Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

by Merkoski, Jason

  The day of the meeting, I made it to Jeff’s office a little early, before he had arrived from another meeting elsewhere. I looked through his windows and tried to understand the way he saw things. He had a telescope in his office and pictures of his kids on the wall. It was a small office, actually, dominated by a giant work desk with tidy stacks of papers.

  I imagined him looking out through his telescope at his far-flung workers, spread out as they were through Seattle in different office buildings, and I imagined him perhaps aiming his telescope at his fulfillment centers in Kentucky or Nevada, yearning to see the incessant shipments of everything from books to Beanie Babies, DVDs to diapers.

  Protected by his executive assistants and sequestered in a tower in Amazon’s headquarters, Jeff’s office was a little like a walled garden. It’s an appropriate metaphor, because what Jeff and I discussed that day, and on days and weeks to follow, had to do with Kindle’s own walled garden.

  When you’re reading about companies like Amazon and Apple, you often come across the “walled garden” metaphor. I want to explain it to you with a visual metaphor, because I’m a visual guy.

  Imagine the wall of a medieval fortress. There might even be a moat around it. It’s a tall wall, made of stone—a wall to keep the enemy out. There’s one way into and out of the fortress, and that’s over a drawbridge that comes clanking down to let you across the moat, through a hole in the wall, and into the city inside. You can think of the city as being everything good that the wall is supposed to be protecting—all the people and gardens inside. This wall protects you from the dragons outside, from the Vandals and Huns and would-be conquerors.

  In tech terms, the walled garden is the arrangement of software and hardware and file format that makes it almost impossible to get to what’s inside unless you go over the drawbridge, the officially sanctioned way in.

  Look at the iPod. It relies on a proprietary format, a proprietary way of getting content into and out of the device. And yet it’s successful because the walled garden is tended so carefully.

  Amazon has a similar walled garden for the Kindle. The only way you can buy a book and read it on the Kindle, according to Amazon’s walled garden approach, is to buy the book from the Kindle store. Are there other ways of reading a book on a Kindle? Yes, but they’re equivalent to the Vandals and Huns laying siege to the city by running ladders up its ramparts and then climbing those ladders with axes and grappling irons. In modern tech terms, this kind of attack is piracy. Or if not outright piracy, it’s that gray area related to digital rights management (called DRM)—the restrictions used to keep people from copying or sharing ebooks for free.

  DRM works against most would-be pirates because it’s often too difficult and exasperating to break. Difficult, but never impossible. It’s a game of cat and mouse, and there’s always a genius who outsmarts the current DRM that’s out on the market. And then the software people at Amazon and Apple and elsewhere respond with patches and updates to make their walls more secure. Apple, for example, releases about ten updates a year to its iTunes software, and most of them include anti-piracy measures.

  As ethical readers, you and I don’t need to worry much about what DRM means, and it’s not likely to affect us. But because occasional readers do try to pirate ebooks, we’re all penalized by the increased cost of ebooks and the inconvenience in copying them to other devices. That process should be easy, but often it’s painstaking. I think everyone agrees that it’s sad that we have to live in a world with DRM, but it’s a consequence of the technical nature of ebooks.

  Likewise, there’s another technicality with ebooks called “file format” that we don’t have to worry about with printed books. There’s only one format for a printed book, and that’s paper. You can pick up any printed book and read it, as long as you know the language. The format of the book is no barrier to reading.

  But imagine having to wear special glasses to read books by different publishers. Imagine you needed one pair of glasses to read Random House books and another to read Simon & Schuster books. Each pair of glasses would be sensitive to the invisible inks each publisher used. Well, that’s what it’s like with ebooks now.

  Amazon has its own ebook format, and Adobe makes another ebook format called ePub. There are many formats on the market. If you live in Japan and want to read ebooks, for example, you have two incompatible ebook formats to choose from.

  Formats make things difficult. There’s no way I can take a book I bought for my Kindle and copy it onto a Sony device—not unless I use some technical wizardry, some illegal tools that can be downloaded from the shady side of the internet. And most consumers aren’t going to learn how to use these obscure wizard’s tools. Like you, they’ll be confronted with a choice of e-readers, which locks you into the format of the books you’re able to read. And once you’re locked into the format, you’re locked into what kinds of books you can read. You may find that a book you want to read is only available for Kindle, but if you have another device, then you can’t purchase the book until it eventually becomes available on that device.

  The Kindle has its own proprietary format. And it’s an old format, one that dates back to the 1990s and applications written for PDAs. Now, I worked at Amazon, and I know the Kindle format inside and out. I couldn’t have told Jeff this at the time—but as much as I hate to say this, I believe the Kindle file format was limited and made for poorer-quality ebooks.

  Here’s how to think about ebook file formats: think about their fidelity to printed books. When we speak of music, we often speak in terms of lo-fi or hi-fi, that is, low or high fidelity. The same terms are appropriate for ebooks. Think of a print book as the gold standard for quality. A book in the Kindle format would be able to reproduce most of the text (though not all the accent marks and sometimes obscure symbols) and is often able to reproduce the margins or the page breaks in the print book.

  I estimate the Kindle format to have achieved something like 50 percent fidelity compared to print. It’s on the lo-fi side. But I think formats that launched in the years after Kindle, such as the one being used in both the Nook and iPad, are more hi-fi, because they allow designers to do typographically compelling high-design flourishes, as well as embed fonts and complex equations into the ebook. These formats approach 90 percent of print fidelity.

  I’m a book lover, and I cared a lot about improving the file format when I was on the Kindle team. But to Jeff and others, file format was just one of many issues that needed to be taken into consideration in launching Kindle. And besides, in the early days, most people on the Kindle team didn’t worry about these lo-fi and hi-fi details, because Kindle was targeted at readers buying genre fiction like romance books and sci-fi and bestsellers. Even in print, these kinds of books aren’t stylistically nuanced.

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  I dealt with crises of all stripes and sizes as we prepared to launch Kindle, but all the issues eventually got solved, one by one.

  Before I knew it, there was just one day left before Kindle launched.

  We don’t know what it was like for Gutenberg in the hours before he unveiled his Bible and the secrecy was finally lifted. Until then, was he furtive, fearful that any secret would be stolen and copied? We don’t know how he or his workers felt. Sure, we know that pies were introduced in the 1450s, and we can imagine Gutenberg going outside with his workers that day and serving them celebratory slices of quail pie and glasses of plum gin or something special from his larder.

  Some of his workers were no doubt hungover from the night before, drunk in a corner and being licked by the dogs after celebrating their victory, but maybe others could see how important the printed book would be. Because truly, Gutenberg had launched something at once commonplace and innovative—a humble Bible, but one set in beautiful, printed type. He unwittingly launched the Protestant Reformation, as well as a shift in reading so profound that we’re feeling aftershoc
ks of the original tremor even now, centuries later.

  Five hundred years later, on the eve of the ebook revolution, I settled in for sleep the night before we launched the Kindle. But sleep was impossible; there was the nagging worry that I had surely forgotten someone or something important. I kept getting out of bed to check my email. I finally managed to get an hour’s rest before being awakened by a team in India looking for help with some last-minute problems.

  After helping them, I stayed awake in bed with prelaunch insomnia, looking out through the window and thinking. Tomorrow, once Kindle was launched, things would never be the same again for anyone. Amazon had a lot of power, and ebooks would surely capture people’s imaginations.

  I stayed awake through the early morning hours of November 19, 2007, wondering about the Kindle. What would ebooks mean for literacy, for reading, for the book itself? Would the Kindle hasten the decline of the book—a decline that had started with radio and movies and had accelerated with TV and video games and the internet—or would it instead revitalize books and breathe fresh life into them?

  Such questions still keep me up at night. I have answers for some of my old questions, but now I struggle with new ones. On the morning of the Kindle launch, I looked through the bedroom window until I had to get dressed and go to work at 4:00 a.m. There was a rare break in the gloom-clouds over Seattle, and I could see a few stars, bright enough to be planets or maybe omens.

  The next few hours saw me running the show in Seattle, while Jeff Bezos was on stage in New York announcing the Kindle. The launch was timed to the minute; I had a clipboard and a stopwatch. I was like the mission-controller in the movie version of Apollo 13, the one with the sweater around his shoulders who made sure each team was “go” for launch.

  We didn’t want anyone saying, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” which is why the launch was scripted and tested in advance. The script was flawless. It was a dream launch. We got the store and services running at almost the exact moment when Jeff said, “Introducing Amazon Kindle,” in front of thousands of reporters and bloggers.

  And then, Kindle was live.

  Everyone in the Amazon offices in Seattle, sugar-addled since 4:00 a.m., started cheering.

  We have the founders of Napster to thank for the widespread adoption of digital music, and we have Netflix to thank for the adoption of digital video. But the future owes digital books to Jeff Bezos.

  Jeff is a simple man. His front teeth are a bit chipped from when he grinds them together, and as the years passed, he seemed to grow thinner, his snazzy blue suit slowly engulfing him. What hair Jeff had when I first met him gradually disappeared entirely. He has a great laugh, an infectious laugh. It makes you smile, as all great laughs do. As Jeff stood in New York about to announce the Kindle to the world, I could only imagine what he must have been feeling.

  This was the moment Jeff had been waiting for since 2004. As he said in his press event that day, “We did a number of things that make the experience of discovering new reading material, getting that material into your hands, and reading seem like magic.”

  And he was right: it really was like magic. As magical as books themselves.

  The sorcerers behind the magic of products like the Kindle are the product managers. If you’re lucky as a product manager, you’ll have the time to dream up new ideas, but if not, you’ll be handed ideas from other executives and told to figure out how to make them happen. Some product managers are more expert than others, more visionary. At Amazon, for example, the CEO was the ultimate product manager.

  And although such product managers are possessed of genius, there are two other secrets to their success. For one, they’re poised like spiders in the centers of their webs of information, and they feed on this network of information. They know more than anyone else in their web and can use this information to further their own projects. Secondly, they have the enlightened autonomy to pursue their goals—something that can’t be done in politics or academia. These are enlightened capitalists for whom even their boards of directors and shareholders will often look the other way, trusting in their long-range plans and their long-range genius.

  Three years earlier, Jeff had embarked on the tough challenge of inventing a new kind of book, a new kind of reading experience. But now, as we launched our first product, not only could we all finally read in public with our Kindles, since it was no longer a secret, but we also could introduce others to the joys of ebooks. We could change the lives of our customers by making reading more immediate and more featureful. We could continue innovating, using the original Kindle as a launch platform. We could continue adding improvements to a fundamental human experience, one that hadn’t changed in more than five hundred years. We were giving customers something they never asked for and delighting them with something at once strange, magical, and uplifting.

  As for me, I could finally call my family and tell them what I was working on. For the last few years, I couldn’t say because Kindle was confidential, so my parents thought I was working for the FBI! I was excited and humbled. I rode the bus home and proudly read my Kindle and showed it off to everyone—although I was so exhausted that I don’t think I was able to read more than a page. I was temporarily relieved, but I knew that there’d be even harder work in the months and years ahead—not just for me or for Amazon, but for the billion-dollar book industry.

  Bookmark: Knapsacks, Book Bags, and Baggage

  Our Stone Age ancestors developed an innovation that I doubt few of us today could replicate, alone in the wilderness: the simple pot.

  Whether it held water, seeds, or honey, I think the pot was the single greatest invention of the Stone Age. Before its invention, people most likely had to live closer to rivers or try to carry water with their hands, a futile task. Containers like the humble pot allowed people to spread geographically, to move and transfer goods and objects easily, and to improve the quality of their lives in a game-changing way. I think the ability to conceptualize and enclose volume in a man-made artifact is one of the keys to civilization.

  The high-tech equivalent of the humble pot is the information cloud.

  We don’t know where the cloud is taking us as a society. It’s something like a magic carpet, and we’re aloft on it, flying above everything, uncertain of our destination. The cloud is in essence a container for digital goods, and it’s already revolutionized the way we store those goods. It’s a clever way of enclosing yet more content in a much smaller area. The cloud is a giant pot with near-infinite volume and near-zero size. I’ll expand on this subject in the chapter “Our Books Are Moving to the Cloud,” but for now, I’ll note that because of the cloud, we no longer have to haul ebooks or information with us as we travel.

  That makes satchels, book bags, and hand baggage increasingly useless as we adopt ebooks.

  As a kid, I would manhandle an enormous book bag in school every day. I never had time to run back to my locker and replace books between classes, so I carried my full day’s allotment of books with me to all the classes I attended. After four years of this in junior high and another four years in high school, my shoulders were unusually well developed for a skinny, nerdy guy. But it was frustrating, tiresome work. I needed to buy a new book bag every few months. And every year, we would be inspected for scoliosis in gym class, no doubt partly because of all the books we had to haul, crushing our spines into sad, deformed springs.

  Luckily for kids and their back doctors, this is no longer necessary.

  And on adopting digital books, you no longer need to haul boxes of books with you every time you move to a different home. Gone are the days of duct-taping shoddy cardboard boxes from U-Haul or liquor stores and still watching your books explode onto the sidewalk when movers accidentally drop the over-heavy boxes. As the heir to the Stone Age pot, the cloud makes moving easier for those of us with large holdings of books.

  A digital book weighs less
than the whisker of a fly. So there’s no strain with the digital. You don’t have to haul digital books in cardboard boxes or book bags, so digital books are easy on the shoulders, and on the eye. But clearly, I’m a believer in the digital. Are there drawbacks to ebooks, in this sense? Absolutely. The sheer massiveness and weight of books adds a kind of gravitas to a home. Books in a home say that someone literate lives there, someone with specific sensibilities and tastes. A home with fully digitized music and ebooks and other media seems barren to me, like a minimalist Bauhaus detention cell, someplace unfit for friends and family. But that’s me. What do you think of books as decorations or as hefty physical objects to be lugged about?

  http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/4.html

  Improving Perfection: Launching the Kindle2

  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.