Ian Freed is Amazon's vice president in charge of the Kindle e-book reader
I had a conversation this morning with Ian Freed, Amazon’s VP and general manager for the Kindle e-book reader.
In the 20-minutes or so we had, we covered a lot of grounds, including why he doesn’t think touchscreen and color is ready for prime-time on the Kindle.
Here’s an edited excerpt of our conversation:
What does DX stand for?
It stands for deluxe because it includes a larger screen, more capacity, plus the ability to read documents in their original form (8.5 by 11) or A4 document.
Why did Amazon raise prices on certain e-books?
That’s actually not a correct assumption. We always had variable pricing with e-books since the day we introduced Kindle. So there’s always been a range. We have made a commitment for the New York Times best sellers to be $9.99. But if you look in the catalog, pricing is in different ranges for all kind of different books. And just like in physical bookstores, prices move around a little bit.
Any plans to add touchscreen capabilities to the Kindle?
We thought about touchscreen. Our goal though is to create the best reading experience as possible. But what we’ve seen so far is whenever there was a touchscreen implementation with electronic ink and electronic paper, it degraded the reading experience, because you’re introducing more reflections, more sets of glass between the electronic ink and the customer.
What about color?
When you think about it, most books are actually just fine in black and white. That said, there are a lot of applications like magazines that will look better in color. But if we introduce color that wasn’t “rich color”, I’m not such customers will like it. And so we far we haven’t seen the combination of the grey electronic ink, the electronic paper and rich color. We’ve seen color in labs but it’s just not that rich experience that you expect from color.
Will the Kindle ever be good enough to browse the Web?
When we introduced the Kindle in 2007, we wanted to include a Web browser primarily for being able to read text-focused web sites, like Wikipedia or search results. The nature of electronic paper is great for text-focused content. We’re not attempting with Kindle to build a browser that is great for all kind of websites. It’s great fortext-focused web sites.
Why buy Lexcycle?
We think we’re in the extremely early days in the evolution of digital books. The Lexcycle team were a set of great innovators, really passionate about e-books. And they built some great applications and we went them to join Amazon as part of the team. Our plan is to keep that business run separately – as we often do at Amazon – and that they will innovate in their own ways, separate and distinct from Kindle but with the support of Amazon.
Amazon launched a large screen version of its e-book reader - the Kindle DX - targeted primarly at readers of newspapers and textbooks
Any plans to open up the Kindle format?
The Kindle format was designed to work seamlessly with Kindle devices and other devices, but to do things customers we think will really like. So for example, with our feature WhisperSync, I can open up a book on my Kindle and start reading it, and later on, open up the same book on my iPhone and it will sync automatically at the same place that I was on, on my Kindle. Same thing for the annotation feature: you can annotate on your Kindle and see the annotations on your Kindle for iPhone application. So our perspective is if you’re focusing on making things really simple for customers, you may need to do things with the format that are specific to those devices and those applications.
Will the Kindle format remain proprietary then?
I think it’s an open question (sic!). We plan to keep innovating on behalf of customers and that innovation may take various form in the future. So it’s hard to speculate about what we might do there. But we have a wide open platform- the digital text platform - for content providers that are free to publish directly in the Kindle format themselves. In that way it is a very open platform.
Why add support for PDF in the Kindle DX?
The main reason is that we heard from many customers that the amount of reading that you do that is outside of books, periodicals and blogs is generally in the form of personal or professional documents that are typically on 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper; and a lot of it is in PDF format. So instead of carrying hundreds of pages of those documents, we wanted you to move it easily to your Kindle and be able to read them. But it’s the combination of having a large screen and the need to maintain the structure of the document – with no re-flows – that really let us to support PDFs.
Will the Kindle really be the savior for newspapers?
It think people have been concerned about newspapers for a number of reasons. Our goal is to provide a great reading experience for customers, in some cases that with newspapers, magazines, highly formatted books and professional documents (PDF). Newspapers have been available on Kindle since we launched on November 2007 and customers love it. Kindle newspaper subscriptions are among the best sellers on Kindle.
This week, the CEO of the Dallas Morning News said Amazon takes a 70 percent commission on newspaper subscriptions through the Kindle. That seems really high, isn’t it?
I don’t want to speculate on what somebody said, and I’ll leave it at that.
When Kindle be available outside the U.S.?
We’re absolutely looking forward serving our international customers with Kindle devices. But just like with the original Kindle, that took us 3 1/2 years before we introduced it, we are focus to create a great experience before launching the Kindle internationally; there’s just a lot of things to work on before that happens.
Another busy week in the Silicon Valley.
Posted by TechPulse 360 
