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By Robert Nagle

Jeff Bezos had a one hour interview on the Charlie Rose show Monday night. Video should be available tomorrow. Highlights:

  • Kindle sold out in the first 5 hours. Will have inventory resupplied in two days.
  • All first chapters are available for free.
  • Curiously, you can access a wide variety of blogs. (Note the verb Bezos uses is “access”, not “pay for”).
  • Charlie Rose asks several softball questions. “Will it break easily?” Geez!
  • Analogies between Ipod and Kindle: “People like carrying their libraries around.”
  • “Our vision –is that you should be able to read any book in any language no matter when it was printed to download it in less than 60 seconds.”
  • Question I would like to ask: can I add ebooks for free? Can I make ebooks for free? Oh, David and I would give Mr. Bezos a drubbing!
  • Kindle is to “start a fire.” (Charlie Rose asks Bezos to explain, and then proceeds to answer the question himself).
  • “I just ask myself, what could be more meaningful than try to improve the book? They are the core of civilization…” (I stopped transcribing Bezos’s statement out of sheer boredom).
  • “Color displays is in the lab right now in three or four years.”
  • His vision: “3rd party businesses use Amazon.com to deliver content, and Amazon derives a commission from it.”
  • Bezos seems friendly and smart enough and probably knows the book business, but really, his insights aren’t particularly original or interesting (to me at least). He also talks slowly.
  • Gosh, Jeff Bezos has gigantic ears!
  • Rose: Were you worried that somebody was ahead of you? Bezos: “No, to put all of these pieces together was so challenging –the newspapers, the publishers, we knew that nobody else was working on this or thinking about this in the same way we were.”
  • Bezos seems to be excited about commercial space travel and confirms that he bought 100,000 acres in Texas to do it. “I’ll be on one of the first trips.”
  • How Bezos comes up with creativity: he takes several days to be alone, surf the web, etc. Then he comes back to the office charged with ideas and tells his underlings to make it so (a la Captain Picard). Sometimes (Bezos admits) his colleagues do so much original work in getting the details right that he can’t really take credit for the idea.
  • Bezos seemed to be personally involved in the Kindle from the very start.
  • I don’t think Bezos used one technical word throughout the entire discussion. He did talk about “horizontal integration” and other business buzzwords.

Random complaint about Charlie Rose: why does he invite so many media tycoons onto his show? Redstone, Murdoch, the Chinese Minister of Information; are these guys really that interesting?

 
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