So, word is that this week Amazon is bringing out a new revision of the redesigned Kindle 2 that features a much larger LCD screen. (The photo at the top of the post is the Kindle 2 as it was originally introduced a couple of months ago)
I hadn’t thought of it before, but this Mental Floss post by link-blogger Miss Cellania points out that half of all Kindle sales are to people over the age of 50, and 70% are to people over the age of 40. Not exactly the demographic one might initially expect for the “e-book”. But she also gives a very plausible explanation for why: adjustable font sizes. The Kindle supports six type sizes, which makes it a breeze for people with aging eyes to adjust the print to whatever level they need to be able to read it comfortably.
But what about large-type books, you ask? That’s the other half of this argument. Large-type books, when they are even available for new titles, by necessity make for more pages and thus heavier and more cumbersome books. But the lightness and overall small form factor of the Kindle alleviates the aggravation of carrying around a great big book when you just want to read a little, not to mention the ability to store a number of books.
As it turns out, I know three people who own Kindles, and sure enough, all of them are over the age of 50. One is over the age of 80. They’re also all women, and I wonder if anyone has looked at gender breakdown in Kindle ownership yet, but for the moment we’ll consider that an unknown quantity. I know they all love their Kindles, but I haven’t heard or read any of them mention the eyesight issue; it may be that they’re not consciously basing their approval on that feature, or it may be that it really isn’t salient for them. My 84-year-old friend also stares at her computer screen using 9 and 10-point fonts all day and doesn’t seem to mind the tiny type. Nevertheless, it’s kind of hard to dismiss the eyesight factor when the demos skew so high to an older audience.
I’ll suggest another reason the Kindle appeals to older users: it’s a single-purpose device. Even though it’s very cool and hip and supposedly represents the beginning of the end of printed books, the Kindle is still just a book reader. (Oh, okay, you got me, it also displays newspapers, magazines, and some blogs, but still all you do with it is READ) My experience teaching older people how to use their computers has made it pretty clear to me that one of the things that flummoxes them about using computers is that they do too damn much. The technological mindset of people whose adulthood predates the computer age in a significant way revolves around gadgets and inventions that do one thing. My clients don’t want to learn how to do a lot of different things on their computers, they want to know how to do one task and to hell with the rest of it. The Kindle reassures people that technology can be safely marshalled into a single comprehensible task.
Don’t believe me? The same argument is frequently made about cell phones — even I prefer a cell phone that is just a phone to one that also has a camera, shows video, sends text messages, and plays MP3s. And how many VCRs never got used for anything but playback because it was too damn complicated to figure out how to record with one, or even how to set the clock? The elderly people I work with were middle-aged when the VCR landed in their laps, so they’re not unfamiliar with technology, they just prefer to do one thing at a time.
The larger screen on the Kindle 2 will increase the appeal to older consumers even more. More real estate means more words per page, even with bigger type sizes. Meanwhile, another feature addition – color – does not appear to have the same value. Last year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said he would “love to add color” to the Kindle, and last month Fujitsu brought out the first color e-book, but the $1300 price point on that reader can’t compete with the $299 price of the Kindle, which a lot of people think is too expensive as it is. Moreover, it’s hard to see the value in a color display if the primary purpose of the device is to render black text on a white background. Bringing color to the Kindle might very well signal a transformation of the device away from its single-purpose strong point into becoming a variation on the recently popular “netbook” PCs, which would almost assuredly chase away the people who have fallen in love with the device for what it is.
Right after the Kindle 2 came out in February, Amazon also quickly dispatched a Kindle book-reading app for the iPhone. The release caught people a bit by surprise, and even moreso when the app turned out to be a free download, but as the review at that link explains, the iPhone is no Kindle. The iPhone is much smaller than the Kindle overall, but especially in the screen dimensions. I downloaded the Kindle app when it came out and also bought a download of Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” to try it out. On my iPod Touch, the screen size is so small that it repaginates the book into over 7000 pages (as compared to 416 pages in the hardcover edition). That’s a lot of page-flipping on my iTouch. The Kindle device renders the same number of pages as the hardcover. The Kindle may not let me check Facebook, play YouTube videos, or make pretend fart noises, but it does do a better job of simulating the book reading experience. Technology writer and prognosticator Steven Johnson recently wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal speculating that the Kindle was the beginning of the end of reading as a solitary pastime. Part of his core argument is that the impulse-buy factor of owning a Kindle (a very real current phenomenon among Kindle owners) and the features available through Google’s Book Search, combined with the ubiquitous online presence of an iPhone will represent a “singularity” where anyone can look up and read anything anywhere at any time.
We will dismiss some of this as the breathless utopianism that futurists, technophiles, and web people frequently engage in. The pitfalls of DRM, the struggles of net neutrality, the uphill battle for municipal free WiFi, and a host of other economic interests will unquestionably prevent elements of Johnson’s vision from ever becoming a reality. Besides that, though, Johnson also engages in that peculiar delusion among people who are infatuated with gadgets that everybody WANTS a gadget that does everything:
But Amazon has already released a version of the Kindle software for reading its e-books on an iPhone, which is much more conducive to all manner of distraction. No doubt future iterations of the Kindle and other e-book readers will make it just as easy to jump online to check your 401(k) performance as it is now to buy a copy of “On Beauty.”
No thanks. I don’t WANT to check my stock portfolio, sports scores, headlines, AND read Baudelaire all on a tiny pocket-sized device. And, conversely, I don’t want to carry around something as big as a Kindle when I *do* want to check e-mail, find a cab, or play a quick game of Tetris in the doctor’s waiting room. This is why tablet PCs have been consistently unpopular and why netbooks are still only a hit among the geek crowd. The multitasking/convergence device crowd needs to take a breath and realize that they have to wait until the current over-40 crowd (basically the ass-end of the Baby Boom generation) is thoroughly kaput before these sort of profound cultural changes can be realized through technology, and by then all the oil will be gone and no one will be able to buy them anyway.
What does seem clear is that the Kindle did absolutely break the barrier that had destroyed every single e-book device before it. I still can’t explain that, because there were several e-book readers prior to Kindle that were technically and aesthetically superior, but if you throw enough shit against a wall, eventually some of it will start to stick. At this particuar juncture, though, I’d pay a lot less attention to people like Steven Johnson and a lot more attention to people like my 84-year-old friend who loves her first-gen Kindle to decide what the near-term prospects for e-books and reading might be.
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