Read Online Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading by Jason Merkoski - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jason Merkoski
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Target. It was practical, but soulless.
Although this packaging was more cost-effective, there was no artistry to it. I’m a big believer that industrial design is a sign of the times, and I’m not alone in this. Andy Warhol would look at department stores like they were museums. I love looking back at 1920s typewriter tins and 1930s talcum powder cans, industrial designs from eras when they still showed zeppelins and aeroplanes flying overhead as signs of their times.
If someone looks back a hundred years from now at our current industrial designs, they’ll perhaps see our culture as being obsessed with digging through layers of plastic and cardboard to get at the pricey prize inside. They’ll perhaps misjudge us and accuse us of not having any artistic inclinations. But they shouldn’t be too harsh on us just because the CEOs of our largest tech companies were frugal. Because inside these boxes were some of the most incredible devices in history.
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Almost everything improved with the next-generation Kindle. By the time we were finished, the Kindle2 was truly an incredible device, with features we were sure would amaze the next generation of ebook readers. But the way there was paved with endless reinventions and trials that left all of us sleepless and stressed. As the head of it all, as we moved ever closer to launch, I started to sense myself being pulled closer each day to a breaking point I had never felt before.
The day we finally launched Kindle2 was almost a sleepwalking dream for me. I remember Seattle being shut down by a snowstorm that day, and I remember how buses careened into one another. One slid off a bridge and into Puget Sound. Cars can’t drive up the steep Seattle hills in snow, so many were simply abandoned until the snow melted.
It was February 2009, a rough time to launch. I came in at 4:00 a.m. again and saw starlight again through holes in the clouds. After the launch, I was numb to news about the number of Kindles we sold. Twenty hours later, I climbed back into bed and slept for a week.
In fits of wakefulness, I thought about how Kindle lacked nuance, style, fonts, and things like multimedia. How great it would be if you could have a book about the history of music with actual musical excerpts! These seemed like great ideas to me, but I wondered if they were a bit too ambitious for Kindle. Because by now, Kindle’s success made new ideas paradoxically difficult, as if everyone was walking around on stiletto heels on a glass floor, careful not to run, not wanting to take the wrong risks.
I also realized that there was no outreach to the outside world—to publishers especially. I thought Kindle should have evangelists, like Guy Kawasaki once was for Apple, out there in the magazines and on the trade show floors talking about Kindle products. Not just as a paid shill, but as someone who used the products and believed in them with a fervor that approached religious fundamentalism. And that’s when the energy started to come back to me.
I realized that it was one thing to improve the Kindle as a device, but another thing entirely to improve the content. Over the last year and a half of effort, nothing had been done to differentiate the ebooks themselves. They were still the same as before. No worse, but no better.
The only category of books that I think the second-generation Kindle improved on was pornography, of all things. This is because the number of shades of gray on the Kindle2 doubled. Porn sells well in any format, whether magazine or book, but it sells especially well in ebook form. Amazon prefers not to sell pornography, but that doesn’t stop many users from buying it elsewhere and loading it onto their Kindles. With the Kindle, you could download pornography to your device and read it anywhere, even on a subway, without anyone guessing that you were not reading the latest bestseller. Digital books excel at protecting a reader’s privacy while he or she reads. And
Although this packaging was more cost-effective, there was no artistry to it. I’m a big believer that industrial design is a sign of the times, and I’m not alone in this. Andy Warhol would look at department stores like they were museums. I love looking back at 1920s typewriter tins and 1930s talcum powder cans, industrial designs from eras when they still showed zeppelins and aeroplanes flying overhead as signs of their times.
If someone looks back a hundred years from now at our current industrial designs, they’ll perhaps see our culture as being obsessed with digging through layers of plastic and cardboard to get at the pricey prize inside. They’ll perhaps misjudge us and accuse us of not having any artistic inclinations. But they shouldn’t be too harsh on us just because the CEOs of our largest tech companies were frugal. Because inside these boxes were some of the most incredible devices in history.
» » »
Almost everything improved with the next-generation Kindle. By the time we were finished, the Kindle2 was truly an incredible device, with features we were sure would amaze the next generation of ebook readers. But the way there was paved with endless reinventions and trials that left all of us sleepless and stressed. As the head of it all, as we moved ever closer to launch, I started to sense myself being pulled closer each day to a breaking point I had never felt before.
The day we finally launched Kindle2 was almost a sleepwalking dream for me. I remember Seattle being shut down by a snowstorm that day, and I remember how buses careened into one another. One slid off a bridge and into Puget Sound. Cars can’t drive up the steep Seattle hills in snow, so many were simply abandoned until the snow melted.
It was February 2009, a rough time to launch. I came in at 4:00 a.m. again and saw starlight again through holes in the clouds. After the launch, I was numb to news about the number of Kindles we sold. Twenty hours later, I climbed back into bed and slept for a week.
In fits of wakefulness, I thought about how Kindle lacked nuance, style, fonts, and things like multimedia. How great it would be if you could have a book about the history of music with actual musical excerpts! These seemed like great ideas to me, but I wondered if they were a bit too ambitious for Kindle. Because by now, Kindle’s success made new ideas paradoxically difficult, as if everyone was walking around on stiletto heels on a glass floor, careful not to run, not wanting to take the wrong risks.
I also realized that there was no outreach to the outside world—to publishers especially. I thought Kindle should have evangelists, like Guy Kawasaki once was for Apple, out there in the magazines and on the trade show floors talking about Kindle products. Not just as a paid shill, but as someone who used the products and believed in them with a fervor that approached religious fundamentalism. And that’s when the energy started to come back to me.
I realized that it was one thing to improve the Kindle as a device, but another thing entirely to improve the content. Over the last year and a half of effort, nothing had been done to differentiate the ebooks themselves. They were still the same as before. No worse, but no better.
The only category of books that I think the second-generation Kindle improved on was pornography, of all things. This is because the number of shades of gray on the Kindle2 doubled. Porn sells well in any format, whether magazine or book, but it sells especially well in ebook form. Amazon prefers not to sell pornography, but that doesn’t stop many users from buying it elsewhere and loading it onto their Kindles. With the Kindle, you could download pornography to your device and read it anywhere, even on a subway, without anyone guessing that you were not reading the latest bestseller. Digital books excel at protecting a reader’s privacy while he or she reads. And
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