Q&A with Ian Freed of Amazon Kindle
By Paul Biba
Eric Engleman of TechFlash has published a Q&A with Ian Freed, the guy at Amazon who is responsible for the Kindle. You can read the whole thing here.
The thing that surprised me the most was Ian’s answer to the question: Are there some Kindle features that you’ve found work particularly well and some that don’t? He responded that newspaper delivery and the experimental browser have gone over really well, but here’s the part of the answer I never would have expected:
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.
Related: Kindle might be open to non-Amazon apps someday, says Kindle VP.
Leave a Reply