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Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose

Here’s a part of what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had to say last night on Charlie Rose. Think this is important in an historic sort of way.

Kindle 3 pre-orders tomorrow

The new Kindle e-reader will come in two iterations: one with Wi-Fi and 3G Internet connections and another with Wi-Fi only.

First we had the markdowns on the Kindle 2, which should have been an early clue because pretty much the same thing happened to the Kindle 1 right before the Kindle 2 was released.

When the Kindle 2 went out of stock on Amazon, industry watchers and the curious alike knew that the next generation Kindle would be coming soon. (All of these events are nicely covered in a Wall Street Journall article. If you want a more in-depth look, Wired has it covered.)

The new Kindle will have the same higher-contrast screen as the new Kindle DX, and will be available in 3G for $189 and wi-fi only for $139, which makes it a good $10 below the wi-fi-less Kobo or the wi-fi-only Nook.

“We developed this device for serious readers. At these price points, it may be much broader than that,” said Jeff Bezos in an interview. “People will buy them for their kids. People won’t share Kindles any more.”

The Journal article does a good job of placing the Kindle in relation to the e-reader market in general:

Mr. Bezos takes pains to distinguish the Kindle from the iPad, saying the company is committed to making a single-purpose piece of consumer electronics. Mr. Bezos said he intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare.

“For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets,” he said.

Underscoring that, Mr. Bezos said he wasn’t interested in making an Amazon tablet computer. “There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets,” he said. “Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution.”

My own take on the Kindle is that Amazon has left its market position vulnerable to devices like the iPad that show full color and have become the darlings of newspaper and magazine publishers who have clearly shifted their efforts away from the Kindle and towards the iPad.

Orlando Figes settles over fake reviews

Orlando Figes

Historian Orlando Figes has agreed to pay damages to two fellow historians, Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service, after Figes wrote fake negative reviews of their work posted on Amazon.com.uk.

At first, Prof Figes’ wife, Stephanie Palmer, a law lecturer at Cambridge University, claimed responsibility for the reviews. But the accusations continued, specifically that Prof Figes wrote them using the pseudonyms “Historian” and “Orlando-Birkbeck.”

Prof Figes, on sick leave since the scandal broke, made matters worse by threatening legal action against colleagues, literary journals, and newspapers — any persons or organizations Figes claimed might have written the reviews. Eventually it emerged that Prof Figes wrote the reviews himself.

According to a Press Association report,

As part of the settlement agreed on Friday, Prof Figes has circulated an apology and retraction in which he accepts that his denial of responsibility for the reviews was false.

He also withdrew any adverse imputations that an email he sent had conveyed against Dr Polonsky and Prof Service, and apologised for instructing his previous solicitor to write to Prof Service threatening libel proceedings for suggesting that he had written the reviews. Prof Figes and his wife also agreed to pay Dr Polonsky and Prof Service damages, and their legal costs, partly on the indemnity basis – the highest rate.

He also gave an undertaking not to repeat the allegations, not to post pseudonymous reviews of their works, and not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage them in their professional capacity.

Prof Figes admitted in a statement on April 23 that he had written the bad reviews. Dr Polonsky’s book, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, was described as “dense” and “pretentious”, with the reviewer adding that it was “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”. Prof Service’s book, Comrades, was panned as being “awful”.

In his April statement Prof Figes apologised for the distress he caused Dr Polonsky and Prof Service, and to his lawyer for having given him incorrect information.