The Kindle Chronicles

VP & Executive Editor, HarperCollins Publishers   Interview starts at 18:58 and ends at 43:28   There are a lot of very serious readers at Amazon, and honestly I think that that’s something that is not understood. They don’t all work on the editorial team vetting books for Best of the Month, but we did and I assume they still are using a lot of readers from the rest of the company who are not technically on the editorial team but who are passionate about reading and who read a lot. There were some really wonderful readers and reviewers that we cherry-picked from around the company. Book love is very much alive at Amazon.   News Om Malik on This Week in Tech - August 7, 2016 Wal-Mart press release on purchase of Jet.com - August 8, 2016 Om Malik’s web site “The best reason for reading? Book lovers live longer, scientists say” by Amy Ellis Nutt at The Washington Post - August 9, 2016   Tech Tip Kindle Owners’ Lending Library Kindle Unlimited   Interview with Sara Nelson “Sara Nelson Heading to HarperCollins” by Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly - June 28, 2016 HarperCollins press release announcing Sara Nelson’s hiring - June 28, 2016 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance Commonwealth: A Novel by Ann Patchet - available for pre-order with delivery September 13, 2016 Moonglow: A Novel by Michael Chabon - available for pre-order with delivery November 22, 2016 Behold the Dreamers: A Novel by Imbolo MBUE - available for pre-order with delivery August 23, 2013   Content The Phil Hendrie Show YouTube video of Phil Hendrie recording his podcast - February 10, 2015 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead   Next Week’s Guest Jessica Tripler, author of “Why Romance Readers Love Digital Books” at BookRiot - August 11, 2011   Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!

Senior Editor, AmazonCrossing   Interview starts at 17:02 and ends at 38:04 [Ayse Kulin] is one of many distinguished voices from diverse cultures that we’ve had the pleasure of publishing, and I think she’s actually a really great example of what it is that we’re trying to do here at AmazonCrossing   News “Amazon Resumes Selling Amazon’s Gadgets Four Years After Rift” by Shannon Pettypiece at Bloomberg - August 4, 2016 “Amazon to test drone delivery in partnership with UK government” by Nicky Woolf and Samuel Gibbs at The Guardian - July 25, 2016 Dromida Kodo drone Amazon Prime Air (YouTube video) - December 1, 2013 “Amazon’s ‘Prime Air’ Cargo Plane is Ready to Deliver Your Packages” at NBC - August 5, 2016 “See Amazon’s Massive New ‘Prime Air’ Cargo Jet Plane” at Time - August 5, 2016 “Amazon’s latest weapon in the e-commerce wars: Its own air force” by Sarah Halzack at The Washington Post - August 5, 2016 Holy Stone RC dump truck  at Amazon.com   Tech Tips Kindle Unlimited audiobooks “7 Ways to Take Full Advantage of Your Kindle” by Joel Lee at MakeUseOf.com - August 4, 2016   Interview with Gabriella Page-Fort “How Amazon came to dominate fiction in translation” by Alison Flood at The Guardian - December 9, 2015 Love in Exile by Ayse Kulin, translated into English by Kenneth Dakan      Other books translated from Turkish into English by Kenneth Dakan Last Train to Istanbul: A Novel by Ayse Kulin, translated into English by John W. Baker Books by Louise Erdrich Escape by Perihan Magden, translated by Kenneth Dakan Ali and Ramazan by Perihan Magden, translated by Ruth Whitehouse Farewell: A Mansion in Occupied Istanbul by Ayse Kulin, translated into English by Kenneth Dakan   Content Rage by Zygmunt Miloszewski, translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and available for free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription Vellum - a Mac app for formatting eBooks “Vellum Review: App offers a sleeker way to build ebooks” by Serenity Caldwell at Macworld - January 8, 2014 “Last Call for Summer Reading: 9 Books You’ll Kick Yourself for Not Picking Up” by Adrian Liang at Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog - July 28, 2016   Next Week’s Guest Sara Nelson, Amazon’s editorial director who last month moved to HarperCollins as vice president, executive editor and special advisor to the publisher.   Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads! 

Founder and CEO of Amazon.com   Interview starts at 12:44 and ends at 32:05   Only when I read a truly great novel do I feel that I have lived an alternate life that might actually teach me some lessons, so that I don’t have to learn them myself. My favorite book is Remains of the Day. When I read Remains of the Day I feel like I understand extreme life regret in a way that I hopefully will never experience in my own life—I don’t want to. You get to live somebody else’s life, and it’s very hard to get that emotional closeness, I think, from any other media type, still. So I think there is a place for great books and will continue to be, hopefully forever.    My interview with Jeff Bezos on July 26, 2016 at Amazon.com in Seattle Kindle Kindle Oasis Kindle Direct Publishing Kindle Unlimited Amazon Books Seattle store information page My interview with Jane Friedman, chairman of Open Road Media - June 24, 2016 The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro Samsung Gear 360 camera My interview with Donald Katz, founder and CEO of Audible - October 24, 2014 Jeff Bezos on The Kindle Chronicles 4th anniversary show - July 26, 2012   Other Links Amazon free-banana stand Amazon Whispercast Amazon Books store in Seattle   Next Week’s Guest Gabriella Page-Fort, content acquisitions manager at AmazonCrossing. She will relay answers to my emailed questions from Turkish novelist Ayse Kulin, author of Love in Exile.   Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!

Founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company   Interview starts at 8:05 and ends at 34:24   I think it’s possible that we’re going to wake up and say we just had another black-swan event, which is that all of the big authors that have been developed over the last five years, a big share of them are Amazon authors, because they had the runway to do that, and publishers didn’t.   News “Bezos Tops Buffet as World’s Third-Richest on Amazon Rise” by Tom Metcalf at Bloomberg - July 21, 2016 Mark Mahaney on Amazon earnings (video) at Bloomberg - July 20, 2016 Amazon earnings webcast details for July 28, 2016 at 5:30 pm ET Jeff Bezos in next Star Trek movie   Tech Tip Using Time to Read on Your Kindle at The Story   Interview with Mike Shatzkin The Shatzkin Files blog Author Earnings “These Charts Show Pokémon Go’s Ridiculous Growth” by Anne VanderMey at Fortune - July 21, 2016 Pokémon Go home page Leonard Shatzkin obituary - American Booksellers Association May 20, 2002   Content Kindle Singles Classics press release - July 19, 2016 “Amazon is bringing some of the best non-fiction classics to Kindle” by Nick Statt at The Verge - July 19, 2016 Julian Fellows's recommendations for Downton Abbey lovers Comments Overdrive apps for Android and iOS Tom Semple’s LG Tone Infinim HBS-900 Wireless Stereo Headset - $71.86 at Amazon.com   Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!

Director of Marketing and Communication at OverDrive, Inc.  Interview starts at 15:18 and ends at 44:22 I’m happy to report that all of the Big Five publishers have made their titles available for library lending in eBook format. They’ve all been already in for their audiobook format. It's been a couple of years now that they’ve made their decision to add their titles on the front list, mid-list and back list available to libraries. So that’s great news for readers. You’ll see all the New York Times bestsellers and all the different popular lists of titles that you should be able to find in your library. News “Amazon’s Prime Day is the Biggest Day Ever” - Amazon press release July 13, 2016 “Behind the Scenes of Prime Day 2016” (video) Holy Stone RC Dump Truck Remote Control Car for my grandson Jake “The 2016 Kindle is Complete Crap as an Accessible eReader” by Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader - July 10, 2016 "The ‘Big Change’ era in trade book publishing ended about four years ago” by Mike Shatzkin at The Shatzkin Files - July 11, 2016 Tech Tip Denver Public Library Interview with David Burleigh OverDrive web site Big Library Read A Murder in Time: A Novel (Kendra Donovan Mysteries) by Julie McElwain Next Week’s Guest Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company and author of a recent, highly informative blog post titled “The ‘Big Change’ era in trade book publishing ended about four years ago." Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.  Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!  

Director, Product Management - Amazon Kindle  Interview starts at 18:09 and ends at 43:26 The biggest technical challenge I would say is creating a seamless Page Flip reading experience across all of our platforms. Page Flip is available on eReaders, on Fire tablets, as well as the Kindle app for iOS and Android. Across those different experiences, we wanted to make sure that things like the performance, things like the fluidity, how it worked and how it behaved—all of those things were both tailored for the experience on the platform that it’s on, but it also felt natural, it felt simple, and it felt automatic.  News The new $80 Kindle at Amazon.com The Kindle Oasis “Alexa, What are Your Prime Day Deals” (press release) Amazon Prime Day is July 12, starting at midnight PT! Meghan’s profile at amazon.jobs  “Amazon Prime Day should be much bigger this year than it was last year” by Tonya Garcia at MarketWatch - July 8, 2016 Tech Tip The new Export Notes feature Page Flip Interview with Mike Torres Amazon’s leadership principles Word Wise on Kindle Mike Torres’s Refocuser blog Getting Things Done by David Allen Todoist app “Kindles Can Now Send Notes and Highlights Directly to Your Email” at The eBook Reader - July 3, 2016 The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly Content Rage by Zygmunt Miloszewski (A Kindle First selection from Amazon Publishing) “Audible Makes Some Noise” w/ Andrew Albanese at Beyond the Book podcast - July 8, 2016 Audible Channels Next Week’s Guest David Burleigh, director of marketing at OverDrive Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.  Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!  

My Father and Grandson   Interview starts at 23:32 and ends at 44:30   News Amazon Inspire press release - June 27, 2016 “Amazon Unveils Online Education Service for Educators” by Natasha Singer at The New York Times - June 27, 2016 “Amazon Inspire Removes Some Content Over Copyright Issues” by Natasha Singer at The New York Times - June 29, 2016 “Good News at The Washington Post” by Christopher Payne at New York Magazine - June 28, 2016 Amazon Dash Buttons press release - June 28, 2016 Amazon Prime Day - July 12, 2016   Tech Tip Page Flip, the reimagined Kindle navigation tool   Interview with my father and my grandson Click here to order a Kindle cover with a photo The Boxcar Children Mysteries by Gertrude Chandler Warner – various prices for Kindle Books by Will James Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton Minecraft Books by Horatio Alger   Next Week’s Guest Mike Torres, Amazon’s director of product management for the Kindle, who will talk about Page Flip.   Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!

Co-Founder, Chairman and Executive Publisher of Open Road Integrated Media   Interview starts at 15:17 and ends at 44:11 I do not think that the world of print survived and now will thrive at the expense of eBooks. I think eBooks will coexist with print, which I think is the best of all possible worlds. And I think that at the right price the revenue that one can receive from eBooks will be pretty substantial.   News “Smaller, lighter $80 Kindle unveiled with rounder edges—plus new Export Notes software update” by Len Edgerly at TeleRead - June 22, 2016 All-New Kindle in white or black with or without special offers (the link includes my Amazon Associates code and will provide a commission to support the podcast if you use it—thanks!) “Apple E-book Refunds to Begin June 21” by Andrew Albanese at Publishers Weekly - June 20, 2016 “Himalayan delivery by bike for Amazon man” at Hemmel Today - June 17, 2016   Tech Tip What’s Your Kindle Worth?   Interview with Jane Friedman “Slavin Named CEO of Open Road; Friedman Becomes Chairman” by Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly - May 31, 2016 Open Road press release announcing new CEO - May 31, 2016 Alan Sillitoe’s books at Open Road Pearl Buck’s books at Open Road Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead Goerge Pat Conroy books at Open Road Homeland on Prime Instant Video The Affair (Showtime) Open Road’s The Lineup site   Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Persepctive" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!

Director of Business Development at BookBub   Interview starts at 5:64 and ends at 16:18   BookBub definitely got off the ground with self-published authors. They’re often the first people in the industry to experiment with a new marketing channel, and they were much more comfortable discounting their books four years ago than a lot of traditional publishers were. Over the course of the past four years we’ve started working with all the major publishers, and we’ve gotten to the point where it’s fifty-fifty. We’ve actually maintained that breakdown for a while now, and we’re very comfortable with it.   News “Amazon’s Third Bookstore Will Be in Portland” by Leena Rao at Fortune - June 15, 2016   Interviews at BookExpo America   Katie Donelan, Director of Business Development at BookBub (5:64 to 16:18)      “Introducing BookBub New Release Alerts” at BookBub blog - January 4, 2016      BookGorilla   David Hemphill, publisher of Coralstone Press (16:54 to 24:26)      The Good Dog by Todd Kessler, illustrated by Jennifer Gray Olsen      Blue’s Clues on Nikolodeon (Amazon Prime Instant Video)   Christina York, co-founder and CEO of Spellbound (24:46 to 29:26)      “Spellbound uses augmented reality to turn children’s books into digital pop-up books” by Chris Meadows at TeleRead - May 12, 2016   Scott Dikkers, founder of The Onion (29:27 to 39:53)      Trump’s America: The Complete Loser’s Guide by Scott Dikkers - available in Kindle, paperback, and audio formats      The Comedy Insider Podcast, a serious conversation about comedy - hosted by Scott Dikkers (See Episode 13 for the Andy Borowitz interview)      Micro Publishing Media   Tech Tip “Kindle firmware v5.8.1: It’s all about dots and sharing” by Chris Meadows at TeleRead - June 16, 2016   Content Buzz Books 2016 (free) “Five Curious Ways to Find New Books to Read” by Mihir Patkar at MakeUseOf - June 14, 2016   Next Week’s Guest Jane Friedman, chairman of Open Road Media   Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Persepctive" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!

Co-Founder and CEO of Shelfie.com   Interview starts at 12:44 and ends at 32:05 We needed to find a metaphor, an analogy for the playlist or the inbound link when it came to books. What we found is that bookshelves are an incredibly good signal.   News 1999 Jeff Bezos speech at Association of American Publishers meeting (YouTube) “Watch Jeff Bezos Lay Out His Grand Vision for Amazon’s Future Dominance in This 1999 Video” by Jason del Rey at Recode - November 22, 2015   Tech Tip Software version 5.1.4 updates for Fire HD 8, Fire HD 10 and Fire “New Fire OS 5.1.4 Update Adds eBooks to SD Card and ‘On Deck’” at The eBook Reader - May 25, 2016 “Amazon Fire updates to Fire OS 5.1.4 - many changes?” by Paul St John Mackintosh at TeleRead - June 5, 2016   Interview with Peter Hudson Shelfie  My interview with Peter Hudson in December, 2014 The Fireman and The Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill Shelfie by Bitlit Crunchbase listing “BitLit Helps You Get E-Book Versions of the Physical Books You Already Own” by Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch - May 22, 2014   Content Daily Beast story on Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump by Harry Hurt III, described as “Trump’s most hated biographer” - June 7, 2015   Next Week’s Show: More from BookExpo America in Chicago     Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Manigat on the "Variations in Time: A Jazz Persepctive" CD by Public Transit Recording" CD.    Please Join the Kindle Chronicles group at Goodreads!