Burning the Page: The eBook Revolution and the Future of Reading

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.

The drawback with pornography is that images can look awful on eInk, no matter how much you dither with them. The original Kindle’s 2-bit eInk screens, for example, only had four shades of gray, and of these, one was white and one was black, which didn’t leave much for nuance. Whether you’re trying to render a picture of the sky or of a woman’s thigh, it’s hard to get pornography to look good with only four colors. Depending on your stance on pornography, that’s either something wrong with eInk or something you’re glad e-readers don’t do well. Even with the Kindle2’s sixteen colors, digital pornography still sucked, although it did improve somewhat.

Clearly, there was potential for improvements in content beyond pornography. There was a whole universe of books to adapt to e-reading—including atlases, dictionaries, comics, travel guides, and textbooks!

Shortly after the Kindle2 launch, I talked to Kindle’s senior management and then took on the role of Kindle’s technology evangelist. I would be half evangelist and half product manager and focus on ebooks alone. A product manager is something like a practical futurist, someone who can think nine months into the future and see a product through from inception to launch. I would be able to dream big and make long-range improvements.

I was refreshed and revitalized, ready for a new chapter of my life at Amazon. I was on a plane every week as Amazon’s first technology evangelist. I would meet with publishers in their midtown Manhattan offices to explore new ebook ideas together. Then I’d be off to India or the Philippines to see how conversion houses were making ebooks and to tell them some of what I’d learned during my time at Amazon, feeding them bits of information that would make them work better and faster and cheaper for us. I was doing my small part with each player in this ebook ecosystem to move it forward and to find ways that publishers could spend less and convert more, so readers could have more ebooks to enjoy.

I saw colossal, warehouse-sized machines that stripped books of their spines in seconds, like wood chippers for books, but that were as precise as a doctor’s scalpel. At a technology park in India, I also saw an experimental array of quarter-million-dollar machines that were like animatronic spiders. They were used for nondestructive scanning, the high-end way to digitize content—unlike the cheaper method of hacking pages with machetes. The machine lifted a book and carefully turned its pages one by one so they could be photographed and digitized. Those animatronic spiders were so delicate that I would have trusted them to hold a baby and change its diaper.

Being an evangelist gave me a chance to engage with publishers worldwide, and I got to see the scramble firsthand as publishers adjusted to digital books. Some publishers reacted better than others; some, in fact, were downright revolutionary.

Ultimately, I think everyone who worked in those early years of ebooks was changed by the experience. We weren’t working just for paychecks. We were learning and growing. We changed from one month to the next, sort of like taking a paintbrush and a bucket of water and drawing your self-portrait on a hot sidewalk. You’d maybe be able to sketch half of your face before the water you’d already painted would start to fade and evaporate, so you’d never quite be finished.

We’re all sidewalk portraits painted with water on a hot summer’s afternoon. And there’s a holy fervor and zeal than you can see in the eyes of the ebook revolutionaries who are working as insiders, whether they work at the publishers or the retailers or as independent software vendors and sideline pundits. It would be one thing perhaps if we were merely part of the MP3 or digital video revolution or part of TV in its early test-pattern era. But (and you know this already) there’s something sacred about books. They’re humanity’s lifeblood, these inky words and smudges that make their way into our minds. Ultimately, books are a small but essential part of the human condition. They are tapestries of birdsong, magic, and intrigue, in equal parts.

As an evangelist, I was interacting with publishers and ebook revolutionaries outside of Amazon. I was moving the ebook revolution forward by improving ebook content. I was venturing beyond Amazon’s walled garden to plant seeds like a Johnny Appleseed for ebooks, never quite certain how these seeds would grow but certain they needed to be planted. And then those seeds would grow and bear fruit that would find its way back to Amazon and to the Kindles and ebooks I loved. This new role was a first for me and for Amazon, with its highly secretive culture. For Amazon, this move was revolutionary.

Bookmark: Burning Books

On July 12, 1562, Diego de Landa, the Bishop of Yucatan, started a horrific bonfire. Hundreds of Mayan scrolls were tossed into the fire, as well as thousands of sacred images. Diego de Landa believed himself to be in the moral right, having found what he called “superstition and lies of the devil” in the books. He had gained the trust of the Mayans, gained access to their sacred books, but then with the might of the Spanish conquistadors behind him, he burned them all. Only three full scrolls of the formerly vast Mayan empire remain now, plus charred portions of a fourth.

The Nazis too are known to have burned books. Jewish and “degenerate” books—including volumes by Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway—were raided from libraries by Nazi youths and consigned to flames. At least 18,000 distinct titles were identified as officially objectionable, and untold hundreds of thousands of copies were burned in well-attended public events.

Book burning has historically been a tool used by tyrants in authority to penalize or marginalize detractors. Do you think America was more enlightened? Not really. Even though we value free speech in America, we have at times taken a tyrannical approach. During the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, it was decided that “material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc.” would be removed from libraries and burned. In fact, this was enacted by presidential decree.

It’s harder to burn ebooks.

Burning an e-reader will cause you to choke from the fumes, so don’t do it. And while digital book burning won’t happen, a more subtle version might arise. The handful of retailers who control the distribution of digital books could choose not to make one or more books available for any number of reasons.

Consider the time, shortly before the iPad launched in 2010, when Amazon decided to yank the “buy buttons” from books and ebooks published by Macmillan, one of the top U.S. publishers, to protest new pricing terms Macmillan wanted. Amazon removed tens of thousands of books in all.

It was one of the brazen moves Amazon sometimes makes. Pulling the “buy button” from items in the store means that it’s not possible to click on any button to actually order a given book shown on the Amazon web page. You can see the book—it’s tantalizingly close—but you can’t buy it. As long as the buy buttons are gone, orders can’t be placed.

It’s a money-losing proposition for Amazon and any business partner it decides to yank the buy buttons from, but contractually, it’s something Amazon is allowed to do. But why would the online retailer want to do that? It’s like Amazon is shooting itself in the foot. Perhaps Amazon had previously shot itself in the foot so many times that it thought it had bulletproof shoes. Or enough scar tissue not to mind.

Yanking the buy button is a punitive gesture that Amazon has been known to pull with publishers, like a tyrannical Byzantine emperor who holds ultimate sway over his court. It’s a powerful threat in business negotiations. But Macmillan wasn’t a mere vassal to some king’s court. That publisher is an empire unto itself in the publishing world. The move to yank books backfired when publishers became enraged and retaliated as a unified group. Ultimately, Amazon needed the books and the support of publishers and its customers, so the company backed down.

Some choices are tough, but leaders are judged by the decisions they make when given tough choices. I believe the Amazon leaders made a mistake. An ethical retailer has a social contract to uphold with its consumers. It’s not appropriate for a retailer to yank or censor content based only on its internal machinations, its policies for better profit margins.

Thankfully, I believe this example shows the power of public outrage to enact change. It’s possible to shame a corporation that has done something wrong or, at the very least, to make a company aware that it should have been more careful about its actions. The same public outrage was hurled at Apple when it released a “Baby Shaker” app that rewarded users who could shake a virtual baby to death. Developed by another company, this iPhone app is grisly and should never have passed Apple’s QA standards. Mercifully, public outcry caused it to be pulled from the app store in less than a day.

No company has perfect QA policies or editorial standards for what content to shelve in its store. Companies need to listen to consumers, read what people post on product reviews, and monitor the blogosphere. But reciprocally, companies need to have strong enough standards in place to avoid smear campaigns and acts of undeserved bullying. Knowing when to remove or reinstate content requires an ethical balance and strong sensibilities.

It’s a tough editorial choice: though a given book may be objectionable, where do we draw the line when it comes to free speech? And more importantly, who is drawing the line? What moral or literary sensibilities do the executives of Amazon have? What about the retailers at Barnes & Noble or Google or Apple? You have to ask yourself whether you trust these men (because they are mostly men—and mostly white men, at that). Do you trust them to make decisions for you on what books you’re permitted to buy?