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

happening with Kindle hardware and ebooks in this position, and by being with Kindle leaders, I learned a lot about Kindle and the Amazon business. I could see the personalities that shaped Kindle.
    For a year and a half, I found myself flying to Silicon Valley every week, because Lab126 was where Kindle2 was being built.
    The Kindle2 was an improvement in design compared to the original. It was lighter, and the eInk was crisper, with more shades of gray and more nuance. The device fit better into your hand while reading, and it had some cool features, like being able to read books out loud to you. It was also much cheaper, even though it had more features.
    With Kindle2, almost everything was reinvented from scratch. Even things as seemingly insignificant as the box it shipped in.
    The original Kindle package was a very maximalist presentation. It was designed to look like a hefty white book. You opened the book and found the Kindle inside, as well as its leatherette holder and a special sleeve for the power supply, all neatly arranged. On the outside of the package, and imprinted in rubber on the underside of the Kindle, you’d see a wonderful explosion of symbols, like someone had thrown a hand grenade into a type foundry.
    But for the second Kindle, the package got reduced to a simple cardboard box with no markings at all on the outside, nothing to indicate there was a Kindle inside. And yet when you opened it, you’d find a beautiful Kindle sitting on a plastic tray, like a pearl in an oyster on the half shell. The packaging was simple and functional. In fact, with its nested layers of plastic, culminating in a strange dishlike tray, the Kindle2 packaging had all the aesthetic charm of a TV dinner.
    Amazon moved from an ornate package design to a simple cardboard box that could be sent by UPS or FedEx and left on your porch without anyone knowing what was inside it, the same kind of box that could be stocked on the shelves at Best Buy or Target. It was practical, but soulless.
    Although this packaging was more cost-effective, there was no artistry to it. I’m a big believer that industrial design is a sign of the times, and I’m not alone in this. Andy Warhol would look at department stores like they were museums. I love looking back at 1920s typewriter tins and 1930s talcum powder cans, industrial designs from eras when they still showed zeppelins and aeroplanes flying overhead as signs of their times.
    If someone looks back a hundred years from now at our current industrial designs, they’ll perhaps see our culture as being obsessed with digging through layers of plastic and cardboard to get at the pricey prize inside. They’ll perhaps misjudge us and accuse us of not having any artistic inclinations. But they shouldn’t be too harsh on us just because the CEOs of our largest tech companies were frugal. Because inside these boxes were some of the most incredible devices in history.
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    Almost everything improved with the next-generation Kindle. By the time we were finished, the Kindle2 was truly an incredible device, with features we were sure would amaze the next generation of ebook readers. But the way there was paved with endless reinventions and trials that left all of us sleepless and stressed. As the head of it all, as we moved ever closer to launch, I started to sense myself being pulled closer each day to a breaking point I had never felt before.
    The day we finally launched Kindle2 was almost a sleepwalking dream for me. I remember Seattle being shut down by a snowstorm that day, and I remember how buses careened into one another. One slid off a bridge and into Puget Sound. Cars can’t drive up the steep Seattle hills in snow, so many were simply abandoned until the snow melted.
    It was February 2009, a rough time to launch. I came in at 4:00 a.m. again and saw starlight again through holes in the clouds. After the launch, I was numb to news about the number of Kindles we sold. Twenty hours later, I climbed back into bed and slept for a week.
    In fits of wakefulness, I thought about how Kindle lacked nuance, style, fonts, and things like multimedia. How great it would be if you could have a book about the history of music with actual musical excerpts! These seemed like great ideas to me, but I wondered if they were a bit too ambitious for Kindle. Because by now, Kindle’s success made new ideas paradoxically difficult, as if everyone was walking around on stiletto heels on a glass