You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Jeff Bezos, chairman, president and chief executive of Amazon.com, spoke to the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg about cloud computing, streaming movies and why books are like horses, with edited excerpts of the conversation published by the newspaper online.
In response to the question whether the physical book would disappear in time, Bezos told the WSJ: "Over some time horizon, books will be read on electronic devices. Physical books won't completely go away, just as horses haven't completely gone away... It's very hard to find a technology that has remained in mostly the same form for 500 years. And anything that has stubbornly resisted improvement for 500 years is going to be hard to improve. That is what we're trying to do with Kindle. We see this as an effort to improve upon the book, even though it's resisted change for 500 years."
He also talks about the competition with iTunes, the recent economic slowdown and the efficiency of Amazon's delivery system.