The death of the serious reader
Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom:
For serious readers, Franzen said, “a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”. “Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change,” he continued. “Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”
The Serious Reader — much like the Serious Music Lover and the Cinephile — is dying.
It was Colonel Ebook, on the subway, with the Kindle.
Still…
One wonders if Franzen isn’t lamenting so much the loss of the “serious reader” as the loss of the status quo: Readers who don’t actually do much reading, but who save their money for those bestsellers (cough, Freedom, cough) which pique their interest two or three times a year, because a massive marketing campaign tells them it’s time to open up their wallet and splurge on the next big thing.
That’s the sort of “serious” market which will always favor the Jonathan Franzen’s of the world. It’s not particularly condusive to the breakout author, the self-published, the diamond in the rough, or, you know, the rebirth of an industry gasping for breath.
This is the point where I planned to make some sort of “why so serious” crack about Franzen’s luddite-like views on the emerging ebook industry, but the more I think about it, the more obvious the answer becomes.
I guess I’ll skip the rhetorical question.
Surprise and Delight
It’s been quite an ordeal, but a Kindle Fire finally made its way into my hands.
I’ve been playing with it off and on for a couple days, now, and — it’s pretty much everything you’ve read in any of the reviews you’ve read. No more, no less.
Which is to say, a lot of people have already nailed its strengths (relatively few) and weaknesses (many).
The one caveat I’d add is that many of the weaknesses are rooted in software, and that’s the sort of thing that can be fixed, at least.
So, instead of rehashing what’s been said elsewhere, I’m going to touch on something that hasn’t been beaten to death, and that’s the idea of surprise and delight.
The underlying premise of surprise and delight is that you run up against a problem, and as you’re doing what you think should happen, it actually happens, or it happens in a way you didn’t anticipate, and you think to yourself: “Wow, I can’t believe someone thought of that. Genius!”
iOS is filled with surprise and delight moments. Perhaps the best example is the ability to type a period with one continuous motion — without lifting your thumb — even though the period key isn’t on the “home” keyboard screen. Uninterrupted flow. One click where three might otherwise be necessary.
In my experience, Amazon’s devices don’t seem to contain many surprise and delight moments, if they contain any at all.
As has been discussed, there’s no dedicated hardware home button on the Kindle Fire.
Instead, each app has a touch-based home button. That’s fine, and I think it’s something I’ll eventually get used to and it’s something people who haven’t used an iOS device might not even need to get used to.
With that said, the home button is situated in the bottom-left of every app. This is a real problem when you’re holding the device one-handed with your right hand, because it’s nearly impossible to reach the home button while doing so.
There are any number of reasons why your free hand might not be available for button pressing, but the least tawdry (and most important) reason is that some people don’t have left hands.
The obvious solution, then, is to simply put the home button in the bottom-middle of every app. Boring, but perfectly acceptable.
The surprise and delight solution is that the Kindle Fire somehow knows which hand it’s being held by, and accommodates for that preference (or disability) by moving the home button to an accessible corner.
Suddenly, the user thinks: “Holy shit, that’s genius, I can’t believe Amazon thought of that.”
Except, no one thinks that, because Amazon’s Kindle Fire isn’t filled with surprise and delight moments.
That doesn’t mean Amazon won’t sell millions of Kindle Fires.
What it might mean is that people will buy them, but they may not find much of an urge to actually use them, once the novelty wears off. Or, they may not find much reason to ever buy another tablet device from Amazon. Or, maybe no one ever talks about the Kindle Fire in a way that makes other people excited to own one as well.
Surprise and delight is the stuff of fanboy devotion. It’s the foundation of customer loyalty. It’s why Apple can lag way behind Android in units sold but still dominate mobile browsing statistics.
You can hate me for being an iOS fanboy, or call me a shill, but whether you like it or not, Amazon, at least, wants me to be an Amazon fanboy — Bezos wants to command a loyal army of Amazon fanboys — and he’s not going to get that through sheer volume.
“Meh” doesn’t build loyalty, or sell services.
Thoughts on Building Lendle, a Kindle Book Lending Site
About a month ago, Carolyn (my wife) came up with a really great idea that, at the time, I was pretty sure no one had implemented yet: What if there were a way to connect with other Kindle owners in order to share lendable books?
I immediately called Jeff Croft — Carolyn and I were arriving at the mall to do some shopping — and within a few hours, we were discussing the early outline of what was to become Lendle. (Beyond Jeff, Kent Croft has been doing a lot of research and Carolyn has been great as a sounding board for new ideas.)
Last week was the beginning of a short beta period. Yesterday, we launched Lendle:
What’s in a name?
As is often the case when starting a new venture, we had more trouble settling on a name than on any technical issues involved with building Lendle. Some of us loved one idea, but couldn’t be sold on another. Others were too obvious and not fun enough. Some sold the process, but were analytical and cold. We also wanted to avoid a direct reference to Amazon’s Kindle for two reasons: 1) To avoid bringing down the wrath and scrutiny of Amazon and 2) to keep the service open to a possible Nook expansion in the future.
EDIT: Since posting this, Amazon has brought the hammer down on Kindle Lending Club, forcing them to rebrand. They’re now simply booklending.com.
So, Lendle.
I’m not sure that it was a universally loved choice, but as with iPad, I can’t imagine calling it anything else, now. Also, it was my choice. So there’s that.
Picture this.
We went through several versions of the logo, including an early example I put together as a sort of proof of concept using the name lendlists. (Jeff didn’t like the word lists, so it didn’t last long.) The final version of the logo is actually a pretty direct descendant of that initial concept, in that I wanted something that would call to mind an e-reader device — nothing too specific — with a screen, but which also felt “bookish”.
Jeff was relatively well into the site development process when I decided I wasn’t happy with the logo we’d settled on for Lendle: It lacked visual punch, and the L portion of the logo was too obviously an L. Kind of cheesy. This had the side-effect of making the entire logo taller than I was comfortable with, even though that height called to mind the shape of a book. So, I squished everything down, making the L and bookmark elements into a perfect square, and I also added some subtle texture throughout.
Nook?
Second only to coming up with a name, we were internally divided about whether or not to include Nook books as a lendable option. This was ultimately settled once we realized that Barnes and Noble simply does not offer an API which would allow developers to easily collect the information necessary to build a useful lending site.
We’d rather have a great Kindle-only site than a mediocre all-inclusive site.
A crowded field.
We discovered pretty quickly that not only were we not the only person to think of this idea, at least one site had beat us to launch: The Kindle Lending Club had been around for a couple months, having started out as a Facebook group. (They’re still listed as a beta site.) To date, there appear to be 3 or 4 other lending services springing up and we realized very quickly that we’d have to differentiate ourselves in several ways:
Lendle. The easiest, fastest, fairest, and best way to lend and borrow Kindle™ books.
- Easiest: Some of these other sites lead borrowers to books which simply aren’t lendable, and there’s no way to know this until after you’ve tried to borrow them. None of the other sites list prices (for buying) or the number of lendable books available. We’ve attempted to do everything we can to make the process of lending and borrowing books as easy as possible.
- Fastest: Some of our early feedback involved someone getting too many books all at the same time. This person also mentioned having the opposite problem at one of our competitor sites, in that she was often having to wait too long between lends. We want searches to be fast, results to be relevant, and the process of lending to be smooth. We’ll never be able to ensure that every book request will result in a lend, but we hope to get them to you more often, and faster.
- Fairest: Someone asked us about this, as he was curious to know how we could claim to be the “fairest” lending site given that all sites are subject to the same set of Amazon lending policies. Our goal is to do everything we can to foster a community which is as happy to lend books as it is to borrow. Lendle won’t work unless everyone is willing to lend. We think we have a good system in place to accomplish this, and we’ll tweak it as necessary. It’s worth mentioning that at least one other site is charging people (as an option) to borrow books.
- Best: I don’t think we’d have built Lendle if we didn’t think we could do it better than everyone else.
Wrapping it up.
Everything else has come pretty quickly. We’ve got a lot of ideas (think social) and a lot of tweaks to nail down (Amazon’s API can be pretty touchy) but the idea we started with is pretty much what we unveiled on launch day. To date, lendlers have added 564 (lendable) books, primarily on word of mouth through Twitter mentions. We’ve lent dozens and — as a note to publishers — sold more books than we’ve lent.
We couldn’t be happier with our early feedback. Most of the criticisms, and there haven’t been many, seem to be focused on something we can’t control: Amazon’s restrictions regarding lending. We expect these to loosen over time.
Our sincere hope is that it quickly becomes clear (to Amazon, to publishers, and to authors) that we’re not only fostering buzz about books by taking advantage of a great lending feature, but we’re also selling books and, eventually, that this realization will lead more publishers to come on board.
We’re keeping our fingers crossed.
Follow @lendleapp on Twitter!
The Next Web: The iPad is Going to Kill the Kindle
Alex Wilhelm, writing for The Next Web:
If you follow the ebook market you were likely stunned this June when Steve Jobs claimed to have captured 22% of the electronic book market overnight with the release of iBooks and iPad. Many of us who watch this market with careful eyes were leery of the numbers that Jobs was tossing around, they sounded too good to be true.
- If you “follow the ebook market” you’re a fucking dork. Yeah. I said it, and I’m not sorry I said it.
- Assuming you’re a fucking dork, were you really “stunned” by Jobs’s claim? Did your mouth literally hang wide open, as you stared blankly at the words that you could not bring yourself to believe? Was it like a punch to the gut?
- Steve Jobs did not make that claim, and if you think he did, you’re not following the ebook market very closely. Dork status: Revoked.
How do I know Steve Jobs didn’t make the claim? An investigation? A Google search? Did I call Steve Jobs up, because I can do that, and ask him?
No, no, no. I only call Steve as a last resort. I didn’t even have to do any of the work myself. Before I copied and pasted the little snippet from TNW’s article, the word “claim” was a “hyperlink” to this Gravitational Pull article:
What Steve Jobs actually said about iBooks market share
As you might have guessed, the word “actually” (which I helpfully emphasized) is a hint that there’s something more to the story. The “something more” was this:
I’ve got a few stats today for you. In the first 65 days, users have downloaded over 5 million books and that is about two and half books per iPad which is terrific. The other interesting thing is the five of the six biggest publishers in the US who have their books on the iBookstore tell us that the share of ebooks now that are going through the iBookstore now is about 22 percent. So iBooks market share now of ebooks from five of these six major publishers is up to 22 percent in just about 8 weeks. And, as we ship more iPads, that number is just going to keep going up and up and up and we’re really thrilled with it.
So, what Steve Jobs “claimed” was merely what he was told by the five biggest publishers who publish on the iBooks platform. The 22% figure is not a reflection of the “total ebook market” and it wasn’t pulled out of Jobs’s ass—it’s a reflection of the sales of those specific publishers.
Yes, I’m aware that a slide from Jobs’s presentation caused some initial confusion, because it read “22% share of total ebook sales” but the entire point of the Gravitational Pull article was to provide context for that slide via the actual words that came out of Jobs’s mouth. Apple doesn’t provide a live feed of its events, so getting a transcript took some time. Time which was used by many in the blog-o-press to flip the fuck out.
Why is it, then, that TNW is trotting out an author who self publishes (one guy whose name is not A. Nick Dotal, alas) to somehow prove false a claim Apple never actually made, even while linking to an article which proves he never made the claim?
Because they can, and no one will call them on it. Because the internet sucks.
On the other hand, the article is written by the kind of guy who would end on something like this:
So much for iPad killing Kindle. I called it.
Way to go, Nostradamus. Where can everyone else get a crystal ball that peers into the obvious?
At any rate: The iPad hasn’t even finished mashing the buttons on the fatality it’s laying down on netbooks and as everyone who follows the technology mortal combat circuit knows, killing things is an art, not a race.
“Get over here!”
Marco.org: The Kindle update
People often assume that the iPad’s backlit LCD screen is an advantage over the Kindle because it doesn’t need a separate light to be read at night. But the Kindle’s e-ink screen is actually more versatile for different lighting: not only does it work in bright sunlight just as well as paper, but I find it easier to read a Kindle at night with a small lamp on than with an iPad in the dark, even using dark mode and low brightness. And I often can’t use those same nightstand or headboard-clip lamps with the iPad to light the area less harshly because the iPad’s screen is too reflective. The iPad is also too heavy to comfortably hold in most ways for long periods, and its wide range of software capabilities can be distracting. When you’re holding a Kindle, all you can do is read. When I read on an iPad, I always want to go check my email. And my feeds. And Tumblr. And Twitter. Just for a minute.
To reiterate: I agree that the Kindle isn’t going anywhere. I think it’s great. If I didn’t have an iPad, I’d have a Kindle.
As to Marco’s points:
The question of eye comfort, I think, is largely subjective. As I said before, I’ve had no issues with comfort or with the brightness of the iPad’s LCD screen, even in a pitch black room. Even if I had a Kindle, though, I doubt I’d read outside. That’s just me. I realize plenty of people do enjoy direct sunlight and I accept that attempting to do so with an iPad would be an exercise in futility.
As for weight, Marco’s claim that “the iPad is also too heavy to comfortably hold in most ways for long periods” is, in my experience, inaccurate. The iPad is heavier, yes, but it’s pretty similar to a typical-length hardback book, which is also quite a bit heavier than a Kindle. So, I suppose it’s fair to say that the Kindle is aimed at the paperback crowd? Either way, it doesn’t matter what I’m reading, I don’t hold it out in front of me without some form of support: I either rest it on my leg or on my stomach, depending on the position I’m in.
I don’t consider a multi-day hiking trip without access to an AC adapter to be all that typical, but I suppose I agree that in that very specific example, a Kindle would outperform an iPad. I could similarly argue that a need to stay connected to the outside world during a 5 day trip through China while carrying as little as possible would rule out a Kindle completely. In that unique situation, an iPad would be the superior reading choice.
The part about his inability to focus on the task at hand (reading a book) speaks more to Marco than it does the iPad, I think. When I’m reading at night, I turn the volume all the way down and that takes care of any bleeps and bloops that might otherwise distract me and I guess it’s just sheer willpower which prevents me from abandoning A Wrinkle in Time in favor of checking my email when/if my iPad vibrates. It’s just not an issue, for me.
I stand by my earlier statement: Each device has plusses and minuses, but I’ve not had any issue with becoming completely engrossed in a book on my iPad. Weight hasn’t been a factor. The battery hasn’t been a factor. The screen hasn’t been a factor. If, like an awful lot of people, you primarily read books in your house, the iPad is pretty great as a reading device.
If you don’t care about the non-book features of an iPad, or if reading outdoors in direct sunlight is a major factor in your purchasing decision, go with a Kindle.
I would also add (not directed at Marco) that if you’ve never read a book on an iPad (and especially if you’ve never read anything on an iPad) you probably shouldn’t claim that the LCD causes extreme (or any level of) eye strain.
Why (Dan Lyons Claims) the iPad hasn’t killed the Kindle.
Kessel says people have realized that the iPad might be good for a lot of things, but isn’t really the best device for sustained reading over several hours. It’s too heavy, for one thing—about a pound and a half compared with 10 ounces for the Kindle, which can be held in one hand, like a paperback. As Kessel puts it, in a bit of an understatement, “The Kindle and the iPad are very different products.”
Another problem is that the iPad’s bright LCD screen can be tiring on your eyes compared with Kindle’s black-and-white “electronic paper.” The Kindle’s screen also works better in bright sunlight. Kindle has better battery life—it can run up to two weeks on a charge, if you keep the wireless switched off. That compares with 10 hours for an iPad. Plus, with Kindle you have no contract and no monthly fee, and you have wireless access in 100 countries—a nice feature for travelers.
Emphasis mine.
The weight issue hasn’t really been much of a factor for me. I agree that it’s heavier, but I have doubts that this is a deciding factor in a significant number of purchasing decisions. I actually read with mine in Apple’s iPad case, which adds even more weight, and I’ve never really had an issue. I don’t hold it up in the air, though. It’s either resting on my stomach/chest while I read in bed, or it’s resting on a table. I do the same thing with regular books, which are never fully supported by my arms alone. (I just did a quick weight check of my iPad vs. a hardcover copy of Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, and didn’t notice much of a difference.)
As for the “too bright” LCD, I wanted to wait until I’d read some books on my iPad before weighing in, and now that I have (Snow Crash and Artemis Fowl) I feel like I can say that I’ve not noticed any issues with eye strain. I can’t compare to a Kindle—I’ve never read a book on one—but I can compare an iPad against something which shouldn’t cause any screen-based eye strain at all: Regular old-fashioned books printed on paper. My eyes feel just fine, thank you.
People are making the eye-strain claim because it sounds plausible, and because they’ve seen other people make the claim, but I’ve never seen scientific studies which prove out the claim. If consumers are coming to the conclusion that the Kindle would cause less eye-strain than an iPad, I’d argue that said conclusion is often based on having read the unsupported claims of journalists like Dan Lyons, rather than on experience.
It’s also worth noting that I can read my iPad in a dark room, but cannot do so with a Kindle. I can also read full color books. And any Kindle book. And comic books. In other words, for every subjective reason Lyons comes up with to explain the continued success of the Kindle, I can come up with one in favor of the iPad. This isn’t to say that the Kindle doesn’t have meaningful advantages, it’s to say that each device has different advantages.
I agree that the Kindle and the iPad are very different, and that those differences will always sway some consumers one way and others another, but my guess for why the iPad hasn’t “killed” the Kindle is pretty simple: It’s only been on the market for around six months.
Only an idiot would think the Kindle was going to disappear in that amount of time.
