Marketing Ninja

Those of you who follow me on Twitter might be aware that I bought my dad a Kindle on Father’s Day. My dad’s a busy guy and the only time he really gets to sit down and read a new book is when he’s sitting in the airport wishing that he had bought one before he stepped into the gate – I figured the Kindle’s ability to instantly grab a book any time, any place would be something that he’d love.

This morning I came across Seth Godin’s blog entry entitled “Random thoughts about the Kindle” and was a bit disparaged when I read:

“[The Kindle's] for women and women are buying it. The bestseller list of Kindle titles is much less tech-heavy than Amazon’s list was in the early days of the web. An Oprah book is #1. And the colors and feel of the machine don’t feel like the current uber-geek tech dream device.”

Naturally I’m not going to let some damn marketer insult my manliness and my father’s manliness! How dare he? HOW DARE HE?!

In all seriousness though, the point I take issue with is this:

The Kindle does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible job of actually improving the act of reading a book. This is a surprising design choice, I think, and a mistake. Here are three simple examples of how non-fiction books on the Kindle could be better, not just cheaper and thinner:

–Let me see the best parts of the book as highlighted by thousands of other readers.
–Let me see notes in the margin as voted up, Digg-style, by thousands of other readers.
–Let me interact with hyperlinks and smart connections not just within the book but across books

I can think of ten others, and so can you. Instead of making this a dead end (like a book) they could have made it a connector (like the web).

Seth is essentially arguing to make the Kindle an interactive book – make it a social connector where you can interact with other readers and see what they’ve thought about the author’s work. While this sounds well and good there are some, in my opinion, cultural, technological, and feasibility issues that make socializing the Kindle a poor decision.

Reading the Book + Reading Thoughts of Other Readers = Polluted Reading Experience

Book clubs and English classes are existing social mechanisms for discussing books – you read a section of a book or the entire book and then you get together and talk about it among your peers. You can share ideas on what the author’s message was, what you liked, didn’t like, and so forth. What’s the difference between those mechanisms and having a widget inside an eBook that keeps you up to date on what your peers think of any particular section of the book?

The difference is that you don’t have your entire book club looking over your shoulder and shouting out their thoughts in real-time as you try to read the damn book!

I can see where margin notes would be helpful, like in a technical book for instance, but if you’re trying to read a novel, the sort of book that demands your full attention in order to appreciate it, then what would happen if you had additional “social” information on every page of the text? Your reading experience would be ruined.

A book club or an English class is an effective means of engaging other readers about a book because you’ve already had a chance to digest the work by the time you end up discussing it. Discussing the book as you’re reading it simply adds noise to the experience and ultimately cheapens it.

Social Widgets Require Frequent Screen Updates + Kindle’s LCD Doesn’t Use Power Unless It’s Updating the Screen = Bye Bye Battery Longevity

The Kindle uses a special power-saving LCD technology which doesn’t require any (or much) electricity to display an image on its screen; The Kindle only needs juice to change the image on the screen. What this means is that a Kindle doesn’t have to waste energy displaying a single page from a book on the reading screen at any given time thus the battery can last for a very, very long time.

This is also why the Kindle has a separate LCD for the scroll bar.

Social information updates constantly and if that information is to be displayed on Kindle then consumers won’t get to enjoy the extraordinary longevity of Kindle’s battery.

If we were to force consumers to make a choice between

• Getting to have access to all of your books for days and days of use without having to recharge the battery or
• Getting to read comments from idiots who don’t “get” Into the Wild

then what would consumers choose? I think the answer is obvious.

I have nothing but respect for Seth Godin; I’m almost finished with Permission Marketing at the moment and I’ll be reading All Marketers are Liars after that, but Seth’s wrong about messing with the Kindle and adding social networking to it. Reading a book should be a personal experience – discussing a book is something that you do once you’re established your own opinion. Being exposed to hundreds of opinions about what you’re reading at the same time you’re reading it pollutes the experience.

Think about it – if all of the comments from my blog popped up in a constantly updating widget that followed you down the screen as you read my entries then how would that affect your reading experience? Would it be different than if you got to read my entries in their entirety, then read the other comments, then added your own? Absolutely it would. Interacting with other readers is something that shouldn’t be performed synchronously with reading.

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