Bezos Pushes Kindle Virtues

by Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 5/31/2008 11:03:00 AM

Amazon developed the Kindle to make it easier for customers to find and buy books, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told a large BEA crowd yesterday. “We’ve been selling e-books for 10 years and you need an electron microscope to find the sales,” Bezos said. Since the release of the Kindle, e-book sales have been stronger than expected, Bezos said, although he didn’t provide hard figures. He did say that Kindle customers purchase more books by a factor of 2.6 than non-Kindle owners. He also reiterated a statistic: of the 125,000 Kindle titles available, Kindle sales represent 6% of sales of those same physical books. The vision for Kindle is to make every book ever printed in any language available for download in 60 seconds, Bezos said. He declined to estimated how long that will take or how many titles will be available for the Kindle a year from now, but he commended Simon & Schuster for its decision to make another 5,000 titles available for the device by the end of 2008. He said Amazon is working on developing a Kindle edition for international markets.

Asked by Wired editor and host Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) if the Kindle will change the way people write, Bezos said he would be “startled” if some authors don’t resort to Charles Dickens–type serializations. The Kindle platform has been designed to promote experimentation by writers, Bezos noted.

While most of the hour was devoted to the virtues of the Kindle—now available for $359—Bezos did defend Amazon’s decision to require print-on-demand titles to be manufactured by Amazon’s BookSurge subsidiary. According to Bezos, printing POD titles in-house makes it easier and cheaper to combine orders in one package, saving time and money for customers. “We’re willing to be misunderstood” on the issue because it improves the customer experience, Bezos said. “It doesn’t make sense to print it somewhere else,” he said in response to a question.

He likened the POD controversy to the one that developed when the company first started selling used books, a practice, Bezos maintained, that has proven beneficial to the overall book “ecosystem.” He claimed Amazon studies have shown little cannibalization of new books by selling used titles.