Just this morning, a regular e-mail correspondent asked the blogger if he was a reader. The blogger resisted a "Does a bear do its duty in the woods?" response and explained that he was a lifelong reader who had gained a new best friend about ten years ago. The blogger received a Kindle Touch as a birthday gift and the initial reaction from the birthday-boy was "What would I do with another electronic device?" Then, the next moment found the blogger trading his Kindle Touch for a Kindle Paperwhite. A few years later, Amazon released the Kindle Oasis with all sorts of touch-screen features and a larger battery capacity. The blogger drank the Amazon Kool-Aid and replaced his Kindle Paperwhite with a Kindle Oasis. Last year, the blogger was frustrated by random activation of touch-screen features and he asked "Why did I ever change from a Kindle Paperwhite?" The blogger purchased a Kindle Paperwhite 7th Generation and sold the Kindle Oasis (at a loss) to a used electronics dealer and has never looked back. The Paperwhite is "old school" compared to the Oasis, but it suits the blogger to a T. The blogger's Paperwhite is a honored guest at every meal and is the last thing the blogger sees before he closes his eyes to sleep. If this is a (fair & balanced) account of man and machine, so be it.
[x Wired]
The Kindle Changed The Book Business — Can It Change Books?
By David Pierce
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
In 2007, a small team of Amazon employees had been working for a few years on a new ebook reader project they'd eventually call the Kindle. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was eager to finish and sell the thing; he was certain Apple or Google was working on something similar, and didn't want them to beat Amazon to market. The team, sequestered away in an old law office in Seattle, working among racks of the very books they planned to make obsolete, had already gotten a lot of things right. But one part still eluded them.
At the very beginning, the Kindle's creators wrote a press release about the device. This is standard practice at Amazon: It's meant to ground everything in the ultimate result, to begin with the end in mind and then work backwards. The Kindle's founding documents mentioned that customers would get new content by connecting their device to their PC, and syncing it like an iPod. So that's what they built. But the vision quickly felt too small. "You want to be able to be on a tarmac, think of a book, and get a book in 60 seconds," says Steve Kessel, one of the early leaders of the project.
There was only one way to make the 60-second vision real: cell service. "We knew we wanted it to be a wireless device that had no contract for customers," Kessel says, but nothing like that existed. So Amazon worked with Qualcomm to build a system called Whispernet, which gave every Kindle owner free 3G connectivity so they could download books from anywhere. The feature felt like magic—both to the Kindle team and to early Kindle buyers. If you had to pick just one thing that made the Kindle a success, it was this.
It's now been a decade since Amazon unveiled the first Kindle to the world. The first model seems ridiculous in retrospect—what with the giant keyboard filled with slanted keys, the tiny second screen just for navigation, and the mostly pointless scroll wheel—but was wildly popular, selling out its initial inventory in less than six hours. Since then, the device has torn through the publishing landscape. Not only is Amazon the most powerful player in the industry, it has built an entire book-based universe all its own. "Kindle" has become a platform, not a device. Like Amazon tends to do, it entered the market and utterly subsumed it.
Now, however, Amazon's ebook project comes to a crossroads. The Kindle team has always professed two goals: to perfectly mimic a paper book, and to extend and improve the reading experience. That's what readers want, too. In a world filled with distractions and notifications and devices that do everything, the Kindle's lack of features becomes its greatest asset. But readers also want to read everywhere, in places and ways a paperback can't manage. They want more tools, more features, more options, more stuff to do. Amazon's still working out how to satisfy both sides. Whatever route it takes, the next decade of Kindle is likely to be even more disruptive than the last. First it changed the book business. Next it might help change books themselves.
Turning a Page
From a hardware perspective, the Kindle roadmap has never changed. Even from the beginning, "the big goal for sometime in the future was, can we ever get to be a sheet of paper?" says Charlie Tritschler, Amazon's current vice president of devices and an early Kindle team member. Everyone at Amazon likes to say that paper is great technology, and they seem genuinely uninterested in rendering paper obsolete. They're just trying to make paper that connects to the internet. The Kindle they've always imagined is thin as paper, as light as paper, as flexible and durable as paper. That's why E Ink technology was so crucial to the Kindle's development: It didn't consume much battery, didn't require a backlight or hurt your eyes to look at, and just sort of looked like paper.
The Kindle has become progressively lighter with successive generations, and even the device's materials are softer than they used to be, more like a book in your hand than a high-tech gizmo. E Ink tech is now nearly as high-res as printed words. Next up, flexibility seems at the top of the Kindle team's minds. Building a Kindle "like paper" would mean one that can be rolled, folded, dog-eared, and turned into a paper airplane, and the beginnings of that tech is already showing up in prototypes and concept devices around the world.
One thing about the Kindle itself won't change, though: It's not going to become anything more than a reading device. Amazon's heard from so many customers over the years that they love their Kindle precisely for all the things it doesn't do. It's a respite from Facebook and news alerts, push notifications and emails. "The more that we're distracted, the more valuable solitude becomes," says Dave Limp, Amazon's head of hardware. "The last thing I want is being absorbed into an author's story, and get an uplevel notification for Angry Birds." Reading is about focus, about falling out of your life and into a story, and so the Kindle is about those things too.
E-Reading Revolution
When the Kindle first launched, Amazon had about 90,000 titles in its ebook catalog. As of this writing, the Kindle Store lists 5,902,458 different titles. After years of fighting with publishers, stiff competition from Barnes & Noble and other competitors, and countless different pricing schemes, Amazon is now the overwhelming leader in the space. According to AuthorEarnings, which studies the book market, Amazon accounts for more than 80 percent of ebook sales in the US. Even all Amazon's competitors put together amount to a fly fighting a hurricane. And the Kindle itself has become effectively the only e-reader worth considering. What, you're gonna buy a Kobo?
Amazon won the ebook market in a landslide, though it's not clear how large a prize that really is. Some data shows ebook sales declining as print makes an unexpected surge, while other studies say digital reading continues to grow steadily. What's crystal clear is that ebooks won't unseat print anytime soon. People like the feel of a book, like the sense of place they get from holding the opened pages in their two hands, like the way they look on a coffee table. The Pew Research Center found that 65 percent of US adults said they'd read a print book in 2016, out of 73 percent who said they'd read a book at all. The only thing that will kill print books is when people stop reading altogether.
There is one part of people's reading habits has changed dramatically over the last few years. That same Pew study found that people were nearly four times as likely to read a book on a tablet in 2016 as they had been five years earlier. They were also nearly twice as likely to read on their phones, and reading on a laptop or desktop PC spiked as well. All three are now more popular than reading on an e-reader.
As reader habits has changed, so has Kindle. At first, all these new platforms posed a bit of a dilemma for Amazon. If it made the Kindle service widely available on every platform and device, as customers wanted, it risked cannibalizing its own device. Limp says there was a debate over what to do, but also says it didn't last very long. "You can't tell them where they want to read," he says. "They're going to tell you where they want to read, and you have to be there." So they built apps for everybody's phones and tablets, and even the Chrome browser.
More recently, Amazon has invested in combining its Audible ebooks with the Kindle service, so users can flip between reading and listening with the touch of a button. Limp says the company is also looking for ways to make Alexa's voice more natural, the better for long-form book listening. And they hope the assistant can be the greatest literary tool on the planet. "Until we can answer every question that a customer would want to ask about a given book or given author, we're not there yet," he says.
For a decade, Amazon's relentlessly offered new ways for people to read books. But even as platforms change, books haven't, and the incompatibility is beginning to show. Phones and tablets contain nothing of what makes a paperback wonderful. They're full of distractions, eye-wrecking backlights, and batteries that die in a few hours. They also open up massive new opportunities. On a tablet, books don't have to consist only of hundreds of pages set in a row. They can be easily navigable, endlessly searchable, and constantly updated. They can use images, video, even games to augment the experience. "The Kindle’s aura of bookishness was the modern equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible’s aura of scribalness," Nicholas Carr, the author and media scholar, wrote in 2011. "It was essentially a marketing tactic, a way to make traditional book readers comfortable with e-books. But it was never anything more than a temporary tactic." Carr should have been right, but six years later nothing's really changed.
The next phase for the digital book seems likely to not resemble print at all. Instead, the next step is for authors, publishers, and readers to take advantage of all the tools now at their disposal and figure out how to reinvent longform reading. Just as filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh are experimenting with what it means to make a "movie" that's really an app on a totally interactive device with a smaller screen, Amazon and the book world are beginning to figure out what's possible when you're not dealing with paper anymore.
Screen Time
In 2010, the design firm IDEO made a concept video called "The Future of the Book" that imagined several screen-based reading experiences. One invited you to participate in the book by texting with characters, going to important locations, and even helping write the narrative. A year later, Sony introduced the Wonderbook, a Playstation-connected thing that turned a hardback book into an augmented-reality surface. Google's been experimenting with Visual Editions, its "un-printable books," for the last couple of years. Over the years plenty of companies have come and gone from the App Store, trying to make text into something more exciting. Right now, chat stories are all the rage, turning a story into a series of fast-paced text messages, revealed one tap at a time.
The challenge for all these new formats, though, is that there's no larger system that helps people make, sell, and consume them. "One of the things that holds you back from developing a highly interactive, graphic, endless storytelling interface is that we don't have the infrastructure for that," says ays Sean McDonald, the executive editor at publishing house Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and the head of its experimental FSG Originals imprint. "It takes a different amount of effort than words on a page, and different skillsets."
As a result, most of the experimentation in the book industry happens within existing categories. McDonald and others are playing with timing, releasing a book faster or slower than usual, and with length and size. They're also trying new things in audio, which has proven the most fertile ground for new ideas about reading. "Digital audio is one of the big growth stories in publishing, so there's definitely a lot of room for people to start exploring creatively," McDonald says. He notes as an example Robin Sloan's new book, Sourdough (2017), for which Sloan actually wrote the music that plays such a critical role in the book and sprinkled it throughout the audiobook. There's also George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which was adapted was a full-fledged drama, with 166 different voices narrating the story. But one is still a book, and the other is still an audiobook.
If Amazon wanted to, it could with a single act bring a new form of book into being. That's because Amazon has more or less vertically integrated the entire book industry within its walls, building a complete reading universe of its own making. Lots of authors now write books especially for Amazon, which readers find on Kindle Unlimited and Prime Reading, read on their phone and tablet, listen to through Audible or your Echo, and then talk about on Goodreads. Amazon has tools that help you write your book, format the manuscript, design the cover, file the right metadata, publish to the right places, and get paid the right amount. Want to make a comic book, a kids' book, or a textbook instead? Amazon can help there too.
Over the years Amazon has tried to experiment with form a bit, with the not-quite-book-length Kindle Singles and the periodically-delivered Kindle Serials. If you look carefully, there are even a few Choose Your Own Adventure-type books lurking in the store as well, but they're third-rate romance and fantasy stories you've never heard of. And Amazon's executives express an interest in continuing to push the medium forward in new and interesting ways.
But so far, Amazon's contributions have stayed on the margins. It's easy to highlight and share passages, look up words, identify characters. It's tried to make books easier to make, easier to sell, easier to find, easier to read. As for the books themselves, Amazon's overwhelming commitment seems to be not evolving the book but preserving it. The original vision hasn't changed a bit. In 2008, Bezos wrote in a note to shareholders that modern technologies have "shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans." Kindle, however, "is purpose-built for long-form reading," he wrote. "We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools."
Bezos also wrote in that letter that he was "convinced books are on the verge of being improved upon," and that there was no guarantee Amazon would be the one to lead that charge. A decade later, books haven't changed much at all. And only Amazon has the clout to really drive what could and should come next. Not by making pixels just like paper, but by embracing the difference. # # #
[David Pierce has been a senior writer at Wired since 2015; prior to that, he worked at The Verge and PC Magazine. Pierce received a BA (government and media studies) from the University of Virginia.]
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
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