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Amazon’s Kindle Disappears

April 28, 2008 – By Raymond T. Hightower | 1 Comment

Listen to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tell how the Kindle e-book reader came to be: “We had been selling e-books for a long time. But nobody was buying e-books.” Rather than wait for a solution, Bezos and his team developed one themselves. It’s called Kindle, and it disappears!

What is Kindle?
Kindle is a stand-alone e-book reader. Unilke many ebook readers, Kindle comes with built in wireless capability. If you can get a decent cell phone signal, you can download and buy e-books on Kindle. The $399 purchase price includes unlimited access to the cell-phone network for downloading e-books.

Bezos on Charlie Rose
Charlie Rose and Jeff Bezos discuss the Kindle in a 54-minute video, published November 2007 at CharlieRose.com.

Kindle’s Uncertain Future?
When I look a the features of Kindle, I am reminded of the old word processing systems (like Wang and IBM’s DisplayWriter) of the 1970’s and 80’s. One machine, one function. But by the mid 1980’s, word processors were a relic of the past, replaced by PCs running word processing software. Why buy a one-function word processor when a PC can do word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and more?

Fast-forward to 2008. Why buy a one-function Kindle reader when devices like the iPhone can handle PDFs, email, and the web very well?

Kindle Disappears
Bezos believes that books are on of the last bastions of analog because books are so good. The book’s most important feature is hard to notice: it disappears.

When you’re reading a regular paper-based book, you don’t notice the paper, ink, stitching, etc. You immerse yourself in the world of what you’re reading. Amazon sought to re-create the book’s disappearing ability in the Kindle. It weighs 10.5 ounces and it connects to Amazon’s site via the cell-phone network in a way that you don’t have to think about it. It disappears.