That's Captain to You!

On the Genius of Kindle

I’ve been extremely skeptical of ebooks. There are a lot of arguments against them, but for me, an important part of owning a book is the tangibility and permanence of the possession. The woman in this Wondermark comic embodies a lot of my feelings toward investing in real books, and I perceive ebooks to potentially conflict with them.

But, at the same time, I try to keep up with technology, so some months ago I bought an Amazon Kindle. It was reasonably priced, clearly the best device on the e-reader market, compatible with my PDF files and, most importantly, meant that I could spend far less money on college textbooks.

Fast forward to today. I suddenly realize that my Kindle has completely transformed my reading habits. It goes deeper than being able to haul all of my college textbooks with my on campus. I’m reading more. I’m reading more fiction, more non-fiction. I can even email technical journals to it over WiFi and skip the trouble of printing them out.

Unexpectedly, the Kindle has become one of the best purchases I’ve made. Unexpectedly, it’s transformed my skepticism against ebooks. How did it do this?

The Kindle is high quality hardware.

There is no way around this. It weighs next to nothing, yet it’s durable and solidly built. What’s more, it has battery life that is measured in astronomical time. It has ample file-capacity and even has WiFi and 3G modems. I can throw it into my bag before biking to work and know it’s there and safe when I need it.

The interface is unassuming.

This is a huge deal. I think this is the central genius of the Kindle. There is minimal Kindle operating-system interface between my eyes and the ebook I want to read.

The interface is so unassuming that, in my mind, the Kindle is the book I’m reading, not some mini-computer running Linux that displays PDF files (which it is).

This is how the Kindle meets the tangibility need I have for books. I can read my “book” and hold it in my hand. Or set it down and think, but know it’s still there. That’s not the sense I get when reading a PDF on my laptop (which is technologically very similar).

Ubuntu Linux

This realization reminded me of a scuffle surrounding Ubuntu’s default settings for the Evolution email client about a year ago in September of 2010. Ubuntu 10.10 started shipping with a default signature in Evolution that appended the text:

Sent from Ubuntu.

It was a tiny change, but it aroused significant anger in the Ubuntu community when a bug was filed. There were many well-formed opinions added to the bug comments, which argued over whether the signature should be kept as default or removed.

One comment stuck in my mind as the truest argument over how an operating system should behave.

[…] The best OS is an OS you don’t see and hear!

– greenhunter

This is an age where operating system UIs are getting much more rich and modern all the time. The most striking example is the preview of Windows 8 that has just been released, but OSX and Unix graphical shells follow the same trend.

What I think OS’s are in danger of forgetting amid market competition, and what I think Amazon’s Kindle and Ubuntu’s greenhunter got right, is that the OS is a means to an end, but not the end.

In the case of Kindle, this means minimal interface around the ebooks I want to read. In an conventional OS, it means minimal shell around the programs I want to run.