Companies with more humanistic sensibilities than Amazon will win the e-reader war by making the experience more human, more engaging. Children’s ebooks should be playful and adult ebooks thoughtful, soulful, or entertaining. Companies should create opportunities for interesting, unexpected experiences to happen. Perhaps digital insects scuttle across the page if you’ve had the book open for too long without turning the page. Perhaps in a thriller, as you read the ebook, you’re startled by the unexpected sound of a gunshot when you turn the page to a crucial passage. Though this can’t easily be done in hardware, you can create an engaging experience in software and make it soulful instead of awful.
Let’s face it: there’s still something emotionally bereft about a Nook or a Kindle. Perhaps over time the industrial design will become more human, more like the “illustrated primer” described in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Or like the book Penny used in the Inspector Gadget TV series, a digital book with actual pages that could be turned. Better design will be part of the rebirth of reading. But to get there, we must be as ready to innovate in design and soul as we are in technology and cost.
The company that does this best is Apple. They blew away everyone’s preconceptions about e-readers when they launched the iPad.
The iPad story is a great one, but I wasn’t a part of it. I didn’t have to put in the grueling hours or countless meetings on product development. It’s one of those stories that we get to read and enjoy. One of those stories where you say that the author did an amazing job. And Steve Jobs did.
Apple understands a lot, including great product design. The iPad is a multifunction device, unlike other e-readers that are dedicated to reading. Dedicated e-readers are as sharp as steak knives in doing what they’re supposed to do, which is let you read books. The iPad is more like a Swiss Army knife—it can cut the steak and uncork a wine bottle, and there’s even a toothpick to use when you’re done eating! It’s got it all.
Sure, it’s got its flaws. For example, there’s the headache the iPad gives you when you try to read in direct sunlight, since it doesn’t have a nonreflective eInk screen. But overall, Apple did an amazing job in creating a product that actually feels like a book. The iPad has the same heft as a book. It’s got the same-sized screen as the average printed book, and it’s as responsive as a book when you turn the page. You don’t have to wait half a second like you do with eInk readers. It’s truly, as Apple is fond of saying, a magical device. A device consumers love.
That should be no surprise, because as one of America’s favorite companies, Apple has some of the most famous lovemarks of all.
A “lovemark” is the concept that a brand isn’t enough. That brands are dead and products are commodities, so to make a product succeed, it needs the love that comes with fads and the respect that comes with established brands. If you’ve got this love and respect, you’ve got a lovemark—something that combines intimacy and mystery and sensuality.
A great example of a lovemark is the Swiss Army knife. Every time you open it, you find a new tool or screwdriver or spoon or toothpick or who knows what inside, prompting surprise and delight and gratification. It’s gratifying in the same way the Kindle was when it first came out. With a Kindle, you could download a book in less than sixty seconds. (It still stuns me today that you can do that.) Even the name “Kindle” connotes something mysterious. What’s more intimate than the experience of curling up with a book to read? Amazon got a lot right with the Kindle that made it into a lovemark.
And what’s even more amazing is that Amazon created a lovemark by focusing on the product, not the ad campaign.
The first round of Kindle commercials emphasized the lovemark, imaginatively making books come alive, in a way that was at once amateurish and approachable. But later commercials have seen a return to Amazon’s retail roots. In one, a man and a woman are sitting by a pool in Las Vegas. He’s reading a print book and she’s reading a digital book on her Kindle, and she cheerfully explains what the Kindle does and how it’s cheaper than a pair of designer sunglasses, pulling no punches when it comes to commoditizing the Kindle. There’s no lovemarking here.
Such commercials treat Kindles as mere commodities with price points that serve utilitarian needs. Admittedly, it’s the kind of commercial you expect from a wholesale retailer of goods, but it’s not the kind of commercial that speaks to the soulful, mysterious aspect of books themselves. I suspect this disparity turns some would-be consumers away from Kindle.
Barnes & Noble’s commercials for the Nook, on the other hand, are intimate and sensuous. One follows a beautiful little girl through childhood and adolescence and adulthood, and you get into her mind as she reads. The commercial stays true to the way that reading simultaneously transports you to new places and comforts you where you are now. At the same time, the commercial factually communicates that the Nook is an e-reader with a wireless connection and all sorts of content available—something the original Kindle commercials never quite conveyed.
The Nook is an under-appreciated genius of a lovemark. The team at Barnes & Noble got a lot right with the Nook, and from a lovemark perspective, I think they created a more intimate product than any other dedicated e-reader. The rubber back behind the Nook is soft and pliable—not hard metal like the later Kindles—making it sensual and intimate. Barnes & Noble also recreated the engraved faces of famous authors from their stores and used them as Nook screensavers. It’s brilliant, not just because it makes reading more intimate, but also because it solidifies the Barnes & Noble brand itself.
And I admit that I love Barnes & Noble and other physical bookstores. An hour spent browsing a bookstore is a day well spent.
It’s hard to love Amazon, though. Not the way we love Apple or a bookstore. At best, you respect Amazon for its obsession to detail, for its cheap prices, and for how it achieves the promised arrival dates for its products. You may not love Amazon, but you trust it as a brand. It’s sort of like the Post Office. It’s hard to love the Post Office, but you never worry much about whether your package will arrive. Although mishaps happen, the Post Office has a great track record.
So for Amazon to launch the Kindle was like the Post Office launching a new e-letter product, a clipboard-sized plastic gadget with a screen on which you can read your letters. You trust Amazon as much as you trust the Post Office, and you absolutely want to read content as soon as it’s available. The devices save you trips to the mailbox or the bookstore, and they’re excellent adjuncts to your leisure time or business reading. But nobody ever declares themselves a Post Office fanboy and rushes to “unbox” the latest book of stamps.
I should explain that a fanboy is a person who’s so smitten by a brand that he’s often the first in line to buy the brand’s newest gadget. A fanboy will often rush home to film the “unboxing” of his new gadget. If you’ve never heard of unboxing, which is the process of unwrapping a new tech gadget while filming it, I encourage you to search this word on YouTube and watch any of the hundreds of thousands of results.
Unboxing is a new voyeuristic phenomenon that’s erotic and technical at the same time. It’s tech pornography. It’s as if we desire total carnal knowledge of our consumer electronics goods. The sheer number of unboxing videos on gadget websites and YouTube is a testament to how obsessed we are.
The fanboys and gadgeteers of our culture are starved for sexy e-readers.
We’re a culture that fetishizes technology, and the way people film the unboxing of gadgets is similar to how people ogle lingerie models on the fashion runway every year. How long will it be before we start running new product launches like fashion shows, displaying the new electronic goods on runways with sultry music, paparazzi snapping photos, and the CEO or vice president reduced to someone shilling the product like it’s next season’s lingerie, a one-handed appreciation of Silicon Valley’s newest creation?