From
SmartMoney.com. I'll just quote some of the Kindle parts.
Quote:
SM: Amazon has about 6 percent of all U.S. sales online. That's huge. Why muck it up with all the other businesses you've added, like manufacturing [the Kindle] and your new customer-service software?
Bezos: We are responding to customer needs.
SM: No one asked for the Kindle.
Bezos: True. It's not the customers' job to invent for themselves. Four years ago we thought about extensions to our business. We took a look at what we're good at. On Kindle, we had been selling e-books for years, but you needed an electron microscope to see the sales.
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Quote:
SM: Funny. Today's technology is such that we will soon have a cheaper, better version of Kindle. When will that happen, and what features can we expect?
Bezos: We will have new versions and new prices, but no date is set. We will continue to put content on. We want to make every book ever written available.
SM: What new features might we expect from the Kindle? Color? Animation? When I tried to read the newspaper on my Kindle, I couldn't easily jump to the business section.
Bezos: Color or animation isn't likely. E Ink [the type of technology Kindle employs] display doesn't support color in a commercial way. Plus, the rapid screen updates required for animation create eyestrain. The Kindle is more like a printed page — easier on your eyes. We will do on-air updates. Perhaps we'll create better user interface to improve what you're talking about for a newspaper.
SM: You are creating some original content to sell over the Kindle. There's a speech by author Mitch Albom, for example. Publishers — your suppliers — won't like that.
Bezos: We are working with publishers to make their books available on Kindle. We are not buying copyrights from them. We're also making self-publishing easier and supporting a lot of small publishers.
SM: Perhaps the larger issue is that adults are reading less than they did 10 years ago, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Isn't this a concern?
Bezos: We humans evolve with our tools—they change us. But our network-connected tools have not kept pace with everything we need. The tools we've been building the past couple of decades make information snacking more convenient—I like my BlackBerry; it's good for e-mail and chunks of text. But you don't want to read a 300-page novel from a laptop.It's not comfortable.The Kindle was built for long-form reading.
SM: So as the Internet shortens our attention span, you think the Kindle will lengthen it?
Bezos: Yes, I think people will read more, not less.
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