Amazon’s Newton Moment

Amazon's launch last week of its Kindle electronic bookreader in an attempt to put itself out of business.  And it's a cool idea, even if the gizmo is a modified Newton.

I mean, think about it: Amazon sells books, so what does it do -- or do uniquely -- if its customers forsake bound paper ones for digital alternatives?  Amazon is facing that possibility...well, not facing it as much as daring it. Tempting Fate.  Inventing the future.

Amazon is challenging its own marketplace hegemony before anybody else does.  Or at least that's how I'd spin the story if I were doing the marketing for them.

But instead of focusing on this really innovative, smart, and bold business strategy, the glowing headlines, like the cover of Newsweek, chose the digital delivery of books via electrified readers as the story lead.  As if it's a foregone conclusion.

It's not.

Books aren't a delivery system in need of repair, and Amazon's Kindle doesn't purport to replace the concept as much as modify the details, anyway.

So what if it can produce endless screens of text, or provide uplink to download comments or updates?  A book has a beginning, middle, and end, just like movies and symphonies, only you can control and customize your experience of it almost infinitely.  Books don't run out of power, break when you drop them, or require that you learn any skill beyond page-turning and, well, reading.

Presuming you don't need to read in the dark or underwater, books offer an incredibly flexible and reliable UI.

The Kindle doesn't represent the future of books.  Not by a long shot.  We can already read on our mobile phones and iPods.  A Newton-like gizmo isn't revolutionary or even evolutionary.  True breakthroughs will change the how and where we read:

• Maybe it'll involve printing out books at home without murdering a couple of ink jet cartridges
• Or imagine being able to read a book on any surface, or via words hovering the air a few inches in front of your nose
• Perhaps there'll be some "live" interactivity with authors, combining blogging and real-time social media ideas, so a consumer would buy a work in progress...or perhaps a book would be a subscription to an episodic publication a la Victorian pot-boilers
• Maybe there'll be some joining of authorship and user-generated content, and people will create some “joint production’ approach to books

It's these sort of novel opportunities to change how we could experience novels that will unleash lots of innovative ways to deliver the required words. 

The Kindle is just smart branding, because it's smart business.  Amazon gets to play with the idea of digital book delivery, front and center, and it gets it loads of credit from a less-than-actively-inquiring popular media.  Maybe it trips over some opportunity along the way. 

But I'd skip all the nonsense about the medium itself, or about the Kindle being anything more than Newton was to Apple.

Amazon's management deserves the kudos for being smart and innovative, even if the results now and then aren't so sexy.  I wonder what other strategies it has in place to shake up what it does (or how it does what it does).  I know Bezos has a rocket company as a hobby project...could there be lots of little put-a-man-on-the-moon type projects underway? 

The way it's positioned now, when Kindle flops, it'll reflect badly on Amazon, instead of the company getting credit before, during, and after the launch for being the Apple-like company that innovates stuff all the time.

I'd try to develop some consistent publicity on that.  Not so much for the new gizmo.  I think we're going to all chuckle over the Kindle (and its dumb name), sooner versus later.