Jeff Bezos as Media Jesus?
First published 12/13/2007
In case you missed it, impresario Jeff Bezos just released what may be the gadget to surpass the iPod as the most important advance in consumer technology since the cell phone: the Kindle.
The Kindle, which is temporarily sold-out on Amazon, is a thin, light, wonderfully wireless hand held device with an “electronic paper” display that brings to its holder newspapers from around the world, magazines, blogs and books for $400 (not including subscription rates and purchase prices of books).
The “electronic paper” display is said to be a breeze to read in natural light and also easier on your eyes than the typical and soon to be antediluvian displays of PDAs and most computer monitors.
Kindle offers six font sizes for the ocularly-challenged set (that means you, mom), automatic or manual digital dog-ears for the forgetful reader (afternoon, dad), easy online browsing and downloading of New York Times bestsellers for $9.99 or less, a long-lasting battery (a move away from Steve Jobsian marketing machinations, which forced customers to update their first generation iPods when batteries died), an embedded dictionary for deciphering unnecessarily esoteric words, like antediluvian which means “terribly outdated,” the ability to receive personal Word docs via email, an extensive library capacity and the coup de grace to competitors like the Sony Reader, the Kindle can withstand a two-and-a-half-foot drop to the floor without losing its composure and crying for its banky.
The Kindle could be the solution to the problem many needers-of-news and readers-of-books have with the evolving media and technology landscape: tangibility.
Like my old-school dad, I prefer news that folds and leaves inky reminders of consumption on my fingertips. I like the sight of a virgin paper through groggy-eyes almost as much as I like the jumbled crumpled wrinkled aftermath that finds the blue recycling tub come evening. I like snapping out the cold morning crispness and scanning the gray wingspan, trashing the advertising inserts that fall out, triaging the stories by interest and cutting-out those pieces worth saving, in finale.
The Kindle ‘aint a paper, true, but I ‘aint young enough to matter.
I may be closer to the digital generation than most, having matured to adulthood with dinosaurs like AOL (I used a pager once, too), but my affinity to smudgy papers will be properly supplanted in the marketplace by the desires of today’s tykes maturing with Facebook, iPhone, PSP and g-d knows what else. If 12-year-olds wrote the news, they’d inform the adults of what was commonplace in their existence and with that, what is expected in the future. The Kindle, I believe, would be in line with those hypothetical editorialized expectations, which would demand capability as well as tangibility.
The future for Kindle looks bright and it will likely only get better in versions 2.0 and beyond—bet your bottom dollar audio and video functions are on their way.
I hope so, because I dig radio. Particularly weekend programming on public radio. Having to consider vocalization while compiling the words of a story requires skill and special consideration. A radio journalist must be considerate to the sensitivities listeners have to vocal inflection, while still skillful at constructing a penetrating, well-studied story. The slow, well-pronounced hum of the radio-read is a nice jazz. (Sports talk radio is a guilty pleasure — how they fill the time, I will never know, hopefully.)
If the Kindle adds that function, and cuts the price in half, I’m sold. I wouldn’t even need a video function, because television news is glance or miss for me anyway. I gravitate more towards CSPAN, TPT and PBS than the well-lit, evenly-foundationed faces of CNN, MSNBC, so forth and so on. Too much show and urgency, not enough concern for the implications of their rantings on the populace. Thankfully, scrolling marquees on the bottom of the screen have a tranquilizing effect, preventing much of their ramblings from penetrating.
But if consequential, what will the Kindle mean for our foundering media? Is it a savior? It remains to be seen, much like my career.
As an aspiring journalist, I wonder where I’ll land when school tosses me back into the world in the summer of 2009. Will the vowels and consonants I connect carefully become a meaningful part of your morning regiment, folded-out with your morning coffee?
Will my voice reach you through car speakers or podcasts?
Will you scroll through my stories?
Will you “Kindle me?”
Will I find a job at all?
Are other aspiring journalists as nervous about our collective futures as I am? How far along in its evolution will the media world be when we graduate and set out to fill the column inches consumed by the interested masses?
Much has changed over the last decade. Circulation rates continue tumbling and with advertising dollars going elsewhere, who will pay for the barrels of ink or bandwidth we need to fill the column inches?
Even if the Kindle is the form of information, speculation and sensation dissemination to climb out of the media maelstrom as the economically viable and preferred platform of the fickle milieu, how, simply put, will those of us who put the words on the paper screen get paid?
Arthur Miller once said, “A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.” I like that. That’s something worth paying for. I look around, I surf and scroll around, and I see too many journalists (and I use that word loosely) just talking to themselves and maybe a few friends. At the highest levels, too many writers alienate readers with blatant naval-gazing. Having something to say is good, but knowing when and when not to say it is even better. Knowing if anybody even cares is best.
Hopefully, something like the Kindle can help reconnect our segmented cohort and blow a salubrious breath into weary lungs.