This has seemed so obvious since the Kindle’s introduction, yet the backward-thinking team at Amazon still churns out the things. I continue to raise confused eyebrows at the Kindle and its popularity. Obviously the iPhone lacks some features (battery life, screen size, etc) that make the Kindle better-suited for book-browsing, but really the Kindle is just a narrower, more specific, and more limited piece of hardware.
Lasting innovation requires flexibility and efficiency. So it makes much more sense (from a consumer and in the end the industry’s perspective) to innovate at the app/software level on multi-use devices than it does to innovate and iterate at the expensive, cumbersome hardware level. How would you rather read books and publications in the coming years? On a device that does 8 other things masterfully and helps you consume all types of digital content, or on a clunky grey 80’s tablet that has but one mediocre talent and takes up just as much space in your physical world as that novel you’re trying to digitize?
In a few years, the mobile reading landscape will be rife with better ways of consuming analog content (if people even care about reading such a thing). We’ll likely use applications that deliver the printed word in an existing format (hello hyper text transfer protocol!) to multi-use devices like the iPhone (not just a phone, hey!) instead of meddlesome e-reader devices.
I realize there’s a persuasive market for the Kindle that makes prioritizing profit over progress seem sensical. That group is the middling adopters. Not young enough to go their whole lives on digital devices but not luddite enough to eschew digital innovation for analog ways. Sure, it makes sense for those people. But really, when you find yourself purchasing devices with screens and buttons that can’t get online and send calls and do text messages and read books all at once, what are you doing with so many restricted use computers?
Apologies to several of you who are Kindle-fans, you know who you are. I just think you’re crazy.