Amazon Kindle: A New Chapter in Reading
Amazon Kindle: A New Chapter in Reading
Breaking down the design principles behind Amazon's hit device
Intro
I’m traveling this month.
When you’re on the road for a while, you learn to get by with a specific, small set of stuff. For me, one item that always makes the trip is my Kindle.
It’s not sexy and it doesn’t pull on my heartstrings like some other good designs, but that hasn’t stopped it from making a big impact and achieving remarkable success.
Now I hear you thinking “But Pat, if it’s so bland, why does it deserve a feature?” To which I’d reply with a quote from John Berry: “Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it’s invisible.”
A design so good it’s invisible? How does that work?
Don’t worry, I’ll explain.
If you’re new here, I like to use principles from the greats in product and marketing to help me break down experiences that live up to the name “Better by Design”. Today we’ll use Dieter Rams’ principles on the product side and David Ogilvy’s on the marketing side. If you haven’t subscribed yet, join 1200+ curious, creative technologists by joining here:
And now, some history.
History
The history of the Kindle is really two independent stories of innovation that ran in parallel from the 1990s into the 2000s. On one hand, it was the founding of Amazon.com as the dominant digital marketplace for books and on the other, it was the invention of the E-Ink display.
On the first path, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994. While his big idea focused on a wide-ranging approach to e-commerce, one of Amazon’s first breakthroughs came in 1995 when the company launched its online bookstore. The site offered a vast selection of books at competitive prices, and its user-friendly interface made it easy for customers to browse and purchase from the comfort of their own homes. The online bookstore's success helped establish Amazon as a major player in the e-commerce industry and set the foundation for the behemoth we know today.
On the second path, MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson and two of his students, Barrett Comiskey and JD Albert, developed the technology for the E-Ink display. They created the first prototype in 1996, and further developed the tech over the next several years. In 2004, the first commercial e-reader to use E-Ink technology, the Sony Librie, was released in Japan. However, it wasn’t until the release of Amazon’s Kindle in 2007 that e-ink displays began to gain mainstream popularity and widespread use.
So over that decade-long period, Amazon built the foundations of the marketplace while E-Ink built the foundations of the product. The Kindle unified those two sides; a physical manifestation of product-market fit whose success led it to become effectively synonymous with the E-Reader experience.
Product
It’s understandable
One of the Kindle’s biggest strengths is its specificity: it’s a device meant for reading. And sure, Amazon has tried to break that mold a bit in recent years, but ultimately it always comes back to the reading experience.
Why should you buy a Kindle? You want to read books.
What should you do with it? Take it with you to read books.
It was dead simple to understand even on day one.
It’s useful
As I mentioned above, the aesthetic of the Kindle doesn’t do much for me. It’s not bad, it’s just kinda ‘meh’.
It’s the utility of the device that makes it a showstopper. It’s hard to overstate how useful it is to be able to pull up basically any book, any time, anywhere I happen to be. I still like physical books too, but you won’t find me lugging them around while I’m traveling anymore.
The Kindle’s usefulness has only grown over time as the broader e-reader ecosystem has expanded. Where I live in the US, you can pair a Kindle with a public library card and get access to an amazing selection of free books that easily covers 90% of my reading needs. It’s also handy to be able to send longer documents or articles from my computer to read at a later date. Now, as a writer, I could hardly live without my Kindle’s connection to my Readwise account which centralizes and resurfaces potential insights for me every day.
It’s just a hugely useful product, through and through.
It’s unobtrusive
A saving grace of the Kindle’s otherwise unremarkable aesthetics is that it allows the device to be totally unobtrusive. The thing really fits in just about anywhere. It’s lightweight, works well in bright and dark environments, and it’s easy to toss in your bag or leave on your bedside table. You rarely have to charge it and books appear like magic over the air. It basically removes every obstacle from reading beside your own willpower to sit down and focus. But that one’s not on the designers to solve. That one’s on you! 🙃
Brand
Have a big idea
Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ballpark. Aim for the company of immortals.
To me, the biggest idea behind the Kindle as a brand can be summed up by the history behind its name. I found an excerpt from a 2008 edition of Steven Heller’s newsletter that does a wonderful job of describing the Kindle’s big idea.
The name was conceived by San Francisco designer Michael Cronan and according to his wife and partner Karen Hibma, this is how it was coined:
About three years ago, Cronan was asked by Lab126, an Amazon.com company, to name a consumer product line, which turned out to be the Kindle. Hibma says, “Michael came up with the name through our usual practice of exploring the depths of what the potential for the new product and product line could be and how the company wanted to present it. Jeff [Bezos, the CEO] wanted to talk about the future of reading, but in a small, not braggadocio way. We didn’t want it to be ‘techie’ or trite, and we wanted it to be memorable, and meaningful in many ways of expression, from ‘I love curling up with my Kindle to read a new book’ to ‘When I’m stuck in the airport or on line, I can Kindle my newspaper, favorite blogs or half a dozen books I’m reading.'”
Kindle means to set alight or start to burn, to arouse or be aroused, to make or become bright. The word’s roots are from the Old Norse word kyndill, meaning Candle. “I verified that it had deep roots in literature,” adds Hibma. “From Voltaire: ‘The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others and it becomes the property of all.'” No other name could hold a candle to Kindle.
Give the facts
The more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement’s chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases.
When you look at the marketing materials for the Kindle you can quickly tell that the writers don’t have to do anything too fancy. They can just give you the facts and the benefits become apparent.
A few of their most common talking points include:
Easy to take anywhere
Long battery life
A glare-free screen that works in sunlight or the dark
Access to a huge catalog of books
Distraction-free
They’re simple bullet points that outline what the Kindle offers in relation to both a physical book and a tablet like the iPad. It’s honest advertising that does the job by giving the facts. No need to complicate it.
Don’t be boring
You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.
While Amazon does play up the facts in their ads, you’ll notice that they pair those facts with interesting environments.
Long battery life becomes “can take with you on a camping trip”.
Easy to take anywhere becomes “slip it into your nice travel bag”.
Its catalog of books gives it an opportunity to rest on the shoulders of other household names and literary classics.
So although the product’s killer features are pretty straight ahead, Amazon is still able to create intrigue without stretching the truth.
Takeaways
Plain and simple: if you want to read, the Kindle is for you.
It wins based on the merits of its features alone and yet its branding helped elevate it into the daily lexicon. It’s so good it’s mundane but maintains a certain allure that continues to power its success from generation to generation.
Perhaps the biggest marker of the Kindle’s success is that I hardly think twice about it anymore. It’s just a fully integrated piece of the toolkit I use to go about my daily life.
It’s invisible but in the best way.
It's boring but Better by Design.
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Resources
Brand
Product
Kindle
How the kindle was designed through 10 years and 15 generations - Techcrunch
Amazon Kindle: A brief history from the original Kindle onwards - Pocket Lint
A fascinating history of Kindle devices and services - Ebookfriendly
I love my Kindle. One of my favourite features is being able to highlight stuff then use an app called Readwise that sends me 5 highlights per day from books I've read. I found it to be incredibly helpful for my creative process, and just reminding myself of ideas and insights that I may have forgotten.