Q&A: Ian Freed of Amazon Kindle on ebooks, blogs, and Jennifer Aniston

Dan Schlatter/PSBJ Photo

Amazon.com is putting a lot of marketing muscle behind its electronic book reader, the Kindle, ahead of this year's holiday season (the company recently secured a coveted endorsement from Oprah). I sat down with Ian Freed, Amazon's VP for Kindle, to talk about  the device, how it's faring, and competition in the ebook space.

We’re approaching the one year anniversary of Kindle. What are your thoughts on how it has done?
People absolutely love the ability to think of a book and get it in under minute. That is the key feature that really causes people to think about Kindle as a new way to read. Whether I’m at a friend’s house and they mention an interesting book, or I run out of things to read when I’m waiting to get on an airplane, I can literally think of something and get it in under 60 seconds. That seems to be the common theme that we hear from customers all the time.

Are there some Kindle features that you’ve found work particularly well and some that don’t?
We’ve had really great response from the periodicals. We didn’t know how that would work. No one has ever really delivered a newspaper instantly to your night stand. Particularly since you can deliver everything from the New York Times, which you can actually get delivered to your house, to Shanghai Daily, which is an English language paper published in China. It was never available before ... That part of getting the newspaper, any newspaper, every morning has been a pleasant surprise.

The other one -- we had pretty good instincts on this but didn’t know for sure how consumers would react — is blogs. The blog experience on Kindle is very different in some ways from the blog experience on the PC. If I’m reading a blog on Kindle I don’t actually have to be connected. I can get five blogs delivered and hop on an airplane with wireless turned off and read through the entire blog as if I’m reading through a newspaper or magazine. And that’s something that we weren’t sure how consumers would react, and frankly, while there is a nominal fee of 99 cents or $1.99 per month for an entire blog, we weren’t sure how people would react to the idea of a paying for a blog. If you think about it, it’s a third or a half the price of a cup of coffee for a month of your favorite blog. It’s not that much money.

The other feature that has worked, I think, very well, and we got it about right, is the browser. We knew the browser would not be a full-fledged PC-based browser that does flash animation video. That’s not what it’s for. We put it in a section of our product called experimental and we think that’s about right. We still feel it’s an experimental feature. The reason is that it works great for some websites, but you’re not going to go to ESPN and watch the video from the football game or the baseball game. The technology doesn’t allow that. But if you want to go to Wikipedia to look something up -- I actually use it, believe it or not, for ferry schedules — it’s fine. The key is figuring out what websites work well, and I think we didn’t overpromise on what the web browser would actually do.

What metrics can you share on Kindle, sales, number in use, etc.?
Sales is not something we break out for Kindle or really any other business at Amazon, so that’s not something we can share. But what I can say is we’re really pleased. We looked at what we thought a device like this should do in its first year, and we sold out in the first five and a half hours of introduction. We continue to be very pleased with sales and on an ongoing basis with customer feedback.

So when will the new version of Kindle come out?
In the future. What we’ve said is there will definitely not be one this year. Next year would be the earliest.

Any particular quarter?
Can’t say.

How many exclusive titles does Kindle have?
There are probably a handful of exclusive books from known publishers, whether those are book publishers or newspaper or magazine publishers. But we also have a platform which we call Digital Text Platform, which literally allows any author or publisher to take any content and publish it directly for Kindle. That platform has reached literally hundreds if not thousands of publishers and authors, so that has done very well since we launched it. In terms of content that might get a lot of media attention, we launched something with Newsweek recently which were four titles, one on each of the presidential and vice presidential candidates, and that’s exclusive to Kindle. We’ve been very pleased with the results on that ... If you think of all the processes required to publish a physical book, you can really compress that when you’re publishing digitally. Something like the latest news and feature stories on the presidential candidates, you can put in a book and publish a few weeks later. That’s something that would be very hard to do in a physical book.

Where are Kindles manufactured?
In China.

What is it like doing business in China?
Overall in consumer electronics, there’s been a pretty significant trend to do a lot of manufacturing in China. What you find with a lot of products and what’s common to Kindle as well, there are subcomponents manufactured all over the world. And certainly quite a bit of manufacturing happens in China and assembly of all those parts happens in China. I think that with lots of cell phones, digital cameras, mp3 players — all of those products are done very similarly. I would say we’ve used very common practice in manufacturing.

The Kindle platform is closed to outside application developers. Would you ever consider opening it?
At the end of the day, most of the interest we have from people outside the company is being able to publish content to the platform ... Right now our focus is on providing a great reading experience and we’ve developed applications that do that. Over time it might be something we look at, but right now we’re focused on creating a great reading experience and I think we have the applications on the platform that do that, whether that’s books, newspapers, blogs, what have you. But supporting a wider ecosystem for applications is nontrivial and we want to make sure we’re serving our reading customers first and foremost and then we look at other things.

But it’s something you might be open to?
I think we might be.

What would be the potential value to opening the platform to outside developers?
Any time you offer more choice for consumers, it’s good. Amazon offers all kinds of choice across the whole company. We started selling books and now you can buy anything at Amazon. That said, this is a reading device. We’re not going to have a video player on it. There are technical reasons why we would never have a video player on this. So we want it to be really focused on reading. But we haven’t figured out everything there is to do about reading and we will continue to invent. The advantage would be, in theory, anyone could come up with a new idea that might improve the reading experience. Over time, it might make sense to do that. But again, we’re really focused on delivering what we are able to deliver now, which is great books, newspapers, periodicals.

I read that Stanza, an electronic book reading application for the iPhone, has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Do you consider that competition for the Kindle?
We think the Kindle ecosystem, end to end, is pretty special. The idea that you can get over 180,000 books from publishers that are sold on a regular basis delivered to you under 60 seconds — that’s something that we really do uniquely. And moreover being able to get over 25 different newspapers and over 25 different magazines delivered on a regular basis is something we do uniquely. So far things have been great and we think that will continue.

Prior to your current role, you worked directly with Jeff Bezos. Tell us about that.
I was a TA, technical assistant (to Bezos). Really the role was to help Jeff and I would say the senior executives at the company to just become another person in the room as we’re looking at all the businesses at Amazon and all the different technology initiatives. Just somebody he can bounce things off of. And as a result I got kind of crash course in everything Amazon, which is totally fascinating and marvelous, really. It’s everything from understanding how our media business grows to how we’re accelerating the consumer electronics business, and sports and apparel, and our early experiment with Amazon Fresh (grocery delivery service). I got to see all of that at different stages. It was totally fascinating, and this will surprise no one but Jeff is absolutely brilliant and great to work for. His insight and creativity, it makes Amazon an incredibly fun and exciting place to work. It was great and we had a lot of fun together.

How did it work on a day-in and day-out basis? Did he call you at 3am when he had a new idea?
He was very respectful that there’s work and there’s home. That doesn’t mean that as with any company, if things are really hot at work and there are some important issues, I wouldn’t myself just drop what I needed to drop and do what needed to be done on a deadline.

Who are the most surprising people that use Kindle?
Jennifer Aniston has one. A lot of younger people here — I’m an old man, so I don’t care about this stuff — they decided that Kindle had truly made it when Jennifer Aniston showed up in one of those, Us Weekly I think it was, with a Kindle. I know that Jimmy Buffett is a fan. He’s talked about it pretty publicly. Martha Stewart is a fan. She’s had one on the air and talked about it. Whoopi Goldberg is another one. She’s had it on The View.

Anybody else?
None that I can talk about publicly, but some very senior leaders who are both current and former U.S. government officials. I’ll  leave it at that.

How was the Kindle concept born?
We looked at all the key tenets of what we have in Kindle today, and a lot of those were not possible until we started to build them into Kindle. One of them was what we call the electronic ink screen. That just wasn’t quite ready for production until roughly about when we started the Kindle. Another was frankly wireless technology, both the technology and business agreements you could put in place to deliver wirelessly. We weren’t from day one thinking it had to be wireless, but as we thought about it, we thought, ‘Wouldn’t that just make it great?’ The other was just that the publishing market we felt was starting to innovate more. We felt that if we paint a picture of the way electronic books should really work, by creating a great device, attaching a really great wireless service and making it really easy to use, and just having a ton of books, that would really make the difference. We launched with 90,000 books, and we’re over 180,000 now. We’ve more than doubled in just under a year.

Time for some personal questions. What kind of car do you drive?
My newest car is a 1994 Jetta.

What is your favorite restaurant?
One of my favorite restaurants for lunch, but the lines are impossible, is Salumi. My office is right near it. It’s awesome. But you have to go at 11am on a rainy Thursday and you might get in.

What do you do in your spare time?
I have two boys who are 11 and 13, so I spend a lot of time with my wife and the two boys. I watched a lot of Little League last spring. We have a little place on Lopez Island and this weekend we picked apples. They’re ancient, sort of breaking-down apple trees, but the apples are still good. We made cider and had a bunch of friends over and made a feast. Every year we seem to try to outdo the previous year, both in terms of gallons of apple cider produced and intricacy of the meal. It’s becoming more like a Thanksgiving feast but all surrounded by an apple theme.