Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles agreed to live-blog the Kindle Fire/Kindle Touch press conference for Kindle Nation readers. Our gratitude remains, but not it is matched by great admiration for Len’s accomplishment in bringing out a short-form Kindle ebook version of his reportage and thoughtful commentary less than a week after the event. It’s a worthy addition to every Kindle library, and at 99 cents it will not cut deeply into your Kindle budget.
Here’s the set-up, directly from Len:
In this 30-page article, I invite you to join me in the front row at Amazon’s press conference in New York city on September 28, 2011. That’s when Jeff Bezos introduced the next generation of Kindles, including the Kindle Fire tablet. Just being at the event was a major thrill for a book lover whose life has been changed by the Kindle. I thought I’d seen the future when I bought a Rocket eBook in 1998. That didn’t work out too well, but the Kindle in 2007 looked like the real thing.
The next year, I started a weekly podcast, The Kindle Chronicles, to participate in the revolution in reading that I was sure would follow. Since then, I’ve interviewed 165 people representing all parts of the Kindlesphere–from Amazon executives to nervous writers, from technologists to school administrators, from the editor of the New York Times Book Review to my wife Darlene, who reads three times as many Kindle books as I do but is an endearing skeptic about technology.
I traveled by train to New York City worried that Amazon executives might get so excited about their shiny new color tablet that they would forget to keep improving the monochrome e-ink Kindles. In the event, I need not have worried. Jeff Bezos started the press conference by telling the Kindle story in a way that touched me as highly personal and revealing. Come join me in the front row, and I’ll show you what I mean.