Please Make a Better Kindle

It must be a nightmare to become a Kindle product manager. 

You show up on the first day of work ready to reinvent the most important advancement in human intellectual history—the book. You sit down at your desk. You notice it is not a desk but is instead a blue door turned horizontal and stacked between filing cabinets. 

I don’t mind the desk door, you tell yourself. I am here to reinvent the book.

The book! THE BOOK! The vehicle of every important event and person in recorded history from Moses, to Jesus. From Aristotle, to Aquinas. From Newton, to Shakespeare. From William James to E. L. James.

You pull out the prep you did for your first day and lay it out on the desk-door in front of you.

You have drawings and diagrams. You have charts and graphs. You have case studies and research notes and prototypes out the wazoo.

You have rethought highlighting and search. Evernote and Notion and Roam will flee your wrath—for you have solved the problem of remembering what you read. You have single-handedly smote SparkNotes with an AI-based summarizing tool. You have created new collaboration features (everyone needs new collaboration features.) 

You even have a memo prepared. An internal press release outlining the next-generation Kindle you’ve so lovingly envisioned. In true Amazon style, it is—dare you say it—customer obsessed. It compacts your genius into just a few lines of black-and-white text. 

You send the memo to your boss and stretch with satisfaction. As you wait for a response, you scroll through Twitter mindlessly. You briefly register a news story about Jeff Bezos partying in Mallorca on a yacht emblazoned with the likeness of his busty beau. You don’t mind. You are a god-emperor of the knowledge economy. You will change the lives of tech bros and BookTok types alike. 

Your boss walks in. You expect exaltation. But he looks…concerned. Maybe slightly resigned. He motions for you to get up and you follow him. He indicates for you to bring your drawings, diagrams, and your precious memo along with you. He walks you to a strange room. White walls and a white floor. A long stainless steel table sits in the center of the room. On top of the table is every single version of the Kindle Amazon has ever produced. This is the cathedral of the Kindle. The citadel of cybertext. Sanctuary of stories. Holy ground. 

He walks you to the left side of the table. Here sits the first-generation Amazon Kindle. Released in 2007 at a $399 price point. It sold out in 5 hours.

He walks you to the right-hand side of the table. You pass each successive generation of Kindle as you walk. 20 years of work. You notice the first model to be released without a physical keyboard. You notice the displays getting larger, and the cases getting smaller. Tiny improvements. Sustaining innovations. Management by committee. Inch by inch. Exactly what you have sworn to change.

Finally, you arrive at the 11th Generation Kindle: the Paperwhite. Waterproof. Easy on the eyes. $139:

“Notice anything?” Your boss says.

“They’re all pretty similar,” you reply. “And that’s why I think we could totally blow the doors off this thing if—”

Your boss raises his hand for silence.

“Your job is to do as little as possible,” he says. “Twiddle some knobs. Make it thinner. Make the battery better. But for the love of god don’t try to reinvent anything.”

He takes your drawings and diagrams out of your hands. He picks up the memo too. He carries them over to a chute labeled, “Incinerator.” He tosses them in the chute. You hear them clang to their fiery death somewhere deep in the bowels of Amazon headquarters.

“The Kindle’s job is to be boring and invisible. Now act like a Kindle and get out of my face.”

.    .    .

The Kindle could be 10x better than it is.

But, as far as I can tell, Amazon doesn’t seem to be moving very fast to improve it. This is not a good state of affairs. Reading books, in my opinion, is one of the most pleasurable, enriching, and interesting activities humans engage in. It sucks that in the age of AI, books seem to be getting left behind.

So this week I decided to set myself a little challenge: What would happen if we set fire to the Kindle?

I decided to pretend I was a Kindle product manager. I came up with a few grand dreams for the future of reading that are totally divorced from the corporate and practical reality of working at Amazon. Consider it a call to arms for the future of books. A rallying cry to make the Kindle actually great.

To start, let’s look at what Kindle is good at today and build features from there.

The Kindle’s most useful feature

In my opinion, the most useful feature of the Kindle is the dictionary. If you read a word that you don’t know, all you have to do is long-press on the word to highlight it and the definition pops up:

This feature is genius because it takes a complex action—asking for the definition of a word—and makes it available via one long press. It does this based on context: if you long-pressed on a word it knows you’re probably asking about a definition. This is great because you can do this interaction easily without interrupting your reading experience. 

Over the last decade, Amazon improved this by adding what they call X-Ray to Kindle books. If you long-press on a person, a place, or a thing on Kindle—instead of providing a dictionary definition—it will provide the snippet of text where that person, place, or thing first shows up in what you’re reading.