The Kindle Chronicles

Founder of StandardEbooks.org Interview starts at 11:43 and ends at 40:40 “One of the criteria for the books that we accept is that we very specifically don’t want to become a dumping ground for everything public domain. I think Project Gutenberg suffers from that to some extent. They are more of an archival website at this point. Anything and everything that was produced before 1923 gets on there, and a lot of stuff just wasn’t good. A lot of stuff didn’t survive for a reason.” News “Amazon launched 22 years ago this week--here’s what shopping on Amazon was like back in 1995” by Caroline Cakebread at Business Insider - July 20, 2017 “Here is the First Book Ever Ordered on Amazon” by Megan Garber at The Atlantic - October 31, 2012 Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter “Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime” at AFTVnews - July 13, 2017 “PSA: here’s how to put your old Amazon shipping boxes to go

New co-owner of Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver Interview starts at 19:56 and ends at 43:00 “Bookstores have evolved over the years to become very much experiential retailing, and we’re no different.” News “Amazon Prime Day breaks record; sales grew by more than 60 percent” by Lauren Thomas at CNBC - July 12, 2017 (includes video of analyst Jan Kniffen) Amazon press release on Prime Day - July 12, 2017 Furbo Dog Camera Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine Tech Tip Libby by OverDrive CloudLibrary Interview with Len Vlahos Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver Books by Len Vlahos: The Scar Boys, Scar Girl, and Life in a Fishbowl Starred reviews of Life in a Fishbowl in Publishers Weekly and Booklist Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken - Audible and Kindle The Chaos of Standing Still by Jessica Brody - available for preorder, delivery on November 28, 2017 “SNL writer-turned-senator Al Franken talks Colorado politics ahead of Denver stop” by John Wenzel at The Denver Post - June 14, 2017 Tattered Cove

Author of All our Waves Are Water: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment and the Perfect Ride Interview starts at 9:50 and ends at 35:52 “All memoirs build a container that’s something of a lie. (You can never say it all.) But this book gets a little closer to the truth in that surfing and Zen are just big characters among many.” (Photo by Peter Dawson) News Camino Island by John Grisham “Amazon bookstores to participate in Prime Day for the first time” by Tonya Garcia at MarketWatch - July 5, 2017 Prime Day in Amazon Books stores Echo Show Nintendo Switch (gray) Jeff Bezos’s tweet with link to New York Times column by The Haggler “The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store” by Brad Stone at Bloomberg - October 10, 2013 Tech Tip Click here to find Audible upgrades on your Kindle books. Interview with Jaimal Yogis Jaimal Yogis on TKC 236 in February, 2013 Books by Jaimal Yogis:   All Our Waves Are Water: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment and the Perfect Ride (Published July 4, 2017)   The Fear Pr

Author of The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future Interview starts at 18:40 and ends at 43:00 “All the visions that most people have of the future are all dystopian, and they’re afraid. They’re worried. And yet the reality, the scientific evidence is that we are much better off today. Any of your listeners are 10 times better off than 10 or 20 years ago. ” News “Early data suggests Amazon’s Echo Show could be a hit with consumers” by Jonathan Camhi at Business Insider - May 24, 2017 Echo Show - $230 at Amazon.com. Buy two, save $100. Prime Day Insider Guide “The 5 best Amazon Prime Day deals you can actually get right now” by Samantha Gordon at USA Today - June 30, 2017 Interview with Kevin Kelly The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts Samsung Gear VR and Controller Magic Leap Recomendo newsletter Next Week’s Guest Jaimal

Reader’s Advisory Librarian at Seattle Public Library Interview starts at 12:20 and ends at 37:05 “The Seattle Library has seen an exponential growth in our e-book usage, which like elsewhere is not cutting into our print usage. It’s additive, which is really interesting to say. Same with audiobooks. These new formats just seem to bring new people into reading and literature, so that’s all to the good.” (Photo by John Lok, The Seattle Times) News “New findings suggest it might be better to read toddlers an e-book than a print book” by Emma Young at The British Psychological Society Research Digest - June 15, 2017 “Amazon’s New Customer” by Ben Thompson at Stratechery - June 19, 2017 “In Whole Foods, Bezos Gets a Sustainably Sourced Guinea Pig” by Farhad Manjoo at The New York Times - June 17, 2017 “Open Road Integrated Media Newsletters Reach One Million Subscribers” - press release on June 22, 2017 Tech Tips “Introducing Smart Home Camera Control with Alexa” by Jeff Blankenburg at Alexa Blogs - June 22,

Executive Editor and Co-founder of Book Riot Interview starts at 10:10 and ends at 43:25 “If publishers woke up tomorrow and sanely priced e-books, I think it would be different in degree not in kind. I don’t think we’d see 10x growth in e-books’ market share. Maybe there would be 5, 10 percent [growth in] market share. I don’t know.” News “Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7 billion” by Nick Turner at Bloomberg - June 16, 2071 Press Release announcing Whole Foods acquisition - June 16, 2017 “Cramer: Amazon could dominate food retail within two years” video at CNBC - June 16, 2017 “Amazon will be the first company worth $1 trillion” by Eric Johnson at Recode - June 12, 2017 Jeff Bezos tweet re: philanthropy The Case for a National Library Endowment via David Rothman   Tech Tips “How to install Google Play on Kindle Fire (without root) by Olga & Rachel at Love My Fire Yousician Interview with Jeff O’Neal The Reading Ape Book Riot Book Riot podcasts: Book Riot, All the Books, Get Booked, SFF Yeah!

Co-founder and chief publishing officer of Unbound Interview starts at 8:56 and ends at 42:25 “It’s not so much the elephant in the room. We are the room inside the elephant, if you look at the size that Amazon is growing as an online retailer. That kind of troubles me, because I feel a little bit like when publishing does get round to direct-to-consumer it will already be too late. ” News “Amazon Will Be the Fifth Largest Bookstore Chain” by Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly - June 1, 2017 Amazon Fresh “Amazon is going after Walmart with a 45 percent discount on Prime for lower-income shoppers” by Jason Del Rey at Recode - June 6, 2017 Tech Tips “Amazon Unveils New Kindle Highlight and Note System” by Michael Kozlowski at Good E Reader - June 6, 2017 Interview with John Mitchinson John Mitchinson on TKC 213 in 2012 Unbound Unbound co-founders Justin Pollard and Dan Kiernan QI (Quite Interesting), the BBC quiz show Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts Kickstarter and Indiegogo Unbound books by Jonatha

Inventor of the Hashtag Interview starts at 12:30 and ends at 44:11 “Your pocket is now your garage, right. If one time you used to buy a car to sort of have in the garage to be like, ‘Wow. Look at this. I’m just going to go out and look at my baby.’ I think that in a similar way Apple thinks very similarly about computer products. And Amazon, meanwhile, is striking a much more ordinary context, like ‘Don’t think too hard about technology.’ But it should be there to enable your life to be easier, be simpler. ” News “Amazon’s stock price crosses $1,000 amid Wall Street love fest” by Ángel González at The Seattle Times - May 30, 2017 “The most bullish Amazon analyst on Wall Street thinks the stock will soar another 47% from here” by Akin Oyedele at Business Insider - May 10, 2016 Echo Look - $200 at Amazon.com Tech Tips “Now you can read your Kindle books in Virtual Reality” by Bufo Calvin at I Love My Kindle Interview with Chris Messina “Why Silicon Valley is all wrong about Amazon’s Echo Show” by Chris Me

Author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky Interview starts at 3:32 and ends at 42:21 “Not only does the guy [Pino Lella] deserve to be noted for what he did, his story is the story of faith, and the ability to endure, and the ability to go on, and the ability to the best and the worst of life in life. And yet still understand that it’s a miracle every day. ” News Amazon Fresh delivery in Denver Tech Tips “Amazon’s Alexa Calling is Like a Jetsons Version of the Home Phone” by David Pogue (includes video) at Yahoo! Tech - May 19, 2017 Interview with Mark Sullivan Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel The Assisi Underground: The Priests Who Rescued Jews by Alexander Ramati (not available on Kindle) Valchiavenna Ski Area Alberto Ascari Con smania Content Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan (Audible) Guadacanal Diary and Invasion Diary, A Dramatic Firsthand Account of the Allied Invasion of Italy by Richard Tregaskis. The Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson. 1. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One o

Co-founder of Tor Labs Interview starts at 16:53 and ends at 40:00 “This story is 14 episodes, and it is about security chief Dakota Prentiss and Matt Salem, who are both ex-military, working at a secret military base that happens to have a flying saucer, an alien, and a mysterious thing called the harp. No one really knows quite what it does. They instantly fall in love with one another, but the hitch is that when you sign up for this gig there is an absolute, ironclad no-fraternization policy. ” News “Amazon Echo Silver” on Saturday Night Live (YouTube video) - May 13, 2017 “8 People Test Their Accents on Siri, Echo and Google Home | Wired” (YouTube video) - May 16, 2017 Seattle Times editorial on Amazon’s donation of space to Mary’s Place homeless shelter - May 14, 2017 “Why Silicon Valley is All Wrong about Amazon’s Echo Show” by Chris Messina at Medium - May 11, 2017 Tech Tips “Alexa Calling Has a Major Privacy Flaw” by elise oras at Medium - May 12, 2017 “Amazon says caller blocking for Alexa/Echo

Digital and Archival Publishing Manager for The Associated Press Interview starts at 12:51 and ends at 40:01 “I really try to get people to understand that every little basic functionality within e-books that Amazon keeps introducing--whether it’s their X-ray feature or Kindle Lending Library or whatever it might be within the e-book world or within the connection with the social-media platform Goodreads--these are all enhancements to your reading experience.” News Introducing Echo Show “Amazon’s ‘Echo Show’ gives Alexa the Touchscreen it Needed” by David Pierce at Wired - May 9, 2017 Alexa Calling and Message (Amazon help page) April Hamilton on Alexa’s new calling and messaging Jeff Bezos at the Internet Association gala (video) Tech Tips Apple AirPods Interview with Peter Costanzo The Associated Press Content Dwight D. Eisenhower: An Associated Press Biography by Relman Morin Saigon Has Fallen by Peter Arnett My Time with the Kings: A Reporter’s Recollections of Martin, Coretta and the Civil Rights Move

Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research Interview starts at 11:17 and ends at 36:16 “I don’t think they [Amazon] really expect the fashion angle to be a big driver of these [Echo Look] devices. They needed a pretext. They needed a reason to put a camera in your home, to see how comfortable you are with that idea, to test whether or not there’s a big social outcry about putting cameras in people’s homes, whether they can start connecting what they see with what they know... Eventually that kind of visual intelligence will be a very crucial part of how Amazon builds a deeper relationship with you. But they had to start somewhere, and the closet, I think, was a pretty safe place to start.” News “Exclusive: This is Amazon’s new Echo with a built-in touchscreen” at AFTVnews - May 5, 2017. “The first photo of Amazon’s Echo with a touchscreen may have just leaked” by Antonio Villas-Boas at Business Insider - May 5, 2017 “Amazon’s touchscreen Echo leaks again, in two colors” by Ashley Carman at

Author of The Doctor Is In: Dr. Ruth on Love, Life and Joie de Vivre Interview starts at 13:00 and ends at 41:17 “This is also my philosophy of life: I talk about a turtle. A turtle stays in one place--it’s safe. Nothing can happen. It carries its house on its back. If that turtle wants to move, it has to take a risk. It has to stick its neck out. And I like that image of the turtle.” Intro Echo Dot (2nd Generation) Ask My Buddy skill for Alexa News Amazon’s first-quarter earnings release - April 27, 2017 “Amazon just turned a profit for the eighth straight quarter” by Jason Del Rey at Recode = April 27, 2017 Introducing Echo Look This Week in Google episode 402 with Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Stacey Higginbotham (via Overcast, cued up to begin playing at discussion of Echo Look) Tech Tips “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Says ‘Star Trek’ Inspired Alexa and Echo” by Mike Brown at Inverse - May 18, 2016 Vital Signs: Discovering and Sustaining Your Passion for Life by Gregg Levoy, who was my guest on TKC 335 A Boo

Author of Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World Interview starts at 10:33 and ends at 41:35 “Education increasingly wants to measure finite, little bites of stuff, and the digital technology that we are using in our education--and we do have print--is tailored to these quick wins as opposed to a deeper level of learning.” Intro My new VR setup: Samsung Galaxy Edge S8 with new Samsung Gear VR + controller News “Amazon continues to grow lead over Google as starting point for online shoppers” by Taylor Soper at GeekWire - January 13, 2017 Scott Galloway bio “How Amazon is Dismantling Retail” - Scott Galloway video - April 17, 2017 Tech Tip How I improved performance on my Amazon Fire HD 8 6th Generation tablet Interview with Naomi S. Baron Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri The Namesake: A Novel by Jhumpa

Painter, art critic and historian Interview starts at 15:00 and ends at 41:14 “I remember your talking on one of your programs about Jeff Bezos’s insisting on a one-second [Alexa] response when his staff said, “We can get this down to three seconds,” and he said, “That’s not good enough.” That makes a huge difference. It shouldn’t--we’re so impatient, I’m so impatient. But the fact that it is more more conversational and that I don’t have to wait and think about the fact that this is a machine processing it, makes it much more real to me.” News Jeff Bezos’s 2016 Letter to Shareholders - and the 1997 letter (PDF) “Over 550 Amazon Employees Are Pressuring Leadership to Cut Advertising Ties With Breitbart” by Charlie Warzel at BuzzFeed - April 13, 2017 Tech Tips How to connect Amazon Tap to a new wifi network (Amazon help page) Ask My Buddy skill for Alexa Interview with Kesler Woodward Painting in the North, Kes’s web site Western States Arts Federation Kes Woodward on TKC 50 - July 1, 2009 iPad Mini 4 Bufo

Creator of I Love My Kindle and The Measured Circle Interview starts at 6:14 and ends at 43:10 “It would also be able to know what your preferences are--that’s one of the biggest things about what we’ll see eventually with Virtual Reality. So for myself as a vegetarian, I could walk down that virtual aisle and have things that were for vegetarians maybe have a green outline on them, so that I could tell what was what.”   News “Amazon exec steps in as CEO Jeff Bezos’s new ‘shadow’” by Rachel Lerman at The Seattle Times - March 14, 2017 Jeffrey Helbling on LinkedIn “Amazon will start collecting sales tax nationwide starting April 1st” by Nick Statt at The Verge - March 24, 2017 “Amazon to hire 5,000 remote customer-service reps, part of drive to add 30,000 part-timers” by Angel Gonzales at The Seattle Times - April 6, 2017 Info on Nights & Weekends part-time Customer Service Associate jobs at Amazon Amazon info page for AmazonCash “Amazon allows customers to add cash to their accounts at brick-and-mor

Author of “Jerry (from accounting)” Interview starts at 14:56 and ends at 45:09 "I love what Amazon is doing in terms of giving access to a platform in a kind of populist way. I think that is incredibly helpful. I think the distribution is amazing. It creates new readers. I love the $2 price point for a novella. I think that’s definitely expanding who can have access to the writing and quality writing. Historically speaking the Big Five were very focused on content and less on how the distribution was happening, and that was what they were pretty good at. Amazon’s strength was in more distribution and being ahead of the curve on the eBooks. I think Amazon now is catching up and really focusing on content across the board." News “Amazon’s Ambitions Unboxed: Stores for Furniture, Appliances and More” by Nick Wingfield at The New York Times - March 25, 2017 “Amazon, the world’s most remarkable firm, is just getting started” at The Economist - March 25, 2017 “Amazon could become our leading physical retailer b

Co-founder of Ask My Buddy Interview starts at 18:45 and ends at 41:25 "In terms of users or penetration, I would say that Google Home probably represents about less than 10 percent on our network. [Alexa has the rest.] That’s just time out there, the commercials. They’re just more widely known. Also, I would say the reduction in price, coming out with the Dot for 49 bucks--that was an end all. There were millions that went out. I would say that the price point developed a stronger user base for Amazon." Audio and links from South By Southwest PARCO shopping mall in Japan “Facebook debuts its first dedicated virtual reality app, Facebook 360” by Lucas Matney at Techcrunch - March 8, 2016 Ana Benitez, President, Storyrocket Khushi Baby health monitor in India Felix & Paul Studios (interview with Robin Lippman, content coordinator) “Is this the future of movies?’ by Len Edgerly at Medium - March 14, 2016 “At 40 minutes, Miyubi is the first VR movie to feel like a real film” by Adi Robertson at The Verge

David Measer of RPA Advertising and Lisa Pecot-Hebert of USC Interview starts at 25:08 and ends at 49:15 I expected the smaller cities in the U.S. to be places where eventually trends made their way there and that they’d be listening to music that I listened to 10 years ago, or wearing fashion that was old. And it wasn’t like that at all. These places, cities that I couldn’t even identify on a map before I went--Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Fargo, North Dakota; Moorehead, Minnesota; Omaha, Nebraska--were actually places that were thriving in their own way. They really had an identity of their own, and they felt like they were leading the charge. They weren’t drafting off of the big coastal cities. (David Measer) Shorter Interviews at SXSW (with times at which they start) Steph Hay, head of conversation design at Capital One. (5:32) Scott Totman, head of mobile technology, payments and innovation at Capital One (10:40) “The Urgency of Now: Launching the Biden Cancer Initiative” - Joe Biden’s talk at SXSW (13:03

Author of Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert Interview starts at 10:27 and ends at 41:38 “Billie Jean King is very aware of my Ripper book, and we talked about it when I began all this investigation in 2001, because Billie Jean had been a friend of mine for many years. We talked about this, and she said, ‘You need to talk to the people at Amazon about this, because this is a really unusual project.’” (Photo Credit: Ecclesine) News Author Earnings report for February 2017 “Amazon could hammer the final nail into the iPad’s coffin” by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDENet -n March 6, 2017 Interview with Patricia Cornwell Patricia Cornwell’s books at Amazon.com Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert by Patricia Cornwell Next Week’s Show Interviews and new ideas from South By Southwest Interactive in Austin. Click here for a link to the events I have favorited and may attend. Music for my podcast is from an original Thelonius Monk composition named "Well, You Needn't." This version is "Ra-Monk" by Eval Ma