The Way the World Works

by Baker, Nicholson

  But e-romances don’t fully explain the Kindle’s success—and the kind of devotion that it inspires. To find out more, I went to Freeport, Maine, to talk to Eileen Messina, the manager of the British-imports store just across from L.L. Bean. Messina, a thoughtful, intelligent woman in her thirties, has all kinds of things on her Kindle, including Anna Karenina, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, books by Dan Simmons and Abraham Verghese, and the comic novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. She is so happy with it that she has volunteered, along with about a hundred others, to show it off to prospective purchasers, as part of Amazon’s “See a Kindle in Your City” promotion. Her Kindle was in her purse; she’d crocheted a cover for it out of green yarn. In the past, she said, she’d taken books out of the library, but some of them smelled of smoke—a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment. I thanked her and bought some digestive biscuits and a teapot, and then I went next door to Sherman’s Books and Stationery. I asked Josh Christie, who worked there, to recommend a truly gut-churningly suspenseful novel. I was going to do a comparison between the paperback and the Kindle 2 version. Christie suggested The Bourne Identity and a book by Michael Connelly, The Lincoln Lawyer—one of his colleagues at the shop swore by it. I bought them both.

  Outside, I sat on a bench near L.L. Bean, eating an ice cream, and tried to order The Bourne Identity wirelessly from the Kindle Store. But no—there is no Kindle version of The Bourne Identity. What?

  What else was missing? Back home, I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of The Jewel in the Crown. There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no Flaubert’s Parrot, no Remains of the Day, no Perfume by Patrick Suskind, no Bharati Mukherjee, no Margaret Drabble, no Graham Greene except a radio script, no David Leavitt, no Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, no Pynchon, no Tim O’Brien, no Swimming-Pool Library, no Barbara Pym, no Saul Bellow, no Frederick Exley, no World According to Garp, no Catch-22, no Breakfast at Tiffany’s, no Portnoy’s Complaint, no Henry and Clara, no Lorrie Moore, no Edwin Mullhouse, no Clockwork Orange.

  Of course, the title count will grow. It will grow because not-so-subtle forces will be exerted on publishers and writers. Below the descriptions of all non-Kindle books for sale on Amazon, there’s a box that says, “Tell the Publisher! I’d like to read this book on Kindle.” If you click it, Amazon displays a thank-you page: “We will pass your specific request on to the publisher.”

  But say you’ve actually found the book you’re seeking at the Kindle Store. You buy it. Do you get what’s described in the catalog copy? Yes and no. You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596–1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel Tequila Truth.

  When you buy the Kindle edition of Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring, rather than the paperback version, you save three dollars and fifty-eight cents, but the fetching illustrations by Lorenz of a greylag goose and its goslings walking out from the middle of a paragraph and down the right margin are separated from the text—the marginalia has been demarginalized. The Kindle Store offers The Cheese Lover’s Cookbook & Guide, from Simon & Schuster. “The picture of the Ricotta Pancakes with Banana-Pecan Syrup may just inspire you enough to make it the first recipe you want to try,” one happy Amazon reviewer writes. She’s referring to the recipe in the print edition, the description of which is reused in the Kindle Store—there’s no pancake picture in the Kindle version.

  Yes, you can save nine dollars if you buy the Kindle edition of The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges, and Corals, by Jaap A. Kaandorp and Janet E. Kübler—it’ll cost you $85.40 delivered wirelessly, versus $94.89 in print. New Scientist says that the book is “beautifully, if sometimes eccentrically, illustrated with photographs, drawings and computer simulations.” The illustrations are there in the Kindle version, but they’re exceedingly hard to make out, even if you zoom in on them using the five-way clicker switch, or “control nipple,” as one Kindler called it. An award-winning medical textbook titled Imaging in Oncology (second edition) is for sale in the Kindle Store for $287.96. Tables are garbled. The color coding—yellow for malignancy, blue for healthy tissue—has been lost. Arrows pointing to shadowy tumors become invisible in the gray. Indeed, the tumors themselves disappear.

  One more expensive example. The Kindle edition of Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems, an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many callouts and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible. “You Save: $1,607.80 (20%),” the Kindle page says. “I’m not going to buy this book until the price comes down,” one stern Amazoner wrote.

  Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. The company uses an encoding format called Topaz. (Topaz is also the name of a novel by Leon Uris, not available at the Kindle Store.) There are other e-book software formats—Adobe Acrobat, for instance, and Microsoft Reader, and an open format called ePub—but Amazon went its own way. Nobody else’s hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon’s permission. That means you can’t read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle. (You can, however, read Kindle books on the iPod Touch and the iPhone—more about that later—because Amazon has decided that it’s in its interest to let you.) Maybe you’ve heard of the Sony Reader? The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion, but forget it. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony machine, or on the Ectaco jetBook, the BeBook, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook, the Hanlin V2, or the Foxit eSlick. Kindle books aren’t transferable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

  On the other hand, there’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

  Instead of ink on paper, there’s something called Vizplex. Vizplex is the trade name of the layered substance that makes up the Kindle’s display—i.e., the six-inch-diagonal rectangle that you read from. It’s a marvel of bi-stable microspheres, and it took lots of work and more than 150 million dollars to develop, but it’s really still in the prototype phase. Vizplex, in slurry form, is made in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a company called E Ink. E Ink layers it onto a film, or “frontplane laminate,” at a plant in western Massachusetts, and then sends the laminate to Taiwan, where its parent company, P.V.I. (which stands for Prime View International, itself a subsidiary of a large paper company), marries it to an electronic grid, or backplane. The backplane tells the frontplane what to do.

  The prospect of Vizplex first arose in the mind of a scientist, Joseph Jacobson, who now works at M.I.T.’s Media Lab and avoids interviews
on the subject of e-paper. Sometime in the mid-nineties, according to a colleague, Jacobson was sitting on a beach reading. He finished his book. What next? He didn’t want to walk off the beach to get another book, and he didn’t want to lie on the beach and dig moist holes with his feet, thinking about the algorithmic beauty of seaweeds. What he wanted was to push a little button that would swap the words in the book he held for the words in some other book somewhere else. He wanted the book he held to be infinitely rewriteable—to be, in fact, the very last book he would ever have to own. He called it “The Last Book.” To make the Last Book, he would have to invent a new kind of paper: RadioPaper.

  At M.I.T., Jacobson and a group of undergraduates made lists of requirements, methods, and materials. One of their tenets was: RadioPaper must reflect, like real paper. It must not emit. It couldn’t be based on some improved type of liquid-crystal screen, no matter how high its resolution, no matter how perfectly jewel-like its colors, no matter how imperceptibly quick its flicker, because liquid crystals are backlit, and backlighting, they believed, is intrinsically bad because it’s hard on the eyes. RadioPaper also had to be flexible, they thought, and it had to persist until recycled in situ. It should hold its image even when it drew no current, just as paper could. How to do that? One student came up with the idea of a quilt of tiny white balls in colored dye. To make the letter A, say, microsquirts of electricity would grab some of the microballs and pull them down in their capsule, drowning them in the dye and making that capsule and neighboring capsules go dark and stay dark until some more electricity flowed through in a second or a day or a week. This was the magic of electrophoresis.

  In 1997, Jacobson and his partners joined with Russ Wilcox, an entrepreneur from Harvard Business School, to form E Ink. “When we first got involved with this, people were, like, ‘Oh, you’re trying to kill the book,’” Wilcox said recently, by telephone. “And we’re, like, ‘No, we love the book.’ Unfortunately, we fear for its future, because people just expect digital media these days. The economic pressures are immense.”

  The newspaper industry, Wilcox figured, was a 180-billion-dollar-a-year business, and book publishing was an additional 80 billion. Half of that was papermaking, ink mixing, printing, transport, inventory, and the warehousing of physical goods. “So you can save a hundred and thirty billion dollars a year if you move the information digitally,” he told me. “There’s a lot of hidden forces at work that are all combining to make this sort of a big tidal wave that’s coming.”

  E Ink ran into some trouble after 2000, when there was less venture capital to go around. The company’s direction changed slightly. It wouldn’t make the Last Book, but it would sell other manufacturers the means to do so. The company’s models were Coca-Cola—which grew great by selling the syrup and letting others do the bottling—and NutraSweet. “Imagine you’re NutraSweet,” Wilcox said. “The cola industry is already up and running. There’s no way you’re going to make your own diet cola and compete head to head. So what do you do? You sell the ingredient.”

  E Ink’s first big, visible customer was Sony. Sony bought a lot of Vizplex display screens for its Reader, the PRS-500, which Howard Stringer, Sony’s C.E.O., introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2006, standing in front of a photograph of the electrophoretic version of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Sony set up an online bookstore, and sold its machines at Borders Books and the Sony Store, and, later, at Target, Costco, Staples, and Walmart. Sony is, of course, a deft hand at handheld design. Its Reader was very good, given the Etch-A-Sketch limitations of the Vizplex medium, but it lacked wirelessness—you had to USB-cable it to a computer in order to load a book onto it—and Sony had no gift for retail bookselling. Hundreds of thousands of Sony Readers have sold—and you can now read five hundred thousand public-domain Google Books on it in ePub format—but, oddly, people ignore it.

  Along with Sony, several other companies rushed to develop Vizplex-based devices. Amazon was one of them. Since 2000, Amazon had been offering various kinds of e-books (to be read on a computer screen), without success. “Nobody’s been buying e-books,” Jeff Bezos told Charlie Rose in November 2007, at the time of the Kindle 1 launch. The shift to digital page-turning hadn’t happened. Why was that? “It’s because books are so good,” according to Bezos. And they’re good, he explained, because they disappear when you read them: “You go into this flow state.” Bezos wanted to design a machine that helped a reader achieve that same flow—and also (although he didn’t say this) sold for a premium, fended off Sony’s trespass into the book business, and tied buyers to Amazon forever.

  Thus Bezos’s engineers—including Gregg Zehr, who had previously worked for Palm and Apple—ventured to design a piece of hardware. “This is the most important thing we’ve ever done,” Bezos said in Newsweek at the time. “It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it.”

  But the Kindle 1 wasn’t an improvement. Page-turning was slow and was accompanied by a distracting flash of black as the microspheres dived down into their oil-filled nodules before forming new text. “The first thing to note is that the screen isn’t like reading actual paper,” Joseph Weisenthal wrote on paidContent.org. “It’s not as bright and there is glare if the light is too direct.”

  The problem wasn’t just the Vizplex screen. The Kindle 1’s design was a retro piece of bizarrery—an unhandy, asymmetrical Fontina wedge of plastic. It had a keyboard composed of many rectangular keys that were angled like cars in a parking lot, and a long Next Page button that, as hundreds of users complained, made you turn pages by accident when you carried it around. “Honestly, the device is fugly,” a commentator named KenC said on the Silicon Alley Insider: “The early 90s called and they want their device back.” The comments on Engadget.com were especially pointed. “It looks like a Timex Sinclair glued to the bottom of an oversized 1st gen Palm device,” Marcus wrote. “That’s some ugly shit,” Johan agreed. “Was this damned thing designed by a band of drunken elves?” Jerome asked. CB summed it up: “It is truly butt ugly. wow. ugly.”

  Undeterred, the folks at Amazon gave the Kindle 1 a hose blast of marketing late in 2007. To counter the threat, Sony boosted its advertising for the PRS-500, but it couldn’t compete. Amazon sold out of Kindles before Christmas of 2007. Then came another lucky break: Oprah announced on TV that she was obsessed with the Kindle. “It’s absolutely my new favorite, favorite thing in the world,” she said. “It’s life-changing for me.”

  Reading the one-star reviews for this device, which accumulated throughout 2008, must have been a painful experience for Amazon’s product engineers. Yet they soldiered on, readying the revised version—smoothing the edges and fixing the most obvious physical flaws. They made page-turning faster, so that the black flash was less distracting, and they got the screen to display sixteen shades of gray, not four, a refinement that helped somewhat with photographs.

  Despite its smoother design, the Kindle 2 is, some say, harder to read than the Kindle 1. “I immediately noticed that the contrast was worse on the K2 than on my K1,” a reviewer named T. Ford wrote. One Kindler, Elizabeth Glass, began an online petition, asking Amazon to fix the contrast. “Like reading a wet newspaper,” according to petition-signer Louise Potter.

  There was another problem with the revised Kindle—fading. Some owners (not me, though) found that when they read in the sun the letters began to disappear. Readers had to press Alt-G repeatedly to bring them back. “Today is the first day when we have had bright sunshine, so I took the Kindle out in the sun and was dismayed to see that the text (particularly near the center of the screen) faded within seconds,” one owner, Woody, wrote. Another owner, Mark, said, “I went through 4 kindles til I found a good one that doesn’t fade in the sun. It was a hassle but Amazon has a great CS.” (CS is customer service.)

  Amazon remains fully committed to electrophoresis. “We think reading is an important enough activity that it deserves
a purpose-built device,” Bezos told stock analysts in April. Heartened by the Kindle 2’s press, Amazon introduced, in mid-June, a bigger machine—the thumb-cramping, TV-dinner-size Kindle DX. The DX can auto-flip its image when you turn it sideways, like the iPod Touch (although its tetchy inertial guidance system sometimes sends the page twirling when you don’t want it to), and on it you can view—but not zoom on or pan across—unconverted PDF files. Some engineer, tasked with keyboard design, has again been struck by a divine retro-futurist fire: the result is a squashed array of pill-shaped keys that combine the number row with the top QWERTY row in a peculiar tea party of un-ergonomicism. Pilot programs have arisen at several universities, including Princeton, which will test the Kindle DX’s potential as a replacement for textbooks and paper printouts of courseware. The Princeton program is partly funded by the High Meadows Foundation, in the name of environmental sustainability; for Amazon, it’s also a way to get into the rich coursepack market, alongside Barnes & Noble, Kinko’s, and a company called XanEdu.

  The real flurry over the new DX, though, has to do with the fate of newspapers. The DX offers more than twice as much Vizplex as the Kindle 2—about half the area of a piece of letter-size paper—enough, some assert, to reaccustom Web readers to paying for the digital version of, say, the Times, thereby rescuing daily print journalism from financial ruin. “With Kindle DX’s large display, reading newspapers is more enjoyable than ever,” according to Amazon’s website.