Kindle

“There was this sort of obsession that people were coming into our stores and photographing books and then ordering them Amazon and, or coming in and choosing books and then downloading them on their Kindles. And it was, which just simply doesn't happen except …”

“Jeff sort of incubated the Kindle project, which, if you look back, could be like, oh, you're Sort of cannibalizing the biggest business you have, because now you're going to sell every single book for nine dollar 99 cents. Yeah. When the average prices of …”

“I've started buying paperbacks again, though, because I'm so sick that I can't buy Kindle stuff in the app on my iPhone. So I literally just gone back to paperbacks.”

“There was a mathematician who looked at Kindle highlight data, and he used highlights as a proxy for how far people make it in a book. And the assumption was when people stop highlighting in Kindle, they probably stopped reading. And he showed that even among …”

“Not outsourcing means it's gonna be more expensive. We're gonna spend a lot more money. It's gonna take longer to get a product out there. But at the end of that, if we are successful, we have a set of skills that we lacked beforehand, then we can go out and d…”

“The Kindle goes on sale for the first time All the way in November of 2007. It retails for 399 dollars and would hold 200 books. It's sold out in less than six hours.”

“This period of both product and process innovation actually occurred in this one narrow window of 2003 to 2007. During that window of time, all the products I just mentioned and all of the processes except for one Were all developed in this one four year perio…”

“A lot of people inside Amazon doubted that the Kindle was going to be a good idea. I remember contentious, you know, board meetings on this topic.”

“They make it impossible to charge anything between, like, 10 and 30 dollars for a book. It's hilarious because the way it's set up is you can set it up so you get like 70% of the money up to 10 dollars, but then after that you have to get 30% of the money. So …”

“You could have the best hardware in the world, but You needed the books. Like the content was what really mattered. It didn't matter if the Nook hardware was better than the Kindle or not. Like Amazon had the biggest selection of books, the easiest buying expe…”

“And so we had this strong vision, and we met with Amazon, like I said, four or five times over the years, kind of talking about, would we do this? And they were always into it. The issue was, it required deep integration to pull off, and they weren't comfortab…”

“But if Kindle hadn't launched in 2007 and moved, you know, started the digital reading revolution, I don't think Goodreads would have flourished. Industry trends have to align. And if that hadn't happened, you know, my old CEO would have been right. It would h…”

“I remember when, at Condé Nast, we were, we went heavy on iPad editions of the magazines spent a lot of money A lot of money on trying to do this and then even try to do Kindle versions of the magazines as well, thinking this is where publishing was going, and…”

“My opinion is Google, Facebook, and Apple are monopolies. Amazon is not a monopoly in anything. Like, every big major thing they have, maybe Kindle is the only one I can think of.”

“They think eBooks should be between two 99 and nine 99. And if you price it there, they'll give you a 70%. If you price it below two 99, Hey, you're welcome to do that. But they're going to pay you 35%, which is half. If you price it over nine 99, again, your …”

“In terms of the future of ownership, I do think that basically the interface to every physical object will be, ah, ultimately digitized, in the sense that you won't own a car, you won't have, you know, you already don't have books, you have Kindle, right? And,…”

“I remember the board meeting on Amazon where we first talked About what become Amazon Web Services, AWS. I remember the first time, I remember a series of meetings that led to the presentation of Kindle. I remember a series of meetings that led to the presenta…”

“The, it's about seven profit on Amazon across all channels from audible, you know Kindle it's average about seven dollars per book.”

“We sell more audio books than I think being Kindle right now.”

“As for reading and I don't know if this is a generational thing, but I still prefer physical books to reading on the Kindle, so I might read on the Kindle on a plane or something, but usually I'll do shorter reads versus long reads, but mostly I like physical …”