Kindle Nation Analysis of Long-Suppressed Video Footage Proves that Jeff Bezos Invented the Kindle in Albuquerque in September 1964

By Stephen Windwalker
Editor, Kindle Nation Daily
©Kindle Nation Daily 2011

 
ALBUQUERQUE, April 1 -- In preparing to send out this week's Kindle Nation weekly digest after a serious case of Workweekus Interruptus, we had to make some tough business and editorial decisions. Without a doubt, the toughest involved how we should handle an ironclad commitment we had made to embargo the following story until our regular weekly issue of April 1, 2011.

Don't get us wrong: we would understand, with or without the painkillers, that ironclad commitments are considered serious by some. But this is journalism, and our first commitment is to our readers, so we decided to run with the April 1 story and answer questions later. Questions like, can we come up with another April 1 story? Or, can we get away with running this one all over again on April 1?

Our story employs some magical and revolutionary journalistic approaches, because it is built upon close textual analysis of never-before-seen footage from very, very early in the career of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the inventor and visionary behind the Kindle.

Mr. Bezos laughing, 2007

We have previously shown footage of Mr. Bezos appearing on the Charlie Rose program November 19, 2007, celebrating the launch of the Kindle and laughing a lot. Really a lot. For the trained eye and ear, there is just one especially interesting piece in that interview. It's the laugh. Bezos really laughs a lot. At times it seems that he can't stop laughing.

What's really going on behind this laughter? What are the unifying threads behind a a laugh that has been likened by Bezos fans Steve Jobs and Len Riggio, respectively, to "a jackass gargling bumblebees" and "a rapid honk that sounds like a flock of Canadian geese on nitrous oxide?"

Mr. Bezos laughing, 2009

In the initial Kindle interview and in an eerily similar later session with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, Mr. Bezos laughs so relentlessly that our own hastily convened private panel of psychological experts concluded, for a healthy fee, that the laughter seemed to involve a desire to replicate certain events, feelings, and conditions from times when he might have had similar cause for laughter much, much earlier in his career, and indeed, perhaps, in his life (although we should hasten to add that in certain cases of precocious entrepreneurial achievement, such as Mr. Bezos' case, there may be little or no palpable distinction between what we mean when we say "career" and what we mean when we say "life."

It was just a matter of time before someone came along to decipher the code behind these eruptions of laughter, and we never thought it would be us here at Kindle Nation. Frankly, we thought it almost certain that it would be Dan Brown.

Mr. Bezos laughing, 1964

Then we got hold of a new piece of Jeff Bezos video. Apparently taken in September 1964 when he was just eight months old, this footage shows a younger but no less focused Bezos with an older but obviously junior colleague who at one point utters Bezos' well-known corporate code name "Micah." Together they contemplate in impressive detail what would happen to the world of paper, of print-on-paper, and of dead-tree books if their Lab 126 people would just hurry up already and get the Kindle, then in pre-Beta status, ready to ship.

Beta tester with early Kindle prototypes

The unifying threads, of course, are the laugh, and the Kindle. Kase Klosed? I think so.

It was a somewhat gentler laugh in 1964, perhaps even less annoying, but we know that babies are engineered to be able to get away with a lot.

To the best of our knowledge the video is not protected by any corporate or pediatric counseling privilege, so we offer it here for your enjoyment and edification:



And do enjoy your April 1st, whether you celebrate it then or now.