Kindle’s Not Working

I originally drafted a post about the Kindle about a month ago but I thought I was being mean – so I let it sit and stew for a while. The release of the Apple 3.0 and some recent comments by Jeff Jarvis has made me dust it off with a quick update:

So there it is sat on my desk with a dead battery – 8 weeks after I bought the second generation ebook reader direct from Amazon. Unused, unloved, unnecessary. I feel like I’ve wasted my money.

My reaction to the whole genre: surely ebooks need a cigarette moment? Ebook manufacturers like Amazon seem to be too busy trying to make faster pipes when people want cigarettes. They seem obsessed with creating shinier pipes when we might actually be looking for an alternative way to get our reading fix that matches our modern lifestyle. If they want to deliver real innovation in the reading space then maybe companies shouldn’t be trying to create a faster book.

Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t work for me because it doesn’t fit my reading, sharing and working habits. Over the last five to six years the way I consume text, imagery and other content has changed. Like the most of you I spend time everyday reading content across newspapers, magazines, blogs and other news feeds. I use that news (from 850 sources). I cut extracts, I send links, I copy images, I share it to Twitter and Facebook, I just let stories hang around deep in my open tabs possibly to be looked at before. And I want to do all this in as little time as possible.

Text to me is not static like the words on a book – it’s fluid, maliable, transferable and more than often temporary.

Sure there’s some copy and paste option but the Amazon Kindle doesn’t offer me freedom to work in a modern way. It wants me to keep smoking my pipe and read like we grew up reading. But now that I’ve learned how to smoke, I want the content-fix on my terms: Rapid, simple, shareable and social.

Jeff Jarvis added some similar comments recently about the Kindle in a post on his blog:

Online, news has been freed from its packaging. Indeed, that is a key architectural underpinning of the web itself: content is separated from presentation. The same text and media can be fed into a web page, or into an iPhone app or an RSS feed. Substance parts company with style. All of which makes me wonder whether we will ever see the iPod moment for newspapers.

News Corp, Hearst and other publishers are reportedly working with manufacturers to develop flat electronic substitutes for their beloved paper. Their assumption is that we are pining for a familiar, nostalgic presentation of content. They hope that when electronic news reminds us of print news – that is, when editors can once more package the world for us – we’ll again be loyal to and perhaps pay for their work and brands.

Sorry, but I think the opposite is occurring. We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall. News is spread in the speed of a tweet. The half-life of a scoop’s value is lessened but the value of links grows.

Of course, the argument is that Kindle is supposed to be for a certain type of reading – so you don’t have to carry those books and magazines. First of all, if we’re really honest with ourselves: we weren’t really carrying that many books before were we? And when we did, did we really mind if someone saw us carrying the thing on our commute on the London Underground? Wasn’t it actually a badge of pride in some ways. A sign that you had the brains to fill them with words each day.

Secondly, there are many long form books we’ve stopped reading for a reason. We don’t need them anymore. Personally, I can’t stand reading business books – I just don’t need to waste my life scanning static and dating words – words written and rewritten with an overt agenda to improve the author’s image and brand awareness. Ponder this: we all spend hours scanning business news and opinion each day in this office – but not a single one of us will take a business book from the pile we’ve been sent.

Because Amazon thinks the wrong way about innovation, the company believes it has done a good job when it hasn’t. The latest iPhone really reminds us that Amazon is parading its little ebook reader in the emperor’s new clothes. The difference in sophistication between the two portable gadgets is immense. Kindle is Dotcom 1 technology – iPhone is web 3.0 fluidity.

Having said all this I do think that several of our readers seem to like the Kindle – and I do applaud Amazon for playing in the digital reading space – I just think that they need to piggyback technology people are using rather than spend too much time creating something people don’t want.

Kindle