slippery slick
Yesterday, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos decided to launch the biggest consumer product flop of recent time. Palm almost made the same mistake earlier this year, but quietly pulled their product launch off of newstands with a simple apology. In addition, Microsoft is holding out for their latest holiday line-up of Zunes, potentially waiting for some revenue and refusing to admit defeat. Amazon is making a bold, bold move by announcing a product that can replace an ancient experience.
The Amazon Kindle, a device that brings books to a digital format with super high-quality resolution and possibly unparalleled ease-of-use, is looking for a market that may not exist for another hundred years, at a time when we can no longer spare the trees on this planet to the paper industry. Ignoring their approach to DRM with these eBooks, I believe there are a few aesthetic factors that play into the wide and long-standing success of writing and reading on paper.
The tactile feedback of turning pages, whirring through pages with a snap of your thumb, and even getting insignificant paper cuts is entirely absent from eBook solutions. Kindle’s video, on the Amazon product page, points out that you can curl up on your couch to read just like before. I beg to differ. Who wants to rely on an LED-like display - aka, the type that reverse contrast in certain lights - that requires a bit of adjusting so that the room or natural light does not reflect into your eyes? And who doesn’t love falling asleep while reading a book, only to discover upon waking that you had magically kept your page bookmarked with your fingers?
I read entirely too frequently on computers, both textbooks and all sorts of papers. And then there’s the internet: blogs, newspapers, blogs, blogs, blogs. It should be clear: books have their place. With millennia of years of experience behind them, books are just as old and as accepted as the major religions. And I would propose that reading from books is just as natural an experience as is the various forms of religious worship. Even more, tangible books have just as much of a history and foundation as do the great architectural monuments of the human ages. A manuscript from an old Chinese dynasty shows just as much maturity as does the Great Wall; a King James Bible recalls the grand cathedrals that speak of both majesty and of fear. Books aren’t going anywhere.
It’s just shocking that Amazon, the proliferator of online book sales, would try to reverse millennia of a product’s success. What brazen directors put their vote down on this? Sometimes, releasing a new modern product before the holiday season is what brash CEOs need to show them how deluded their dreams of grandeur really are.
November 20th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
i just saw this earlier today while browsing for a compendium of ee cummings poetry. i was just as surprised as you were— i think the only technological gadget that might possibly be functional as a reading device would be a multitouch iTablet the size of a penguin great ideas volume. which would of course be a video/audio/photo player as well.
November 21st, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I really dig your “biggest consumer product flop” critique.
The Kindle will likely make it to this list in no time.
Full disclosure: I did buy or use #1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 15, 18. :-/