Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

instead revitalize books and breathe fresh life into them?
    Such questions still keep me up at night. I have answers for some of my old questions, but now I struggle with new ones. On the morning of the Kindle launch, I looked through the bedroom window until I had to get dressed and go to work at 4:00 a.m. There was a rare break in the gloom-clouds over Seattle, and I could see a few stars, bright enough to be planets or maybe omens.
    The next few hours saw me running the show in Seattle, while Jeff Bezos was on stage in New York announcing the Kindle. The launch was timed to the minute; I had a clipboard and a stopwatch. I was like the mission-controller in the movie version of Apollo 13 , the one with the sweater around his shoulders who made sure each team was “go” for launch.
    We didn’t want anyone saying, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” which is why the launch was scripted and tested in advance. The script was flawless. It was a dream launch. We got the store and services running at almost the exact moment when Jeff said, “Introducing Amazon Kindle,” in front of thousands of reporters and bloggers.
    And then, Kindle was live.
    Everyone in the Amazon offices in Seattle, sugar-addled since 4:00 a.m., started cheering.
    We have the founders of Napster to thank for the widespread adoption of digital music, and we have Netflix to thank for the adoption of digital video. But the future owes digital books to Jeff Bezos.
    Jeff is a simple man. His front teeth are a bit chipped from when he grinds them together, and as the years passed, he seemed to grow thinner, his snazzy blue suit slowly engulfing him. What hair Jeff had when I first met him gradually disappeared entirely. He has a great laugh, an infectious laugh. It makes you smile, as all great laughs do. As Jeff stood in New York about to announce the Kindle to the world, I could only imagine what he must have been feeling.
    This was the moment Jeff had been waiting for since 2004. As he said in his press event that day, “We did a number of things that make the experience of discovering new reading material, getting that material into your hands, and reading seem like magic.”
    And he was right: it really was like magic. As magical as books themselves.
    The sorcerers behind the magic of products like the Kindle are the product managers. If you’re lucky as a product manager, you’ll have the time to dream up new ideas, but if not, you’ll be handed ideas from other executives and told to figure out how to make them happen. Some product managers are more expert than others, more visionary. At Amazon, for example, the CEO was the ultimate product manager.
    And although such product managers are possessed of genius, there are two other secrets to their success. For one, they’re poised like spiders in the centers of their webs of information, and they feed on this network of information. They know more than anyone else in their web and can use this information to further their own projects. Secondly, they have the enlightened autonomy to pursue their goals—something that can’t be done in politics or academia. These are enlightened capitalists for whom even their boards of directors and shareholders will often look the other way, trusting in their long-range plans and their long-range genius.
    Three years earlier, Jeff had embarked on the tough challenge of inventing a new kind of book, a new kind of reading experience. But now, as we launched our first product, not only could we all finally read in public with our Kindles, since it was no longer a secret, but we also could introduce others to the joys of ebooks. We could change the lives of our customers by making reading more immediate and more featureful. We could continue innovating, using the original Kindle as a launch platform. We could continue adding improvements to a fundamental human experience, one that hadn’t changed in more than five hundred years. We were giving customers something they never asked for and delighting them with something at once strange, magical, and uplifting.
    As for me, I could finally call my family and tell them what I was working on. For the last few years, I couldn’t say because Kindle was confidential, so my parents thought I was working for the FBI! I was excited and humbled. I rode the bus home and proudly read my Kindle and showed it off to everyone—although I was so exhausted that I don’t think I was able to read more than a page. I was