Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon.com. Jeff spent his hour reading a manuscript on an Amazon Kindle.

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Rampage is literally the word to use in this instance. A Time magazine article last week said;

“on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles.”

That’s according to a Time magazine source inside Amazon, now consider that just two months ago Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sat down with with Walt Mossberg at “D: All Things Digital Conference” and said;

“Title-by-title basis…Kindle unit sales more than 6% of total book sales”

Incredible! A doubling of sales in the publishing industry is unheard of! in two months Amazon has managed doubled sales with a device which many critics claimed was not ready for prime time. The supply problems and pessimistic early reviews haven’t dented growth at all.

Which begs the question, have Kindle users started to purchase more e-books? and is that because e-books are significantly cheaper than their printed counterparts? or has Amazon been selling a stack load of Kindle’s, far more than previously thought.

Time magazine has a theory;

A couple of things could explain the uptick. The Kindle quickly sold out shortly after it was unveiled on Amazon at the end of 2007. However, the company recently cranked up supply to meet demand, and cut the price at the end of May from $399 to $359. Some analysts estimate Kindle sales at around 55,000 a month. At the same time, the Kindle is quirkier than your average gadget, and consumers are learning how to use it. It’s possible that as Kindle owners warm up to the gadget — and as the library of titles rapidly grows — they increase the rate of their purchases. We now return you to more scrutable data points…

So we are asking you, have to started to purchase more e-books for your Kindle now that you have had the device for a few months? or have you recently purchased the Kindle and was that because of the price drop?

Source: Time Magazine

BookExpo, the US industry largest annual trade exhibition ended last month in Los Angeles without a clear strategy to revive the industry.

The book industry which is going through troubling times lacks a clear strategy to move forward, with the advent and popularisation of new technologies like the Kindle and the internet challenging the traditional ways of publishing it is forcing the industry to evolve and adapt to change.

Simon & Schuster CEO and President Carolyn Reidy said about the event: “It was quite, very quite”, in fact the entire even lacked interest in the absence of a “buzz book”. Amazon could have been that “buzz book” or should I say “buzz e-book”, in fact the event lacked such interest that the highlight of the event was a pop concert by Prince.

Amazon was praised throughout the whole event with its Kindle reading device, however since Kindle e-books only account for 6% of total book sales it was hardly exciting anyone, having a bigger stage at BookExpo could have increased e-book exposure as a viable alternative to traditional books and as a way of kick starting the industry back into gear. Perhaps Jeff Bezos could have delivered the keynote address instead of the Prince pop concert.

However popular novelist Ray Bradbury expressed some reservations about e-books saying: “There is no future for e-books because they are not books.”

Should Amazon Kindle have had a prominent position at the BookExpo in LA to promote the use of e-books and e-book readers?

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has taken a personal stake in microblogging service Twitter. Bezos made the investment through Bezos Expeditions - his personal investment vehicle.

From the Twitter blog:

We’re happy to announce two new members of our investment team: Bijan Sabet with Spark Capital in Boston and Jeff Bezos of Bezos Expeditions in Seattle. Bijan has also accepted a seat on our board of directors. We’re looking forward to the guidance and advice both will bring to Twitter. Existing partners Union Square Ventures in New York City and Tokyo-based Digital Garage exercised their pro rata rights to participate in this round as well.

Twitter did not immediately disclose the size of the investment round, however it is rumoured to be around $15m which makes it a significant investment for Bezos. Could Bezos be thinking about somehow incorporating Twitter into Amazon.com? we all know word of mouth is amongst the best form of advertising and Twitter users are forever chatting about new and exciting products and services. It wouldn’t surprise if Bezos was to somehow incorporate Twitter into the Kindle service, what do you think?

Source: Twitter

Portfolio contributing editor Kevin Maney interviewed Jeff Bezos in a packed auditorium at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Bazos and Maney discussed many topics during the lengthy 1 hour 30 minute interview - everything from Bazos personal life, how he makes business/personal decisions, the founding and growth of Amazon, Amazons Infrastructure Services, Amazon Prime, Amazon A9 and of course the Kindle. It is a very in depth interview, Bazos goes into great detail about what the vision is for Kindle and how Kindle came to be - it is a fascinating interview and if you have the spare time its well worth watching.

We don’t all have a couple of spare hours every day, so if your just interested in what Bazos has says about the Kindle then you can skip most of the interview - Bazos starts talking about the Kindle in part 3 at 3min 25sec into the interview.

Partial Transcript by Wired.com:

Portfolio: Let’s talk about the Kindle. What do you want it to be?

Bezos: Any book, in any language, ever in print should be available in less than 60 seconds. We worked on it for three years. It’s been selling out since being released.

Portfolio: You sold how many?

Bezos: You asked that so innocently, but you know I’m not going to answer. We have a long-standing practice of being very shy about disclosure, and I’ll stick to that practice. The Kindle has substantially exceeded our expectations.

Portfolio: Every effort at e-books has failed. Why should this one work?

Bezos: We decided we were going to improve upon the book. And the first thing we did was try to determine the essential features of a physical book that we needed to replicate. The No. 1 feature is that it disappears. When you’re in the middle of reading, you don’t notice the ink or the glue or the stitching or the paper — all of that disappears, and you’re in the author’s world. Most electronic devices today do not disappear. Some of them are extraordinarily rude. Books get out of the way, and they leave you in that state of mental flow.

Portfolio: How do you improve on that?

You can watch the full interview 6 part interview here.

Source: Wired

Our old friend Walt Mossberg sat down with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos this morning at the “D: All Things Digital Conference”.

Walt Mossberg gave the Kindle a luke-warm reception back in November calling it “mediocre” and “marred by annoying flaws”. He liked the idea and the shopping experience behind the Kindle, but thought that the device itself was where Kindle’s flaw lied.

Jeff Bezos does his normal sales pitch about the Kindle, but this time he throws in a bit of new information about Kindle sales. Walt asks point blank “How many Kindles have you sold?” Jeff politely refused to answer the question instead he gave us a new stat: “Title-by-title basis…Kindle unit sales more than 6% of total book sales”. So of the 125,000 titles available for Kindle, of all those 125,000 titles that were sold — digital and print — Kindle accounted for 6% of sales. Jeff also said he envisioned a time when e-book sales formed a substantial portion of book sales at Amazon.

Jeff Bezos also commented on a Kindle v2:

“There will be a second version, a third version, a tenth version. … but a second version is not that near.”

It may take a decade to get the product to where Amazon wants it, he said. So this has confirmed what many thought, that Amazon is committed to the Kindle and there will be a Kindle v2 release sometime in the future.

The interview wasn’t just limited to talk about the Kindle, Bezos also talks about the streaming video-on-demand service for Amazon, which will be released in the next couple of weeks amongst other things.

You can see the interview below in 2 parts.

Source: All Things D