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

floor, careful not to run, not wanting to take the wrong risks.
    I also realized that there was no outreach to the outside world—to publishers especially. I thought Kindle should have evangelists, like Guy Kawasaki once was for Apple, out there in the magazines and on the trade show floors talking about Kindle products. Not just as a paid shill, but as someone who used the products and believed in them with a fervor that approached religious fundamentalism. And that’s when the energy started to come back to me.
    I realized that it was one thing to improve the Kindle as a device, but another thing entirely to improve the content. Over the last year and a half of effort, nothing had been done to differentiate the ebooks themselves. They were still the same as before. No worse, but no better.
    The only category of books that I think the second-generation Kindle improved on was pornography, of all things. This is because the number of shades of gray on the Kindle2 doubled. Porn sells well in any format, whether magazine or book, but it sells especially well in ebook form. Amazon prefers not to sell pornography, but that doesn’t stop many users from buying it elsewhere and loading it onto their Kindles. With the Kindle, you could download pornography to your device and read it anywhere, even on a subway, without anyone guessing that you were not reading the latest bestseller. Digital books excel at protecting a reader’s privacy while he or she reads. And in this same sense of protecting privacy, digital books are the best thing that ever happened to pornography, with the possible exception of the brown paper bag.
    The drawback with pornography is that images can look awful on eInk, no matter how much you dither with them. The original Kindle’s 2-bit eInk screens, for example, only had four shades of gray, and of these, one was white and one was black, which didn’t leave much for nuance. Whether you’re trying to render a picture of the sky or of a woman’s thigh, it’s hard to get pornography to look good with only four colors. Depending on your stance on pornography, that’s either something wrong with eInk or something you’re glad e-readers don’t do well. Even with the Kindle2’s sixteen colors, digital pornography still sucked, although it did improve somewhat.
    Clearly, there was potential for improvements in content beyond pornography. There was a whole universe of books to adapt to e-reading—including atlases, dictionaries, comics, travel guides, and textbooks!
    Shortly after the Kindle2 launch, I talked to Kindle’s senior management and then took on the role of Kindle’s technology evangelist. I would be half evangelist and half product manager and focus on ebooks alone. A product manager is something like a practical futurist, someone who can think nine months into the future and see a product through from inception to launch. I would be able to dream big and make long-range improvements.
    I was refreshed and revitalized, ready for a new chapter of my life at Amazon. I was on a plane every week as Amazon’s first technology evangelist. I would meet with publishers in their midtown Manhattan offices to explore new ebook ideas together. Then I’d be off to India or the Philippines to see how conversion houses were making ebooks and to tell them some of what I’d learned during my time at Amazon, feeding them bits of information that would make them work better and faster and cheaper for us. I was doing my small part with each player in this ebook ecosystem to move it forward and to find ways that publishers could spend less and convert more, so readers could have more ebooks to enjoy.
    I saw colossal, warehouse-sized machines that stripped books of their spines in seconds, like wood chippers for books, but that were as precise as a doctor’s scalpel. At a technology park in India, I also saw an experimental array of quarter-million-dollar machines that were like animatronic spiders. They were used for nondestructive scanning, the high-end way to digitize content—unlike the cheaper method of hacking pages with machetes. The machine lifted a book and carefully turned its pages one by one so they could be photographed and digitized. Those animatronic spiders were so delicate that I would have trusted them to hold a baby and change its diaper.
    Being an evangelist gave me a chance to engage with publishers worldwide, and I got to see the scramble firsthand as publishers adjusted to