Video2009

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Bezos’s first late-night comedy appearance: he brings the Kindle 2 to Jon Stewart on the day it ships, calls its reading voice ‘a little freaky’, and mostly laughs while Stewart praises paper books as ‘comfortably low tech’, teases Amazon Prime and feigns shock at the $359 price.

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All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

2007
Charlie Rose: the Kindle
Hours after unveiling the Kindle, Bezos sits with Rose for a full hour to explain why Amazon built hardware, how the wireless store works, and why he thinks the book is the last analog bastion worth digitizing. The interview became the long-form companion to the launch.
2007
Kindle launch press event
Bezos took the stage at 9:41 a.m. with a tablet, a papyrus scroll and a picture of Gutenberg to argue that the book is a ‘500-year-old technology’ that ‘disappears when you read it’, then unveiled the 10.3-ounce Kindle with free Whispernet wireless delivery over Sprint’s network, 90,000 titles, bestsellers at $9.99 and a $399 price, demonstrating font resizing, dictionary look-up and the store before rolling a promotional video.
2007
NPR All Things Considered: ‘Amazon Rolls Out New Wireless Reading Device’
On the evening of the Kindle launch, Bezos tells NPR’s Michele Norris why electronic ink and built-in wireless make the $399 device different from ‘a long history of failed reading devices’, that new releases will cost $9.99 against $25 hardcovers, that the device took three years to build, and that ‘we were never going to out-book the book’.
2008
Fortune Brainstorm Tech on-stage interview
Two excerpts from Bezos’s session at Fortune’s 2008 Brainstorm Tech conference: in one he discusses Amazon’s strategy and, unusually for the time, his plans to build a commercial spaceship at Blue Origin; in the other, the first months of the Kindle and the future of reading.
2008
The Oprah Winfrey Show: Oprah’s ‘favorite new gadget’
Oprah Winfrey devotes a segment to the Kindle as her ‘favorite new gadget’ and brings on Bezos to explain the device, giving it the mainstream push that preceded the Kindle 2; Amazon emailed customers in advance to announce his appearance.
2009
Kindle 2 press event with Stephen King
Bezos unveils the slimmer Kindle 2 ($359, text-to-speech, 230,000 titles) fourteen months after the original, stating the goal of ‘every book ever printed in any language in under 60 seconds’, demonstrating a newspaper and a book on the device, then handing the stage to Stephen King, who reads from a novella written for the Kindle.
2009
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Bezos’s first late-night comedy appearance: he brings the Kindle 2 to Jon Stewart on the day it ships, calls its reading voice ‘a little freaky’, and mostly laughs while Stewart praises paper books as ‘comfortably low tech’, teases Amazon Prime and feigns shock at the $359 price.
2009
Charlie Rose: Kindle 2 and internet retailing
Bezos returns to Rose’s table after the Kindle 2 launch to talk about Amazon’s business model, what is new in the Kindle 2, and the future technologies he expects to change reading and retail.
2009
CNN Money interview on the Kindle DX
Short CNN Money interview segments in which Bezos defends the nearly $500 Kindle DX as ‘a great value’ and argues that it could be a lifeline for newspapers and magazines, weeks after the device’s unveiling.
2009
Video message to Zappos employees on the acquisition
On the day Amazon announced it was buying Zappos, Bezos — in a polo shirt, standing at a whiteboard in a bare room — recorded a message for Zappos employees distilling ‘everything I know’ into four lessons: obsess over customers, invent, think long-term, and remember that ‘it’s always Day 1’.
2010
We are what we choose
Bezos returns to his alma mater to deliver the Baccalaureate address, built around the story of his grandmother and his grandfather’s lesson that ‘it’s harder to be kind than clever.’
2010
Charlie Rose: the new Kindle
Bezos sits with Charlie Rose the evening after Amazon unveiled the $139 Wi-Fi Kindle, insisting the device should remain ‘for uncompromised reading’ rather than chase the iPad.
2011
Kindle Fire unveiled
Bezos’s first full product keynote in the Apple style: he walks through the $79 Kindle, Kindle Touch and the $199 Kindle Fire tablet with its Silk browser, framing Amazon as selling ‘premium products at non-premium prices’ and the Fire as a service, not a device.