A strange thing happened at Christmas. Well, two really. Amazon.com reported that its Kindle eReader had become the “most gifted” product in its vast inventory; and on Christmas Day sales of eBooks on its site exceeded those of physical books. The phenomena are, of course correlated: all those recipients of Kindles needed to buy something they could actually read on the devices. But the combination of the two “facts” has further ratcheted up speculation that 2010 will be the Year of the Kindle and the end is nigh for the printed codex.
If you detect a whiff of what philosophers call “technological determinism” in this, you’re in good company. I have on my shelves a (printed) copy of The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, a wonderful antidote to the irrational exuberance of Kindlemania. The authors conducted an ethnographic study of how people actually use paper in order to reach an understanding of which of those uses might conceivably be eliminated by electronics, and which might not. It should be required reading for anyone showing the early symptoms of Kindlemania.
The central insight of their research is that technology-takes-all scenarios are likely to be simplistic because they ignore the complex roles information goods play in people’s lives. The best bet is that new technologies take over some of those roles, while older technologies continue to fulfil others; in some cases the new technology actually boosts the older one. Thus Sellen and Harper found that the use of email in an organisation resulted in an average increase of 40% in paper consumption. Other studies showed that one reason employees tend to keep thousands of emails in their inboxes is because it’s the easiest way of making sure they can find a document.
In other words, new information technologies don’t necessarily wipe out older ones but rather take their place alongside existing systems. So while it’s quite likely that sales of eReaders will increase in the coming year — if only because they offer the only way of taking a reasonable amount of holiday reading on a Ryanair flight — it would be premature to infer from this that 2010 will indeed be the Year of the Kindle.
There is, you see, a shadow on Amazon’s horizon. If industry gossip is to be believed, 2010 will also be the year in which Apple releases its Tablet (variously christened the iPad, iSlate and iTab by fevered commentators; not since Moses has a slate been the subject of so much advance speculation). This is a problem for Amazon because while the Kindle is probably the best of the current eReader breed, it is actually a rather clunky and primitive device.
Apple doesn’t do primitive and it has shown what it can do when it chooses to disrupt established businesses. First it took over the music business with its iTunes/iPod combination of software and hardware. Then it took the mobile phone market apart with the iPhone, a device so far ahead of the competition as to be out of sight. If the industry speculation about the Apple tablet is correct, it suggests that the company has decided that the burgeoning Kindle market is the next target for its distinctive brand of creative destruction.
Apple’s success stems from a combination of design skill and fanatical control over everything connected with the operation of its products. For those of us who believe in open systems, the latter factor gives rise to serious long-term concerns; but there’s no doubt that it creates very satisfactory experiences for consumers in the short term.
If you doubt that, try doing — as I did — a comparison between the (open) Android phones and the iPhone; the Google devices are excellent in their way, but seem haphazard and unfinished in comparison with the slickly-unified and predictable Apple device.
So if Apple does produce an iPad/iSlate, things will suddenly become very interesting. At present, devices such as the Kindle are like the Daimler “horseless carriage” of 1886: the only difference is that the nag has been replaced by the engine. For electronic reading to become more than a way of carrying lots of texts around, eReaders have to become devices that add significant value to the reading experience. The only company that stands a chance of bringing that off is Apple. Roll on 2010 — and happy reading, in whatever medium! – guardian.co.uk