, because in my experience the two are almost always the same. They're people like me who just love reading and want to do as much of it as possible, and audiobooks are a way to do that."  News Jeff Bezos interviewed by Walter...

Author of the Making Book blog   Interview ‪starts at 14:03 and ends at 44:31 "The idea that Barnes & Noble can make it by sort of becoming a small specialist, cozy bookstore is kind of delusional. It's a big organization!" News Amazon Prime Air Jeff Bezos's tweet announcing first Prime Air delivery - December 14, 2016 Jeremy Clarkson Prime Air video - November, 2015 Amazon White Papers on recomme...

Senior Pastor of New Covenant Church, Indianapolis Interview ‪starts at 7:20 and ends at 33:36 I think it's a matter of accepting the change that God has provided with these tools, learning how to use the tools. For example, we could try to tell people, "Well, don't go to the movies." Well, they're going to the movies. Teach them how  to go to movies. With social media and all the rest, I believe...

Head of Cynthia Manson Literary Agency Interview ‪starts at 14:30 and ends at 41:06 "The trick is that if you have an author that is struggling to find that audience, to find that readership--Alan [Russell] is a perfect example, because he always got wonderful reviews, is a fantastic writer, still has a great relationship with his former editor at St. Martins, but there was always a struggle to fi...

Senior Books Editor at Amazon.com Interview ‪starts at 12:41 and ends at 43:35 "[ The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis] is one that I personally wanted to see as high on the list as possible. It's a fictional story set in a post-apocalyptic world. It's as if we're living again in the Old West, so there's vigilante justice, there are small pockets of people living in the wilderness. Searching for gold is ki...

Deputy Editor, Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard   Interview ‪starts at 16:02 and ends at 40:51 "I think it's become very clear that there's going to be a devoted subset of people who do read on eReaders, and there's going to be a lot more reading on phones." News "Amazon App for iPhone Now Has X-Ray Vision to See Inside Your Packages" by Andy Orin at Lifehacker - November 16, 2016 "Alexa, What Are...