Plateau Kindle Before Peak Kindle

My wife thinks I’m insane. For a number of reasons, I suspect. But for the purposes of this post, I mean because of my gadget travel habits. You see, everywhere I go, I bring a MacBook, an iPad, and a Kindle.¹ That’s on top of an iPhone, of course.²

Do I actually need all of these gadgets? On each trip? Well, define need. Could I make do without say, a MacBook and an iPad? Probably. Or an iPhone and an iPad? Almost certainly. But you’re probably looking at the iPad and the Kindle combo as the most superfluous. Here, I disagree.

I love my Kindle because it’s what I read every night before I fall asleep. And I know that if I don’t travel with it, I’ll get back into the bad habit of reading my phone (or tablet).³ Obviously, I check those before I go to bed, but I do try to set aside time to read without interruption before I sleep. It’s nice to read without distraction (and without as much backlight).

Couldn’t I just turn off the notifications on other devices? Sure. But I’m weak. When I read, my mind tends to wander. And on the iPad post-iOS 9, swiping left to bring up your Twitter feed is the new mind wandering. I will stray.

On the Kindle, I cannot. Yes, it has a web browser. But there’s a reason that feature has been labeled as “Experimental” since its inception. It’s terrible. Sure, a lot of it is the e-ink refresh rate. But it’s also just buggy and slow. It’s fine in a pinch, but it’s not something you would seek out to use.

And I have to believe that’s at least in part on purpose. Amazon is a great tech company. While some of their software is suspect, I’m willing to bet they could have made a better browser on the Kindle after years of effort. But a quote by Dave Limp, Amazon’s head of hardware, in a recent Wired profile of the Kindle by David Pierce seems to hold a key:

One thing about the Kindle itself won’t change, though: It’s not going to become anything more than a reading device. Amazon’s heard from so many customers over the years that they love their Kindle precisely for all the things it doesn’t do. It’s a respite from Facebook and news alerts, push notifications and emails. “The more that we’re distracted, the more valuable solitude becomes,” says Dave Limp, Amazon’s head of hardware. “The last thing I want is being absorbed into an author’s story, and get an uplevel notification for Angry Birds.” Reading is about focus, about falling out of your life and into a story, and so the Kindle is about those things too.

Exactly. This is why I use the Kindle at night and why I travel with the Kindle.

That said, the Kindle, while now quite good, is not the perfect device. In fact, I feel almost as if it’s hit a bit of a plateau in recent years. And I wonder when it’s going to get over that hump to become the ultimate manifestation of itself.

Unlike the iPhone (or iPad), I don’t buy every new generation of Kindle. And the reason why is obvious: you don’t need to. Even the most hardcore fans/readers won’t notice much difference between the generations.

Case in point: I did recently upgrade to the new Kindle Oasis — you know, the waterproof one. Beyond that feature, and a slightly wider screen, there’s not much better about the Oasis than the Kindle Voyage which came before it.⁴ In fact, I actually find it a bit more cumbersome to hold and I don’t like the page turning buttons as much.

These are nits. But the reality is that for all practical purposes, the Oasis isn’t really any better than the Kindle I bought three years ago. And, for most people, it’s probably not that much better than the $100 Paperwhite variety of Kindle. Certainly not $150-$200 better.

Anyway, my point here is how the product — which again, I love — has plateaued. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, except that it’s pretty clear to all fans of the Kindle what the end game is here.⁵ Pierce lays it out in his piece:

The Kindle has become progressively lighter with successive generations, and even the device’s materials are softer than they used to be, more like a book in your hand than a high-tech gizmo. E Ink tech is now nearly as high-res as printed words. Next up, flexibility seems at the top of the Kindle team’s minds. Building a Kindle “like paper” would mean one that can be rolled, folded, dog-eared, and turned into a paper airplane, and the beginnings of that tech is already showing up in prototypes and concept devices around the world.

This is the holy grail. Others have been dancing around and dabbling with such tech for years at this point. But if Amazon can do this at mass scale, that will be the Kindle everyone has wanted since the very first Kindle. Call it what you want: Peak Kindle. Kindle Pinnacle. The perfect Kindle.

And assuming we’re closer rather than farther from such a Kindle, it could come at a perfect time. The tech backlash against distraction is in high gear already, but isn’t likely to go away any time soon as we all continue to use our devices more and more. If Amazon is waiting in the wings with a piece of technology that is an antidote…

Or, as Jeff Bezos wrote in his shareholder letter a decade ago:

Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry — I’m convinced it makes me more productive — but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.

We’re still waiting, Jeff. Don’t take too long, lest the Kindle go the way of your valued BlackBerry.

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¹ The TSA, it would seem, sides with my wife as well.

² And it used to be even worse. I would often travel with both an iPad mini and a “regular” iPad (the one which was formerly 9.7” and is now 10.5”). But thanks to Apple’s degradation of the former, I mainly leave it behind.

³ It’s also, of course, a much better device if you happen to be traveling somewhere with say, a beach, as you can read it in direct sunlight.

⁴ The built-in Audible aspect should be the best feature, but it’s hilariously flawed. You can’t actually listen and read at the same time! WTF?!

⁵ And it’s not color!