{"id":651312,"date":"2013-04-09T08:00:20","date_gmt":"2013-04-09T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paidcontent.org\/?p=227314"},"modified":"2013-04-09T08:00:20","modified_gmt":"2013-04-09T12:00:20","slug":"book-review-former-kindle-exec-on-kindle-flaws-nook-strengths-and-googles-future-in-ebooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/651312","title":{"rendered":"Book review: Former Kindle exec on Kindle flaws, Nook strengths and Google\u2019s future in ebooks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jason Merkoski was a founding member of the Amazon team that launched the Kindle. He no longer works at Amazon, and in a new ebook, <a href=\"http:\/\/books.sourcebooks.com\/burning-the-page\/\"><i>Burning the Page: The Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading<\/i><\/a> (Sourcebooks, ebook $9.99) he discussed how the Kindle came to be, the features it (and other e-ink readers) lack, and what he imagines the future of digital reading will look like. While\u00a0<em>Burning the Page<\/em>\u00a0often reads more like a series of rambling blog posts than a well-edited narrative, it offers some interesting thoughts on how technology will change books and reading in the coming years.<\/p>\n<p>Merkoski ran technology departments for a number of companies and headed e-commerce initiatives at Motorola before joining Amazon as a technology manager in 2005. For the next five years, he served at the company in a number of Kindle-related roles, helping to launch the first two Kindle models and the Kindle DX. &#8220;I first joined a team that built the electronic books for Kindle, but I went on from there to do it all,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;I invented some of the technology used in ebooks and launched the first few Kindles. I&#8217;ve traveled to book fairs in New York and London and Frankfurt to evangelize ebooks. I&#8217;ve watched ebooks being made in the Philippines and supervised the assembly of Kindles in China. I&#8217;ve talked to the White House, former presidents, and astronauts about ebooks.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I found\u00a0<em>Burning the Page<\/em> the most interesting when Merkoski discussed\u00a0his experience at Amazon, working directly for CEO Jeff Bezos. &#8220;I worked in a modern version of Gutenberg&#8217;s workshop,&#8221; he wrote. But he can&#8217;t share much:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;I believe Jeff [Bezos] wanted Kindle to be his legacy to history. He wanted it to succeed.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The Kindle organization was in some ways a startup within Amazon and benefited from Jeff Bezos&#8217;s venture capital infusions, long-range vision, and full support.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Jeff originally wanted the Kindle code names to come from\u00a0<em>Star Trek<\/em>, since he&#8217;s such a Trekkie, but more literate minds prevailed.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While Merkoski described himself as &#8220;the closest there was to an ebook shaman, a tribal elder who could talk to all the people who joined Amazon after me about the early days of Kindle, provide the inside scoop,&#8221; he didn&#8217;t (and may be legally unable to) provide any inside scoops in this book. So the next best thing is when he can speak specifically about e-reading platforms &#8212; including the advantages of Amazon&#8217;s competitors. The development of the Kindle was highly secretive: &#8220;No outsiders had seen the Kindle because it was created in a perfect vacuum from the very beginning,&#8221; Merkoski wrote. That resulted, in 2007, in a $399 device that sold out in five and a half hours, remained out of stock for months and got a lot of mixed reviews (facts that Merkoski doesn&#8217;t mention).<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"kindles-flaws-and-what-competi\">Kindle&#8217;s flaws &#8212; and what competitors did better<\/h2>\n<p>Future versions of the Kindle improved on some flaws: Merkoski called the Kindle 2, introduced in 2009, &#8220;truly an incredible device.&#8221; But &#8220;in fits of wakefulness, I thought about how Kindle lacked nuance, style, fonts, and things like multimedia&#8230;Kindle&#8217;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.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Kindle competitors, he said, have done better in lots of ways. Take Barnes &#38; Noble: &#8220;Out of all the retailers who sell dedicated e-readers, they&#8217;re the most innovative. They&#8217;re the first to release new book-reading features and to innovate on the hardware side. They were the first to have touch-sensitive e-ink screens&#8230;They totally get the social experience of books in the way that it crosses over from the real world to the digital. They can innovate so fast because they&#8217;re not burdened with their own R&#38;D group.&#8221; Likewise, &#8220;companies with more humanistic sensibilities than Amazon will win the e-reader war by making the experience more human, more playful&#8230;let&#8217;s face it: there&#8217;s still something emotionally bereft about a Nook or a Kindle.&#8221; The winner on that front, he said, is Apple&#8217;s iPad.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, Merkoski believes, &#8220;Amazon is winning the ebook revolution, but it may lose the war&#8230;Competitors like Barnes &#38; Noble and Apple have successfully blurred the lines and proven that they can provide a great media experience, so Amazon&#8217;s brand matters less in the eyes of readers now.&#8221; He says &#8220;it&#8217;s hard to love Amazon&#8230;at best, you respect Amazon for its obsession to detail, for its cheap prices, and for how it achieves the promised arrival dates for its products.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Oddly, Merkoski didn&#8217;t mention the Nook division&#8217;s terrible performance these days, or the company&#8217;s inability to cut into Amazon&#8217;s market share. Nooks, he claims, are &#8220;downright futuristic.&#8221; And that&#8217;s really where he wants to go in this book: How will ebooks, reading and writing change?<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"whats-next-high-speed-head-plu\">What&#8217;s next: High-speed head plugs and a &#8220;Facebook for books&#8221;?<\/h2>\n<p>Let&#8217;s be clear: Merkoski loves books. An endless number of sentences like &#8220;Books are priceless,&#8221; &#8220;Books can inspire us toward greatness,&#8221; &#8220;Books hold the repository of human knowledge, and then some,&#8221; &#8220;Reading is an act of bathyspheric descent into the depths of an inky-black ocean,&#8221; &#8220;For me, it really is about books. They&#8217;re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you&#8221; become increasingly irritating as the book goes on and weigh down Merkoski&#8217;s interesting and imaginative ideas on what the future of reading could actually look like.<\/p>\n<p>Once you cut through the platitudes, Merkoski envisioned some specific innovations that are interesting and imaginative. For instance, &#8220;the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author&#8217;s head, some way of taking an author&#8217;s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format. The same high-speed cables will connect you to the author&#8217;s original experience.&#8221; That sounds horrible to me, but another idea &#8212; a screenless e-reader that uses a pico projector to project an ebook onto a blank surface (like a ceiling or the pages of a blank book), pulls ebooks from the cloud and is navigated by voice commands &#8212; seems like something that could actually exist in a few years.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, Merkoski believes there will be<\/p>\n<blockquote id=\"quote-just-one-book-a-vast\">\n<p>&#8220;just one book, a vast book that includes all the others inside it, which I call the Facebook for Books. You&#8217;ll be able to start reading from an ebook and naturally segue into a different one, just by following a link. It could be a bibliographic link, or just a link to a book that influenced the author and that&#8217;s been annotated as such by a reader like you or me. You will be able to link forward or double-back and keep reading&#8230;The more content you get, the more cumulative the connections are between books, and the more intertwined and rich the network becomes.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The company best situated to make this dream a reality is not Amazon, Merkoski believes, but Google &#8212; thanks to its knowledge of search engines and the vast number of titles it&#8217;s scanned for Google book search, &#8220;Google has digitized more of human culture than any other retailer or library.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For now, rights issues are in the way, and so books&#8211;our greatest repository of knowledge and inspiration &#8212; aren&#8217;t participating in conversations with us online, with the exception of public-domain books that lag by at least ninety years.&#8221; It will take &#8220;a sea-change in opinion about ebook pricing models,&#8221; Merkoski acknowledges, before such a hyperlinked database of books can legally exist &#8212; even though we have the technology to put it in place now.<\/p>\n<p> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/stats.wordpress.com\/b.gif?host=gigaom.com&#038;blog=14960843&#038;%23038;post=628849&#038;%23038;subd=gigaom2&#038;%23038;ref=&#038;%23038;feed=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/pubads.g.doubleclick.net\/gampad\/jump?iu=\/1008864\/GigaOM_RSS_300x250&#038;sz=300x250&#038;%23038;c=42136\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/pubads.g.doubleclick.net\/gampad\/ad?iu=\/1008864\/GigaOM_RSS_300x250&#038;sz=300x250&#038;%23038;c=42136\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:<\/strong><br \/>Subscriber content. <a href=\"http:\/\/pro.gigaom.com\/?utm_source=media&#038;utm_medium=editorial&#038;utm_campaign=auto3&#038;utm_term=628849+book-review-former-kindle-exec-on-kindle-flaws-nook-strengths-and-googles-future-in-ebooks&#038;utm_content=laurahowen38\">Sign up for a free 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He no longer works at Amazon, and in a new ebook, Burning the Page: The Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading (Sourcebooks, ebook $9.99) he discussed how the Kindle came to be, the features it (and other e-ink readers) lack, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7418,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-651312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7418"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}