Read Online Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading by Jason Merkoski - Free Book Online
Authors: Jason Merkoski
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books with you every time you move to a different home. Gone are the days of duct-taping shoddy cardboard boxes from U-Haul or liquor stores and still watching your books explode onto the sidewalk when movers accidentally drop the over-heavy boxes. As the heir to the Stone Age pot, the cloud makes moving easier for those of us with large holdings of books.
A digital book weighs less than the whisker of a fly. So there’s no strain with the digital. You don’t have to haul digital books in cardboard boxes or book bags, so digital books are easy on the shoulders, and on the eye. But clearly, I’m a believer in the digital. Are there drawbacks to ebooks, in this sense? Absolutely. The sheer massiveness and weight of books adds a kind of gravitas to a home. Books in a home say that someone literate lives there, someone with specific sensibilities and tastes. A home with fully digitized music and ebooks and other media seems barren to me, like a minimalist Bauhaus detention cell, someplace unfit for friends and family. But that’s me. What do you think of books as decorations or as hefty physical objects to be lugged about?
http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/4.html
Improving Perfection: Launching the Kindle2
Improving the Kindle meant more than making better hardware, although I didn’t realize that immediately.
As a program manager, I got to fly into any building, any country, and do whatever it took to get my product shipped. A part of the job was making sure that people were on schedule, but another part was more punitive, requiring me to check out their dirty laundry. I had to be the eyes and ears of the Kindle executive team. And to do this, I had to know more about the Kindle than almost anyone except Jeff Bezos.
Being Kindle’s program manager let me see how decisions were made all across the Kindle organization. I participated in meetings with teams all over the globe, as well as with the vice presidents and Jeff in Seattle. I had an opportunity to see and influence what was happening with Kindle hardware and ebooks in this position, and by being with Kindle leaders, I learned a lot about Kindle and the Amazon business. I could see the personalities that shaped Kindle.
For a year and a half, I found myself flying to Silicon Valley every week, because Lab126 was where Kindle2 was being built.
The Kindle2 was an improvement in design compared to the original. It was lighter, and the eInk was crisper, with more shades of gray and more nuance. The device fit better into your hand while reading, and it had some cool features, like being able to read books out loud to you. It was also much cheaper, even though it had more features.
With Kindle2, almost everything was reinvented from scratch. Even things as seemingly insignificant as the box it shipped in.
The original Kindle package was a very maximalist presentation. It was designed to look like a hefty white book. You opened the book and found the Kindle inside, as well as its leatherette holder and a special sleeve for the power supply, all neatly arranged. On the outside of the package, and imprinted in rubber on the underside of the Kindle, you’d see a wonderful explosion of symbols, like someone had thrown a hand grenade into a type foundry.
But for the second Kindle, the package got reduced to a simple cardboard box with no markings at all on the outside, nothing to indicate there was a Kindle inside. And yet when you opened it, you’d find a beautiful Kindle sitting on a plastic tray, like a pearl in an oyster on the half shell. The packaging was simple and functional. In fact, with its nested layers of plastic, culminating in a strange dishlike tray, the Kindle2 packaging had all the aesthetic charm of a TV dinner.
Amazon moved from an ornate package design to a simple cardboard box that could be sent by UPS or FedEx and left on your porch without anyone knowing what was inside it, the same kind of box that could be stocked on the shelves at Best Buy or
A digital book weighs less than the whisker of a fly. So there’s no strain with the digital. You don’t have to haul digital books in cardboard boxes or book bags, so digital books are easy on the shoulders, and on the eye. But clearly, I’m a believer in the digital. Are there drawbacks to ebooks, in this sense? Absolutely. The sheer massiveness and weight of books adds a kind of gravitas to a home. Books in a home say that someone literate lives there, someone with specific sensibilities and tastes. A home with fully digitized music and ebooks and other media seems barren to me, like a minimalist Bauhaus detention cell, someplace unfit for friends and family. But that’s me. What do you think of books as decorations or as hefty physical objects to be lugged about?
http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/4.html
Improving Perfection: Launching the Kindle2
Improving the Kindle meant more than making better hardware, although I didn’t realize that immediately.
As a program manager, I got to fly into any building, any country, and do whatever it took to get my product shipped. A part of the job was making sure that people were on schedule, but another part was more punitive, requiring me to check out their dirty laundry. I had to be the eyes and ears of the Kindle executive team. And to do this, I had to know more about the Kindle than almost anyone except Jeff Bezos.
Being Kindle’s program manager let me see how decisions were made all across the Kindle organization. I participated in meetings with teams all over the globe, as well as with the vice presidents and Jeff in Seattle. I had an opportunity to see and influence what was happening with Kindle hardware and ebooks in this position, and by being with Kindle leaders, I learned a lot about Kindle and the Amazon business. I could see the personalities that shaped Kindle.
For a year and a half, I found myself flying to Silicon Valley every week, because Lab126 was where Kindle2 was being built.
The Kindle2 was an improvement in design compared to the original. It was lighter, and the eInk was crisper, with more shades of gray and more nuance. The device fit better into your hand while reading, and it had some cool features, like being able to read books out loud to you. It was also much cheaper, even though it had more features.
With Kindle2, almost everything was reinvented from scratch. Even things as seemingly insignificant as the box it shipped in.
The original Kindle package was a very maximalist presentation. It was designed to look like a hefty white book. You opened the book and found the Kindle inside, as well as its leatherette holder and a special sleeve for the power supply, all neatly arranged. On the outside of the package, and imprinted in rubber on the underside of the Kindle, you’d see a wonderful explosion of symbols, like someone had thrown a hand grenade into a type foundry.
But for the second Kindle, the package got reduced to a simple cardboard box with no markings at all on the outside, nothing to indicate there was a Kindle inside. And yet when you opened it, you’d find a beautiful Kindle sitting on a plastic tray, like a pearl in an oyster on the half shell. The packaging was simple and functional. In fact, with its nested layers of plastic, culminating in a strange dishlike tray, the Kindle2 packaging had all the aesthetic charm of a TV dinner.
Amazon moved from an ornate package design to a simple cardboard box that could be sent by UPS or FedEx and left on your porch without anyone knowing what was inside it, the same kind of box that could be stocked on the shelves at Best Buy or
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