Charlie Rose Interviews Jeff Bezos
On 28th July Charlie Rose interviewed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. You can watch the interview here. Here is some selection of the interview related to Kindle:
Kindle VS iPad
CHARLIE ROSE: In the end when people say the iPad or some other tablet device that allows you to read is a Kindle killer.
JEFF BEZOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: Jeff Bezos says what?
JEFF BEZOS: I get this all the time. And first of all I can say Kindle is succeeding. It’s a very different product. It’s a little bit — I can give you an example. If I came to you, Charlie, and I said, “Charlie, I love your show. We’ve got to sex it up.” (LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: You’ve got my attention.
JEFF BEZOS: “The Charlie Rose Show,” we need fast cuts, vicious arguments between your guests. We need to really sex up your show. You would say rightly to me, “Jeff, I love you, man, but you don’t understand my audience. We have a cerebral conversation here. It’s what we do, and it’s how we’re differentiated.”
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s our place.
JEFF BEZOS: That’s what happens to — when people come to me and they say, Jeff, you’ve got to have full motion video color on the Kindle. I say, why? Do you think Hemingway is going to pop more in color?
So we’re doing a particular thing. And so when somebody says to me, you know, you need to add the full motion video and all these things that the iPad has, I say, you know what? You don’t understand myaudience. I love you, but you don’t understand my audience.”
CHARLIE ROSE: And you don’t understand how many Kindles I have sold.
JEFF BEZOS: That’s true. It’s also working. That’s the other argument I can use to rebut that……
…………
JEFF BEZOS: They want a purpose-built device where no tradeoffs have been made, where every single design decision as you’re walking down the process has been made to optimize for reading. The number one thing that people are doing on their iPad right now if you look at the rankings is playing a game called “Angry Birds” where you throw birds at pigs and the pigs blow up. The number one thing that people are doing on their Kindle right now is reading Steve Larsson.
eBook Pricing
CHARLIE ROSE: When the iPad came along, the price of books made publishers happy on the iPad. Books here are 9.95, books on the iPad are 13.95, I think. Tell me the impact of all of that.
JEFF BEZOS: Well, we have 630,000 books that you can read that we sell in the Kindle store. That doesn’t even include the 1.8 million public domain, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books.
But of those 630,000 books, 510,000 of them are 9.99 or less. Same thing if you look at “The New York Times” bestseller list, there are about 112 titles on the list. In the Kindle store 81 of those 112 titles are 9.99 or less. So we are pushing –
Color Kindle
CHARLIE ROSE: When will you have color?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, color — electronic ink — you know, the sort of electronic paper –
CHARLIE ROSE: Electronic ink is the thing that made this possible because you wanted to create the sense it was as much like the feel of a book as possible.
JEFF BEZOS: We really want it to have no eyestrain. That’s the key. We’re not just trying to imitate the book — there is one feature of the book we definitely wanted to imitate which is the book’s incredibly elegant book to get out of the way, to disappear so you could enter the author’s world.
CHARLIE ROSE: See the story.
JEFF BEZOS: And part of that disappearing act that a book does is it does not cause you eyestrain the same they that a typical computer monitor does. So that’s why we chose that electronic-ink display. Color, I’ve seen, but it’s still in the laboratory. It’s not ready for prime time.
Touchscreen Kindle
JEFF BEZOS: So all those things are — that’s our job. Our job is to design a perfect device for reading.
People say why don’t you add a touch screen? The reason we don’t have a touch screen is when we were going down that decision path, we say, “OK, a touch screen,” and the current technology for touch screens is called capacitive touch. It’s a layer that goes on top of that display. It adds glare.
The first thing that you do when you add a touch display is you add a little extra layer of glass or plastic and a little bit of glare. So it’s very easy from an engineering point of view to add a touch screen, but it’s not the right thing when you’re making no compromises. And that’s our point of view on this. We want to build a device that’s uncompromised for reading. And guess what. Our approach is working.
Kindle Sales Figure
CHARLIE ROSE: It clearly is. You said millions. But why are you so secretive? You and I have had this discussion before.
JEFF BEZOS: On the number?
CHARLIE ROSE: People have written about our discussion, as you know, from Kindle –
JEFF BEZOS: I’ll tell you why. We are secretive about the number because we think it’s competitively useful. There are the other people who if they’re going to start planning their manufacturing lines and their supply canes, it’s a helpful data point for them to know how many of these we’re selling. When we just say “millions,” that’s not a good data point for them.
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