Jeff Bezos to Speak at BEA

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos will participate in an Upfront and Unscripted Spotlight conversation with Wired magazines Chris Anderson on Friday afternoon at 3pm during BEA. I gotta say, I’m pretty excited about this – a major goal of BEA is to bring the entire book industry together in one place, and Amazon.com is a big part of our business. Jeff will certainly discuss the launch of the Kindle and his perceptions of it’s impact on our industry but he’s promised to delve into larger industry maters as well.

The decisions Amazon makes internationally in particular have an immense impact on our global industry. The question on the mind of any publisher doing business internationally is, “Where is Amazon going next?” To wit, BEA consultant Ruediger Wischenbart points out on his blog that he estimates that Amazon.com is the #3 largest bookseller in Germany – read it here.

The conversation should prove to be most enlightening on the present and future of the book business from the Amazon.com perspective and I’m always thrilled when BEA can bring an industry leader of this stature to the show and provide them a forum.

Upfront and Unscripted (UU) is a series we launched in 2006 where we pair compelling figures in the books business with an equally compelling questioner, such as Twelve’s Jonathon Karp interviewed by Carl Lennertz or Borders CEO George Jones interviewed by Shelf Awareness’s John Mutter. The UU Spotlight is a new platform to call attention to the entire UU series and it’s a similar strategy we also used with our Conference Keynote to call attention to BEA’s world class conference (this year Thomas Friedman in the conference keynote, last year was Alan Greenspan). Pretty cool having a guy like Jeff Bezos to christen the new event!

We’ll release to full schedule of UU programs in just a few weeks and almost all of them will be vid casted this year as part of the BookExpo Cast pod cast series.

-L

PS - After some issues, all special event tickets for BEA are now available for purchase (or to add onto a badge you've already bought) on our web site. Buy early and buy often!