Author of Somebody’s Daughter Interview starts at 17:04 and ends at 43:26 “I think there’s nothing more terrifying than the realization that someone you thought you knew--whether it’s your spouse, your parent, your sibling, someone you thought you knew really well, someone in your family--has been keeping some kind of secret from you.” Photo by Glen Rose Photography News Kindle Paperwhite will be on sale for $80 ($40 off) on Prime Day. “Amazon is giving Prime members up to $30 in free cash for s...
Jul 14, 2018•45 min
Founder & Chief Trailblazer of Retirepreneur Interview starts at 16:01 and ends at 40:10 “I went deep into Kindle and the electronic piece, and then I began pulling back some. I would tell you right now I am right down the middle. I’m a hybrid.” News Amazon’s Prime Day starts July 16th at 3 pm ET “How to Get Primed for Amazon Prime Day” at Wired - July 3, 2018 Delta Trinsic faucet with Alexa control (new product launch on Prime Day) Prime Day “Home Smart Home” sweepstakes “Why Amazon keeps m...
Jul 07, 2018•45 min
Author of the Deadly Edits and Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries Interview starts at 16:16 and ends at 44:12 “What I try to do is after I get up and have my coffee and my toast, is to come into my office and sit down and write at least one scene, the next scene in the story. I do that usually seven days a week.” Tech Tip My comparison of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant News Prime Wardrobe Alexa on iPhone and iPad (TechCrunch ) Show Mode Dock for Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10 Interview with Kathy Lynn Emers...
Jun 30, 2018•45 min
Seattle Music and Arts Pioneer Interview starts at 9:38 and ends at 44:45 “There it was, the [Seattle] head tax. ‘We’re going to do it, this is what we’re going to do. It’s going to address homelessness. We’ll collect the money--we don’t know how we’re going to spend it yet, but we’re going to hit these businesses with this tax.’ That’s just not the way to govern, in my opinion.” News Atul Gawande to head Amazon-Berkshire-JP Morgan health organization, as covered in The New York Times and The Wa...
Jun 23, 2018•45 min
New Owner of Digital Book World Interview starts at 12:01 and ends at 43:50 “Everything with books orbits discoverability. That’s the billion-dollar problem. That’s the problem that Apple has never figured out yet. That’s the problem that Amazon has sort of figured out.” News Target dazzles me with service Rebranding Prime Mayday! Mayday! The end of a great customer help service. Tech Tip Alexa on your Apple Watch How to read PDF’s on your Kindle Try “Alexa, play the podcast The Kindle Chronicle...
Jun 15, 2018•45 min
Author of “The List” in Amazon’s The Real Thing Collection Interview starts at 13:23 and ends at 39:21 “I think we look at the Big Five publishers as being kind of set in their ways and really traditional, but I actually think that everyone is looking to try new things. I think everyone is realizing that just putting out a hardcover in the exact same way isn’t going to always work in a way that they would hope. It’s more that I’m just excited about different ways of approaching storytelling.” (P...
Jun 09, 2018•45 min
Senior Editor, The Information Interview starts at 11:36 and ends at 43:50 “[Amazon’s HQ2 decision] will be before the end of the year, unless something radical changes. I don’t think it’s imminent. It’s probably--I’m guessing here--but it’s probably months away. I would guess like towards the end of the summer, early fall. That’s really not based on hard facts but kind of reading between the lines.” News Data Guy’s presentation to the 2018 Science Fiction Writers of America conference “Amazon P...
Jun 02, 2018•45 min
Author of the Frank Adversego Thriller Series Interview starts at 11:14 and ends at 35:51 “Alexa’s pretty primitive. I think it’s very concerning from a cybersecurity point of view, because people have already learned how to spoof Alexa. Just a few days ago they came up with the equivalent of a dog whistle-type command that you couldn't hear, but Alexa could. Someone could turn it on and off.” News “An Amazon Echo recorded a family’s conversation, then sent it to a random person in their contact...
May 26, 2018•45 min
Editor-in-Chief of Good E-Reader Interview starts at 3:45 and ends at 33:51 News “Amazon Go cashier-free store could be headed to SF’s Union Square” by Matier & Ross at The San Francisco Chronicle - May 13, 2018 “The Information hires NY Times’s Wingfield” by Chris Roush at Talking Biz News - May 15, 2018 The Information “Trump personally pushed postmaster general to double rates on Amazon, other firms” by Damian Paletta and Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post - May 18, 2018 “You’ll soon hear...
May 19, 2018•45 min
Authors of Our Towns: A 100,000-mile Journey Into the Heart of America Interview starts at 9:43 and ends at 39:14 “James Fallows: ‘Through my reportorial lifetime I’ve seen a number crises for the American system, which the U.S. has so far managed to muddle its way through. That does not guarantee continued muddling, but I personally am more heartened than I thought I would be by all this resilience around the country. So Deb, will we make it?’ Deborah Fallows: ‘I’m going to say we’ll make it. I...
May 10, 2018•45 min
Traveler, teller of tales, reviewer of eReaders Interview starts at 15:25 and ends at 41:53 “To be honest, I haven’t met one person outside tech nerds like myself that use it [Kindle’s X-Ray feature.] I very rarely use it. I kind of go ‘Let’s see what this is about.” I think it takes away from the immersion of reading. If I’m interested in something I’ll take a look at it later on, but during the reading process I don’t really want to leave.” News Jeff Bezos interviewed in Berlin by Mathias Dopf...
May 03, 2018•45 min
Longtime Kindle Chronicles listener Interview starts at 18:14 and ends at 43:00 “It was very clear what was missing [in Seattle’s Amazon Go store]. There was no Kindle, no Fires, no place to scan and order one. Maybe that’s because you can just walk out, and they figure if they’re going to lose inventory they want it to be five dollars or under. What was distinctly absent was any Amazon products that you identify with the Amazon brand.” News “Inside Jeff Bezos’s DC Life” by Ben Wofford at The Wa...
Apr 28, 2018•45 min
Author of Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen Interview starts at 15:50 and ends at 41:48 “It’s not that I sought out to be published by Amazon. It was that Amazon happened to be the people who believed in me and my book, and they’ve been so wonderful to work with. I do feel also that Little A is a tiny imprint within a huge company, so I kind of get the best of both worlds--that personal TLC and the brawn of the marketing and other kinds of reach of Amazon.” News Jeff Bezos’s 2018 Letter...
Apr 21, 2018•45 min
Creator of the Kindle Classroom Project Interview starts at 15:29 and ends at 43:19 “I don’t think that the Kindle makes reading any more fun, but a lot of students--especially 9th Grade boys who have been turned off of reading, they get a Kindle, and the Number One thing that they do is they bump up that text size, because they don’t like it to be so small, so they can really feel like they’re achieving as a reader. Even though the book takes the same amount of time to read, they feel they are ...
Apr 13, 2018•45 min
Author of The Punishment She Deserves: A Lynley Novel Interview starts at 12:25 and ends at 36:50 “The late Sue Grafton said something to me that was really helpful on time. I was talking about difficulty I was having in the book with a character. She said to me, ‘If you know the question, you do know the answer.’ That was really helpful, because what that told me is that if I could articulate what difficulty I was having with a book then buried somewhere in my head was going to be the solution ...
Apr 07, 2018•45 min
Co-founder and CEO of Goodreads Interview starts at 14:30 and ends at 36:54 “People read along, and then--for as long as there’ve been books--after you’re done reading, you you go talk about the ideas, the stories, the concepts that you read about. That’s actually a good metaphor for Goodreads and Kindle. Kindle is where you read alone. Goodreads is where you go talk about what you read.” News “Trump hates Amazon, not Facebook” by Jonathan Swan at Axios - March 28, 2018 “The World’s Richest Man ...
Mar 30, 2018•45 min
Readly U.S. Contact Interview starts at 12:48 and ends at 40:51 “Everyone for a long time has been trying to reinvent the magazine experience on digital, or even the newspaper experience on digital. I was one of those who came out and said, ‘Why?’ What you need to be doing is expanding your brand. People know your brand. Don’t think about shoe-horning the magazine or newspaper into this new--whether it was a device, a screen type, a platform, you’ve got to sit there and think of what do people r...
Mar 24, 2018•45 min
Brittany Kaiser, Co-Founder, Bueno Capital and CryptoHQ Interview starts at 16:20 and ends at 22:29 South By Southwest Links “Wyoming Passes 5 Pro-Blockchain Laws” at Consensys - March 15, 2018 “Despite some glitches, VR cinema takes a leap forward at SXSW 2018” by Omar L. Gallaga at the Austin American-Statesman - March 15, 2018 “Wyoming’s Blockchain Bills: A Very Personal Labor of Love” by Caitlin Long - March 9, 2018 Pressing On: The e-magazine for growing Christians “U.S. State of Wyoming De...
Mar 17, 2018•45 min
Author of Closer Than You Know Interview starts at 9:29 and ends at 43:09 “I look at certain authors that are greatly esteemed in the moment as literature . But I think, frankly, a lot of what passes as literature today will not stand the test of time, because there’s no story in the story. You have 350 pages of a character examining his navel and having interior monologue, and that’s just not the stuff that’s going to endure....Though he has not won a National Book Award and probably never will...
Mar 07, 2018•45 min
General Manager Fire Tablets & Kindle and Amazon Echo & Alexa Product Marketing Interview starts at 15:16 and ends at 39:43 “I loved what I had heard about the leadership principles, particularly the customer obsession and innovation which I was seeing externally. As I came through the hiring process and since my first day that has been the reality. And so I just really love how the company obsesses about customers and looks to invent every day. That’s what really attracted me here.” New...
Mar 03, 2018•45 min
Avid reader, longtime listener Interview starts at 12:45 and ends at 43:20 “My ideal Kindle would have real buttons and would have audio support, so that you could do immersion reading along with just straight reading.” News “Amazon plans to open as many as six more cashierless Amazon Go stores this year” by Jason Del Rey at Recode - February 22, 2018 “Prime Members Now Earn 5% Back When Shopping At Whole Foods Market Using the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Card” - press release February 20, 2018 Am...
Feb 24, 2018•45 min
Carmela Orsini of Novel Effect (5:08 to 13:22) Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson The Little Shop of Monsters by R. L. Stine Paul Knopf, chief architect at GFA Technology (13:27 to 21:40) Felix Lloyd , cofounder and CEO of Beanstack (21:44 to 30:53) Harvard (MA) Public Library David Burleigh , director of brand marketing and and communication at OverDrive (30:57 to 40:23) Overdrive’s Libby app Pete Schreiner, Libraries Fellow at North Caroline State University in Raleigh (40:27 to ...
Feb 17, 2018•45 min
My father William and grandson James Interview starts at 17:43 and ends at 42:24 “I’ve been writing a realistic fictional narrative for my class as an assignment. There are certain phrases in [Kindle] books that have been highlighted 300 times or a thousand times. I try to make my phrases be like those phrases, because I’ve gotten to know what are the powerful phrases that people are going to highlight.” News Amazon press release announcing Prime Now delivery from Whole Foods - February 8, 2018 ...
Feb 10, 2018•45 min
Author of Into the Black Nowhere: An UNSUB Novel Interview starts at 18:20 and ends at 40:10 “One of the oldest stories that humanity tells itself is defeating the monster. Whether that’s the dark shape that howls in the night outside the cave or something that drags a club around or sea monsters--humanity always wants to defeat the monster. To do that we have to try to identify and understand it. The idea that the monster walks among us disguised as one of the community I think sets us on edge....
Feb 03, 2018•45 min
Senior Vice President & Publisher at Open Road Integrated Media Interview starts at 11:28 and ends at 34:48 “No company in publishing right now is better aligned with Amazon in terms of our focus on the customer experience, in terms of our focus on eBooks and driving growth in eBooks.” News Amazon Go video “Amazon Go: convenience and concern at new checkout-free corner shop” by Mark Harris at The Guardian - January 22, 2018 Amazon’s listing of 42 Amazon Go jobs open “Amazon Go draws crowds” ...
Jan 27, 2018•45 min
Editor at Little A Interview starts at 22:52 and ends at 44:24 “The trick with writing is a lot of times the more specific, the more universal something becomes. In taking care of a story, if there is something that I don’t quite understand, I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, that’s not related. We’ll take it out.’ I’m going to ask for more. Show me how this is all of us.” (Photo by Stephanie Land) News Amazon press release on top 20 in HQ2 search - January 18, 2018 Recode on top 20 - January 18, 2018 “...
Jan 19, 2018•45 min
Author of Ricochet Joe & the new Jane Hawk series Interview starts at 10:30 and ends at 41:57 “Whatever I was reading in childhood through adolescence, it lifted me up and out. I think it was all of that that made me want to be a writer. I thought it would be the most amazing thing if out there in the world somewhere there was a kid reading something or an adult for that matter that was really getting to them and affecting them as so many people had affected me. And you didn’t even know who ...
Jan 13, 2018•45 min
Software Quality Engineer Interview starts at 12:46 and ends at 41:14 “Somehow the Goodreads would talk to the Amazon/Kindle cloud, so as new notes come in it would sync those down from Goodreads as well. And then they would just show up in your notes and highlights with the name of the person who you were following. I think that would be really cool.” News “Another big Amazon acquisition, a Peloton IPO--and other commerce predictions for 2018” by Jason Del Rey at Recode - January 4, 2018 “Barne...
Jan 06, 2018•45 min
Co-founder of Select A Story Interview starts at 8:33 and ends at 33:40 “An interactive story is essentially a series of interlocking short stories. I think a lot of authors kind of forget about that, and they end up writing a story where at the end of it, it’s like ‘Okay, you saw a spaceship, and then you thought to call the police and then you decided whether you should call your friend, and then you decided whether you should take a picture and put it on Instagram and then you went on the spa...
Dec 30, 2017•45 min
Doubledecker Bus Driver in London Interview starts at 11:20 and ends at 39:30 “The [Fire HD] 8 will be my Kindle that travels with me. I take it to work. We’re not allowed to have them in the cab for fairly good reasons. They don’t want anything that will distract you from the job of driving.” News “The Kindle changed the book business. Can it change books?” by David Pierce at Wired - December 20, 2017 Mosaic app at iTunes Store Tech Tip Echo Connect and how to set one up Alexa Voice Remote for ...
Dec 23, 2017•45 min
