Bufo Calvin is the creator of the I Love My Kindle blog and The Measured Circle’s Geek Time Trip Interview starts at 9:49 and ends at 36:45 "If you want to watch 'Devil Girl from Mars' you can go and watch it on this site . What’s happening so far is that I’m having a great time with it. I’m adding stuff to it. Virtually no one else ever goes there. I kind of feel like I’m up in my attic, and I put all these things on the wall and that’s great and I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of that. But ...
Oct 21, 2016•45 min
EVP and Publisher, Open Road Integrated Media Interview starts at 15:33 and ends at 43:28 "We are not an agency publisher. So we don’t have any control over the consumer price. We set the digital list price, and we don’t have control over the consumer price. And Amazon is free to discount it to whatever price they want. And I would also point out that we are very aggressive in the number of and the frequency of which we promote our books in price promotions." News “Amazon Music Unlimited versus...
Oct 15, 2016•45 min
Author of Find Your Own Voice Interview starts at 16:18 and ends at 42:39 "I don’t think books are going to evolve, because I think other things are there to take that slack up. And I think that’s okay. The one thing I can tell you is I have a lot of print books in my life, even though I read mostly digital now. Every time I have a print book I always want to be clicking a link or something. I always want to be grabbing some text and dropping it into Evernote. There are a lot of moments where t...
Oct 08, 2016•45 min
Senior Writer and Features Editor at Publishers Weekly Interview starts at 12:44 and ends at 32:05 "The fact that we have rapidly declining eBook sales from major publishers and that we see for two years running now in the Pew surveys that eBook readership is not growing is stunning, considering the vast offerings that are now available in digital format. I just hope that the publishers haven’t, if not killed then wounded their golden reader, which is a reader that will read on any device, and ...
Oct 01, 2016•45 min
Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research Interview starts at 14:34 and ends at 44:17 "It’ll happen in the cloud, and it will get propagated out to eight, 10, 15, 20 million households that will have the more rudimentary voice enabled [Alexa device], and then suddenly it will become like magic. Suddenly that device, that Trojan horse that Amazon has gotten into your home, will suddenly unleash itself and become a truly intelligent agent. Is that a year away? At least, but we’re...
Sep 23, 2016•45 min
Rowing medalist, challenged reader trying a Kindle Interview starts at 14:43 and ends at 42:48 I remember walking home from third grade and throwing a workbook away, it was a book that I had made out of paper and was keeping notes in. I threw it in the bushes, because my teacher said, “You’re supposed to take this home and get your parents to sign off on your assignments, that you’ve done them all.” I threw it away, and I said I’d lost it. because I didn’t want to show that I’d not done the re...
Sep 17, 2016•45 min
Author of Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids Interview starts at 8:44 and ends at 41:26 The thing that really hit me was, this is compulsory. None of these kids have a choice. Whatever the cutoff age is, they have a choice, but all of those earlier years they cannot just decide, “I don’t want to go to school today” unless they had a very understanding set of parents or something. They have to go. And they have to get up really early. Often they’re on a bus for an hour, and then all...
Sep 10, 2016•45 min
Senior Editor, Amazon.com Books Interview starts at 17:14 and ends at 44:11 "I’ve heard it said that summer’s a great time for summer reading, but it’s also a great time to sit down with that one nonfiction book that you want to take the time to read. Maybe it’s transitioning a little bit, but fall is definitely the big time to sell books. That’s when everybody gears up and starts scheduling their huge books." News “Now Arriving on the New York Subway: Free E-Books, Timed for Your Commute” by ...
Sep 03, 2016•45 min
Publisher of Open Letter Books Interview starts at 15:15 and ends at 43:30 Amazon[Crossing] is filling in some of these gaps, because we haven’t for a long time seen the normal mystery book that someone picks up in Spain and reads when they go on their vacation. That’s never been translated into English, because it didn’t seem like it would make a ton of money for one of the big presses, and the small presses are looking for something that’s more patently literary. Amazon’s taken up a lot of tho...
Aug 27, 2016•45 min
BookRiot contributor who writes about romance novels Interview starts at 10:59 and ends at 42:21 We’re sort of worshipping at the temple of love, the same way that religion can help us make sense of human experience and help us to feel there's good in the world—there's a structure that is bending towards the good. Romance can impart that feeling and help you feel like you're participating in the goodness of the fabric of the world. And I think that’s a real draw. News “Mysterious ‘Project X’ poi...
Aug 19, 2016•45 min
VP & Executive Editor, HarperCollins Publishers Interview starts at 18:58 and ends at 43:28 There are a lot of very serious readers at Amazon, and honestly I think that that’s something that is not understood. They don’t all work on the editorial team vetting books for Best of the Month, but we did and I assume they still are using a lot of readers from the rest of the company who are not technically on the editorial team but who are passionate about reading and who read a lot . There were s...
Aug 12, 2016•45 min
Senior Editor, AmazonCrossing Interview starts at 17:02 and ends at 38:04 [Ayse Kulin] is one of many distinguished voices from diverse cultures that we’ve had the pleasure of publishing, and I think she’s actually a really great example of what it is that we’re trying to do here at AmazonCrossing News “Amazon Resumes Selling Amazon’s Gadgets Four Years After Rift” by Shannon Pettypiece at Bloomberg - August 4, 2016 “Amazon to test drone delivery in partnership with UK government” by Nicky Woolf...
Aug 06, 2016•45 min
Founder and CEO of Amazon.com Interview starts at 12:44 and ends at 32:05 Only when I read a truly great novel do I feel that I have lived an alternate life that might actually teach me some lessons, so that I don’t have to learn them myself. My favorite book is Remains of the Day. When I read Remains of the Day I feel like I understand extreme life regret in a way that I hopefully will never experience in my own life—I don’t want to. You get to live somebody else’s life, and it’s very hard to g...
Jul 30, 2016•45 min
Founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company Interview starts at 8:05 and ends at 34:24 I think it’s possible that we’re going to wake up and say we just had another black-swan event, which is that all of the big authors that have been developed over the last five years, a big share of them are Amazon authors, because they had the runway to do that, and publishers didn’t. News “Bezos Tops Buffet as World’s Third-Richest on Amazon Rise” by Tom Metcalf at Bloomberg - July 21, 2016 Mark Mahaney on A...
Jul 23, 2016•45 min
Director of Marketing and Communication at OverDrive, Inc. Interview starts at 15:18 and ends at 44:22 I’m happy to report that all of the Big Five publishers have made their titles available for library lending in eBook format. They’ve all been already in for their audiobook format. It's been a couple of years now that they’ve made their decision to add their titles on the front list, mid-list and back list available to libraries. So that’s great news for readers. You’ll see all the New York Ti...
Jul 15, 2016•45 min
Director, Product Management - Amazon Kindle Interview starts at 18:09 and ends at 43:26 The biggest technical challenge I would say is creating a seamless Page Flip reading experience across all of our platforms. Page Flip is available on eReaders, on Fire tablets, as well as the Kindle app for iOS and Android. Across those different experiences, we wanted to make sure that things like the performance, things like the fluidity, how it worked and how it behaved—all of those things were both tail...
Jul 09, 2016•45 min
My Father and Grandson Interview starts at 23:32 and ends at 44:30 News Amazon Inspire press release - June 27, 2016 “Amazon Unveils Online Education Service for Educators” by Natasha Singer at The New York Times - June 27, 2016 “Amazon Inspire Removes Some Content Over Copyright Issues” by Natasha Singer at The New York Times - June 29, 2016 “Good News at The Washington Post” by Christopher Payne at New York Magazine - June 28, 2016 Amazon Dash Buttons press release - June 28, 2016 Amazon Prime...
Jul 01, 2016•45 min
Co-Founder, Chairman and Executive Publisher of Open Road Integrated Media Interview starts at 15:17 and ends at 44:11 I do not think that the world of print survived and now will thrive at the expense of eBooks. I think eBooks will coexist with print, which I think is the best of all possible worlds. And I think that at the right price the revenue that one can receive from eBooks will be pretty substantial. News “Smaller, lighter $80 Kindle unveiled with rounder edges—plus new Export Notes soft...
Jun 24, 2016•45 min
Director of Business Development at BookBub Interview starts at 5:64 and ends at 16:18 BookBub definitely got off the ground with self-published authors. They’re often the first people in the industry to experiment with a new marketing channel, and they were much more comfortable discounting their books four years ago than a lot of traditional publishers were. Over the course of the past four years we’ve started working with all the major publishers, and we’ve gotten to the point where it’s fift...
Jun 17, 2016•45 min
Co-Founder and CEO of Shelfie.com Interview starts at 12:44 and ends at 32:05 We needed to find a metaphor, an analogy for the playlist or the inbound link when it came to books. What we found is that bookshelves are an incredibly good signal. News 1999 Jeff Bezos speech at Association of American Publishers meeting (YouTube) “Watch Jeff Bezos Lay Out His Grand Vision for Amazon’s Future Dominance in This 1999 Video” by Jason del Rey at Recode - November 22, 2015 Tech Tip Software version 5.1.4 ...
Jun 11, 2016•45 min
CEO of Tapas Media Interview starts at 19:22 and ends at 43:40 I believe that for publishing, even though Kindle is capturing a lot of the mobile market, I think there are still innovations to be made. In terms of marketplace players out there who have fundamentally thought about the whole thing from mobile specifically, I don’t think there’s a lot yet. News Walt Mossberg interviews Jeff Bezos at Recode’s Code Conference 2016 (full video and a separate audio link) - May 31, 2016 “Amazon’s $290 e...
Jun 03, 2016•45 min
Audio recorded at BookExpo America in Chicago and related links: Jon Malinowski (2:00-4:25), president of The Combined Book Exhibit , creator of the Book Fair Buddy app on iOS and Android platforms. Pubmatch.com “Authorship in the Digital Age” panel moderated by Jon Fine (14:24-21:13), former Director of Author and Publishing Relations at Amazon “At Chicago’s BEA-Lite: A Meaningful Discussion on Publishers and Authors” by Porter Anderson at Publishing Perspectives - May 13, 2016 Presumed Innocen...
May 28, 2016•45 min
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 need instead to make a relatively small amount of money per reader on a much larger number of readers...
May 20, 2016•45 min
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 YouTube script, opens marketplace to video creators” by Angel Gonzalez at The Seattle Times - May 10, 2016 “...
May 13, 2016•45 min
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 Fool Money podcast on Amazon earnings - April 29, 2016 (Thanks to David Enzel for the link) "Amazon was prof...
May 07, 2016•45 min
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 saying, “How could we give people more for less? ” Which is not the way traditional business was operat...
Apr 28, 2016•45 min
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 something that you first need to probably experience when you’ve had it in your hands, and I think that’s whe...
Apr 23, 2016•45 min
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: In answer to Faith Eldridge's question, it turns out the Oasis does not have an adaptive light sensor....
Apr 13, 2016•45 min
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 of the equation right now. Intro Elon Musk unveils Tesla Model 3 (YouTube) - March 31, 2016 News “Amazon...
Apr 08, 2016•45 min
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 Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown Echo Dot and Amazo...
Apr 02, 2016•45 min
