I picked up this article today from the Shelf Awareness email feed, and thought Mr. Bezo’s comment on the recent POD/Amazon controversy was interesting, although brief. The whole ordeal seems to have died down a bit, but I know it’s still in the back of our minds, or should be…
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos began his BEA appearance by reading an excerpt from Scott McClellan’s What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception and then using the former White House press secretary’s tell-all to extol the virtues of the Kindle. What Happened is out of stock on Amazon, he said, but it can be downloaded instantly by those who own the wireless reading device–like the customer who has purchased 1,076 Kindle titles (not Bezos or his mother, it was pointed out).
Bezos argued that the Kindle has not cannibalized sales of physical books, saying that Kindle consumers bought just as many print editions of titles as they previously had–with a 2.6% increase in overall sales.
After highlighting the Kindle’s “whopper of features,” Bezos shared comments from consumers, one of whom called the Kindle “up there with Haagen-Dazs and sex.” In a video clip featuring Neil Gaiman, the scribe said he has gone from “skeptic to absolute believer in the device,” in part because his 12-year-old daughter was entertained on a flight with electronic versions of Meg Cabot’s novels downloaded on the Kindle. Gaiman concluded by declaring the device “worth its weight in gold” (which, as Bezos noted earlier in his speech, is 10.3 ounces).
Currently 125,000 Kindle titles are available, up from 90,000 when the product was launched six months ago. Bezos said that his vision is to have “any book ever printed in any language–in print and out of print–all available in less than 60 seconds.”
During a conversation with Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Wired editor-in-chief, Bezos briefly touched on the controversy surrounding the decision to require that all POD titles directly sold on Amazon.com be produced at the company’s on-demand printing facilities, saying that combining items in one package reduces expenditures. He added, “You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to be a pioneer.” That sentiment might well apply to one of Bezos’ other ventures–”helping humanity into space” via a sub-orbital space vehicle.
