Luckily for kids and their back doctors, this is no longer necessary.
And on adopting digital books, you no longer need to haul boxes of 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?
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 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.
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 in this same sense of protecting privacy, digital books are the best thing that ever happened to pornography, with the possible exception of the brown paper bag.