“People don’t read any more”
Here’s the sequence of events:
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reveals his company’s newest product: The Kindle, a handheld electronic device for reading & buying books on the go.
- Apple CEO Steve Jobs responds to the release, saying “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read any more.”
- Timothy Egan, blogger for the New York Times, responds in a blog post, firing back with “The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude. Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.”
- Blogger and my pal Erin Balser responds to that, writing “Egan is confusing “reading” with “books”. iTunes and iPods are products, listening is not. The Mac is a product, everything we use it for is not. iPhone is a product, interacting with friends and surfing the internet is not.”
Got that? Good.
I think it’s pretty clear that Jobs was referring specifically to printed books (and not the act of reading itself) when he made his statement. It’d be silly to think Jobs & Apple don’t see a future for reading in and of itself: just look at the iPhone. One of its most touted features is the ability to deliver the ‘real’ internet. They even ran a commercial showing the New York Times web site on the phone, all primed and ready to be read.
If Apple was so down on reading, they would have emphasized the iPhone’s video and youtube abilities, and not made a device that offers probably the nicest mobile text-reading experience available. Seems simple, doesn’t it?
What Jobs (probably) meant
I think you have to look at what Jobs was saying from two angles:
First, he’s not a man who’s above being overtly dismissive and even hostile when it comes to competitors’ products. He can be a bit of a prick. How much this figures into his statement is left as an exercise to the reader.
Second, and more critically, Jobs was responding to the idea of the Kindle as a product where the primary use case is buying digital books online. This isn’t a convergence device. It does (basically) one thing — lets people download and read books.
And so I ask: is the idea that that market segment isn’t large enough to sustain a $400 electronic device really that outrageous? It’s not that there is zero market for digital books, it’s just that there’s no market for a $400 digital-book-reading device that doesn’t do anything else. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Apple announced book sales through iTunes tomorrow, because it makes sense to offer them for reading on a convergence device like the iPod or iPhone. What Apple would never do is design and release a device dedicated to reading digital books.
When you have music, movies and games, books are a nice side-business. But to think books can stand-alone as the driver behind a device like the Kindle? I’ve got to side with Jobs on this one: on that scale, people don’t read any more.
All that said, I’ll leave you with two digressions, offered without comment.
Digression #1: Some Sales Figures
- Est. Unit Sales of You: Staying Young, the #1 selling book for the period October 29 to December 9: 503,000 source
- Est. Unit Sales of Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360), the #1 selling video game for the period November 2007: 1,565,404source
- Est. Unit Sales of Ratatouille, #1 selling DVD for the period October 29 to December 9: 9,190,669 source
Digression #2: A message from Amazon on the Kindle
From Kindle’s product page:
Kindle Availability
Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is temporarily sold out. We are working hard to manufacture Kindles as quickly as possible and are prioritizing orders on a first come, first served basis. Please ORDER KINDLE NOW to reserve your place in line. We will keep you informed by email as we get more precise delivery dates. Note that Kindles cannot currently be sold or shipped to customers living outside of the U.S.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
purchasing job May 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 am
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