Many years ago I saw a short film based on the Jack London short story To Build a Fire. As it was shown in an educational capacity, clearly it was filmed for an educational audience. The general gist of the story is that an adventurer in the Klondike leaves camp in the bitter cold winds of winter against the advice of the long-time inhabitants of the region. He is sure that his technology (a package of sulphur matches) will keep him warm in the howling winds and relentless chill of the Klondike. He travels with a dog, who every time the traveler stops to light a fire yearns to stay near it and revel in its warmth. Often considered one of London’s classic Man v. Nature stories, where the prevailing attitude of the main character is that he can defeat nature with the latest and greatest of technologies, I think that the lesson learned from To Build a Fire is often forgotten by the gadget world in the race for the latest and greatest in the world.
Everything from portable GPS units to e-book readers often over-looks the fact that people have serviceable substitutes for these items that do not require the effort, batteries, and the adaption to the lifestyle of use that their modern replacements want from you. Take a GPS unit for example and it’s early day counter part the road map. GPS does have several advantages from the maps of yore. It can tell you exactly where you are, it can give you turn-by-turn instructions which can be invaluable for someone who is traveling in an area that they have never been to before. But consider this: Whenever I drive somewhere that I have never been before, I make it a point to look at a map before I go and to commit the details to memory. Then it merely becomes an exercise in remembering which direction you are going. Only when I lose where I am on my internal map do things become a little dicey, but then all I have to do is pull over and get my road map out, which does not rely on batteries to run, and find where I am and where I need to go. I will admit that there are some times that I want the flexibility of a GPS system; in order to have a really good mental system I would need to have maps of every city that I’m going to ever head into in the car as well as doing some research before I left the house. Part of the problem is that having GPS has taken some of the onus off of the driver or the navigator of the vehicle and puts it on the device. Overall I think that it discourages the planning that I believe is necessary for every trip that someone makes in a car. When you have to think about where you are going you have to think about how to get there. You can remember that such and such a street is under construction, that you would have to make a left turn across a busy highway without the benefit of a left-turn arrow, that you must be in the left lane to make a turn or to avoid a back-up. In the end you would end up thinking about where you need to be and have the ability to plan ahead and can avoid most of that split second decision-making that annoys other drivers and can be dangerous.
So technology can’t make a person a better driver, but can it build a better book? The written word has been around for about 6,000 years and since the first bits of cuneiform were transcribed upon clay tablets in Sumeria, people have been looking for a way to collect lots of text into a format that can be accessed again in the future. Scrolls, codices, books, volumes all have been ideas that have been passed along. The scrolls weakness was its longevity. Large numbers of scrolls have been collecting for centuries, but the flimsy papryus or vellum that they were written on did not survive the march of the elements. Ancient scrolls are notoriously difficult to unroll (just ask the historians in charge of unraveling the Dead Sea Scrolls) and the passage of time, particularly the weight placed upon them and their susceptibility to fire and humidity made them less than advantageous for the storage of the written word. The codex was slightly better, the hard-cover and the binding made it much easier to open and read old works and the choice of vellum in a flat format is a key factor in the fact that hundreds of years later we can still quite easily read things such as the illuminated Bibles for Medieval Europe and old copies of La Morte D’Arthur. With the invention of the Gutenburg printing press and the acquisition of cheap paper-making from the Arab countries in the 1500s that the current revolution in the written word took off: the book.
And in case you weren’t paying attention, Amazon released an e-book reader earlier this week that claims it will blow away the paper book and change the way that people see the e-book. Clearly Jeff Bezos hasn’t heard others trying this. This is not to say that just because someone has tried and tried again that you shouldn’t put your ass on the line to find a better way to do things, the question should be “Is this the better way?” And I don’t know if Kindle is or it isn’t, but there are several things that I don’t like about Kindle up front.
The first is the attempt to multitask. Kindle has been (incorrectly) listed as the iPod of books. While there are many reasons why this is an inept comparison, the biggest is that when the original iPod debuted back in 2001 it did one thing and it did it well, it allowed you to take all or a sizable portion of that music with you in your daily life. Kindle tries to be an e-book reader, an audio-book device, and a wireless mobile platform. Somehow I have the feeling that Kindle may suffer from the “biting off more that you can chew” problem. Why o why does the Kindle feel it needs to have a keyboard? Are you expected to buy your books from the store right there and then? Apparently you can get content through Whispernet to your Kindle to access newspapers, e-books, the font of all human knowledge Wikipedia without a monthly charge. Kindle also suffers from the problem of the early smartphones. “Let’s only concentrate on a few areas that will let our customers only access a portion of the world wide web.” Just as the dumbed down mobile web was destined to fail, so is this portion of the Kindle. If you are going to offer access to the internet, let everyone have all of it. I have feeling that there were similar discussions with about the recently released iPod Touch. It has wireless and access to the cool new feature of the iTunes store on your mobile device. If TouchPod hadn’t offered access to the full-fledged web, I wouldn’t have bought one. It would have been silly to be able to buy songs and not be able to access the general web. Kindle has the same issues, but they are worse because unlike the hypothetically crippled iPod Touch, Kindle does let you reach more portions of the web, newspapers, Wikipedia, blogs, and so forth, but not the whole thing. But a bigger issue is that while the theoretical TouchPod had the same screen as the iPhone, but no access to the web the Kindle doesn’t support many of the websites that exist in the great wide web. Even some of the blogs, which was one of the much ballyhooed features of Kindle won’t really render quite so well on Kindle. Only smart web designers like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber are able to deal with this kind of challenge. It’s not that others aren’t capable, it’s just that who would want to do this, what possible incentive could there be?
That brings me to another point. The blogger pay off. Let me start off with some points before I dive in.
- There is no good reason why a weblogger shouldn’t be able to make a living or at least some money writing on a blog. I don’t know if this is something that I would want to do, but hey it’s called capitalism for a reason.
- Everyone is entitled to a fair opinion of a product.
- I have not used or even played with a Kindle.
- I love the idea of something like Kindle. The ability to browse online find books and then read them is just one of those things that I think could be a killer app for an existing device *cough iPhone cough*
According to reports to access an RSS feed on Kindle you may have to pay upwards of $.99 to read an RSS feed. So basically you can have access to the entirety of the web (such as it would be on the Kindle’s web browser), but you have to pay to have the blog fed to you in a simplistic fashion. Then an item I hadn’t even thought of until Scott Bourne brought it up on this weeks Mac Break Weekly, astroturfing. Bloggers far and wide are singing the praises of Kindle, but because of a per usage fee that is required every time you use the service, a portion of which goes to the blogger, can we really trust what several prominent technology bloggers are writing about Kindle? Their pockets will be lined with the dollars that they have earned, but by plugging an item that they have a vested interest in without disclosing their relationship with it in a monetary sense to their readers feels downright dishonest. It may be that the money has little to no effect on a quality of review or the push that they make of a product, but without an upfront disclosure at the very least what are the readers of their sites going to think? It is in human nature to make the very worst assumption right off the bat and I can’t say that I blame them.
There are other problems with Kindle. The fact that it can’t read anything but .txt and .azw – the later of which is Amazon’s proprietary book format. That’s right folks it can’t even read the .pdf format that has become the gold standard for not only e-books but the exchange of documents. Then there is Kindle’s form factor. It has the all the visual appeal of the LC II, with none of the features. The size seems about right at least in a “I can hold it and read it easily”, but the fact that you could advance or reverse pages by sneezing on it seems to be a poor choice from an interface guideline. The text does look gorgeous as it should, but I worry that it won’t be able to compare to the resolution of a book and it certianly doesn’t seem to be able to have the portability that a book would have. For instance would you be comfortable reading it on the john? Or in the bathtub? If you can’t answer yes to the these items then the item that you’re using is not a book replacement.
Not only is Kindle not the “iPod of books”, but it probably doesn’t work the way that book would in many instances. I only need point to Mark Pilgrim’s excellent point-counterpoint of the ins and outs of the Kindle license and the words of Jeff Bezos concerning Amazon’s intentions with book sellers and the reality of the situation. Of these things I have no doubt, Amazon’s Kindle will sell well, it will be relatively easy to use, and it will be a great product for many people, but it is not the item that is needed to push the revolution of the e-book to the forefront. The potential is there possibly for Kindle 2.0 or more likely 3.0 for a killer product, however I’m sure that I’m not alone in supposing that an e-book reader for iPhone would just about slay Kindle in it’s tracks. In the Jack-of-all-trades category iPhone already has the Kindle beat in form factor and interface, add to that the ability to have books that would be nigh-on-impossible for Kindle to read, like a book about Monet for example and we have a winner.
In closing I would like to point out to all those wonderful and creative people out there who are rapidly defining the way that people deal with such ancient concepts as written words and music, don’t always think that you have to reinvent a concept to get your idea out the door. Find out what the old medium did best and try to preserve it for another generation. Search for what the old medium did poorly and fix it and integrate that fix into your product without dealing the deathblow to the things that we love. You may end up changing the way that we interact with items, but keep the concepts the same. And since it is rather chilly in my neck of the woods, I hope you all learn the lesson from To Build a Fire don’t fight nature and stay warm.
