The Kindle Chronicles

Jeff Bezos: We need to take The Washington Post from being a great local paper, which was a very successful strategy for decades, and transform it into a great national and global paper. We have the capability to do that, and as we do that we're going to change the revenue structure. We ' ve historically made a relatively large amount of money per reader on a relatively small number of readers. We...

Accessibility Architect at Amazon's Lab126   Interview starts at 9:45 and ends at 39:50   We continually evaluate ways we can make reading on the Kindle more enjoyable, more comfortable, more accessible. This led us to create the Bookerly font. This led us to include the open-source OpenDyslexic font. So we continue to evaluate and bring innovations to our customers.      News "Amazon borrows from...

Author, Poet and Associate Editor of TeleRead   Interview starts at 22:08 and ends at 43:10   This [Kindle Oasis] basically gives Amazon its BMW or its Mercedes Benz, which is a pretty powerful draw for the entire range. It has produced a very fine, high-end E Ink eBook reader which caters very well to really  serious readers.   News Amazon's First Quarter  earnings report - April 28, 2016 Motley...

Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research   Interview starts at 12:00 and ends at 44:01   I've got to write this down in a way that helps people understand how this cycle works, where technology comes in and allows us to render scarcity irrelevant. And then what's the business strategy to do this? And that's where I point to people like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon—who are in the habit of...

Assistant Professor at AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow Poland   Interview starts at 20:15 and ends at 43:40   On the Kindle Oasis: "I remember the first eBook readers that were available in Poland cost about that much as well, seven to eight years ago. It’s quite a steep price, and I’ve read comments on Polish web sites that indeed it’s very expensive. I also think that it’s somet...

Featuring Neil Lindsay, Amazon VP Devices and Chris Green, Amazon Lab 126 VP Industrial Design   This special episode of The Kindle Chronicles is all about the new Kindle Oasis, based on an embargoed preview of the device that I attended in New York City on April 7, 2016. The episode is divided into the following four parts: Meet the Oasis - product specs and first impressions. 2:14 to 8:4   (Note...

Author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity   Interview starts at 28:24 and ends at 42:21   The people who are throwing rocks at the Google bus, they’re on to something. The understand something. We should listen. And we can reconfigure, we can optimize, reprogram our economy to help everybody —That’s extremely optimistic. I put myself on the hopeful side...

The Kindle Chronicles’ first listener   Interview starts at 14:54 and ends at 43:13   I should have known that we’d be building our life around it like we have other things that you’ve done. I’ve gotten used to it. I should have known.   Intro Whill wheelchair site   News “Amazon is the ‘most reputable’ company in the US” by Julie Bort at Business Insider - March 29, 2016 Daring Greatly: How the C...

  Editor-at-Large, CNET’s Technically Literate   Interview starts at 19:40 and ends at 43:30   We have a very different generation coming up who may relate to literature in a different way, because we have completely digital generations coming up. So I think those of us who present stories to the world have to be open to different ways to present them. And when we have a way to do it like we do in...

Start and End Times of Interviews at South by Southwest Interactive Martin Baron , executive editor of The Washington Post (8:20 to 18:34) Scott Totman, head of digital product engineering at Capital One 22:16 to 31:30) Rob Holzer , founder and CEO of Matter Unlimited and executive producer of Inside Impact: East Africa Adrian Bell, co-founder and Executive Director of Action Impact in Dubai   Lin...

Senior Writer, Publishers Weekly   Interview starts at 19:24 and ends at 33:23 I absolutely think it’s madness to continue to push for regulatory input into the eBook market. Look what it did for you last time. Let’s just let the lawyers go away now. We’ve all articulated what we think  the problem is in the market. Publishers came together to put the agency model in place, and they perfectly arti...

English Translator of Winter Men by Jesper Bugge Kold   Interview starts at 20:10 and ends at 41:14 I like the fact that I can tell an editor there [at AmazonCrossing] that this book is something that you should really look for, and they listen. And in this case, from start to finish, I suggested this book, and it became a reality and now I’m sitting with it right here on my desk.   News Amazon Ta...

Author of Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives   Interview starts at 14:49 and ends at 42:07 You worry about the next generation of readers. Is literature going to survive? It seems to be surviving at the moment, but the iPhone has been around since 2007, and the way that digital culture has taken over in those nine years is staggering. Its’s much more compr...

Author of Winter Men   Interview starts at 9:42 and ends at 43:24   I was very scared that it was translated into German. I really wanted  it to be translated but still scared, because it’s like their  war. I come from another country with another perspective on the war and write about their  war and their forefathers. But the reception has been overwhelming. I’ve seen some reviews where they writ...

Chief Executive Officer of The Tattered Cover Book Stores   Interview starts at 10:03 and ends at 42:09   I think it would be interesting for independent booksellers to experiment with selling eBooks directly, because it’s become much less device-centric. Tablets have in some ways normalized that world, and the notion that someone could build an open-source eReader app and that we could have direc...

Creator of the I Love My Kindle Blog   Interview starts at 10:46 and ends at 44:02 If people were evolving away from reading long-form reading, we would not have  series. But right now people will say, “Oh yes, that’s great. It’s a 200-page book, but I want a thousand  pages about this character. So I think you can make an argument that people are more into long-form reading that they were in the...

Editor of Amazon’s Little A imprint and Day One magazine   Interview starts at 18:03 and ends at 42:20   A lot of editors across Amazon Publishing kind of have their hands in Day One . Everyone’s really excited about it and dedicated to discovering these new voices and finding opportunities for new writers. (Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths)   News Amazon.com announces fourth quarter earnings ( Pre...

Helping authors and publishers flourish in the digital age   Interview starts at 12:44 and ends at 32:05   This question has become a little bit of a litmus test in the writing and publishing community. It’s almost interesting to talk about how other people react very viscerally to Amazon as a good or bad influence or factor. I do consider myself mostly neutral. Nothing about it, I feel, is wholly...

Author of Maude   Interview starts at 15:00 and ends at 44:33 I do have an agent who called me, and he’s representing Maude. She’s been translated into Italian, German, and Russian. He made the deal for the audiobook. He’s right now negotiating with a few more countries. Whatever Kindle and Amazon don’t cover as far as print copies, he will handle that for me. And hopefully some day a motion pictu...

Creator of the Evil Genius Chronicles blog and podcast   Interview starts at 10:47 and ends at 42:22 This idea that books are exempt from the rules of hoarding, that you’re supposed to be happy that you have walls and walls lined with these things? I don’t actually feel that. I feel that if I had one of those book scanners or if there was a program, if Google had a book buy-back program where I co...

Editorial Director at Publishers Weekly   Interview starts at 16:57 and ends at 44:32   It’s far from the death of eBooks. eBooks are a permanent part of the publishing industry, for sure. But what’s the next innovation? What’s the next mover? What’s going to come along to jumpstart it again? Publishers acknowledge that all you've really done so far is to put the text into a digital format.   News...

Publications Specialist, Wyoming State Library   Interview starts at 20:34 and ends at 38:51   We know that libraries will continue to evolve. The technology is changing so fast. It’s kind of hard to say how they will continue to evolve. But they are going to be out there to meet the needs of their patrons.   News Jeff Bezos's address to the Academy of Achievement (video) in 2001 Interview with Su...

Vice President - Amazon Devices   Interview starts at 18:29 and ends at 37:47   We spent two days in an off-site with Jeff going through the experience, setting up little scenarios of “Ok, here’s the customer. They’ve done’ this, they’ve done this.” And then we would go off in our own corners for 15 minutes and be that  customer and then come back together and discuss “What did we think worked, wh...

Founder and CEO of BeeLine Reader   Interview starts at 12:44 and ends at 32:05   They tried it out with the first graders and found that in the control classroom the students’ reading fluency went up by about 8 points in the course of a month. In the BeeLine classroom, they went up by 14 points.   News Leather covers by Oberon Design for Kindles and Fires Limited Edition Premium Leather Case for...

Graphic designer, author, product developer and workshop presenter   Interview starts at 14:57 and ends at 44:47 So whatever you do, you build products that relate to the knowledge that you have, and the two can feed each other, and you can do them in the same space.   News “Take your tablet to bed: Amazon rolls out ‘blue shade’ tool for Fire” by Ellie Zolfagharifard at The Daily Mail - December 2...