A note to Jeff Bezos

Daniel Rothschild
March 23rd, 2010
Technology

Hey Jeff,

How’s it going? Long-time fan, first time open-letter writer. Huge fan of your operation, despite your sometimes silly abuse of patent laws.

And for the last few months, I’ve been a huge fan of your Kindle. It’s literally changed the way I read. Every Sunday, for instance, I cruise through the New York Times in a matter of an hour or so. I literally couldn’t turn the pages in the paper edition in that time. And the best part is it only costs seventy-five cents.

I’ve been reading more fiction, too, since I got a Kindle. Better fiction, as a matter of fact. When I get the idea I want to read something, I go to the Kindle store and get it. I start reading a minute or so later. So when I have the momentum to start a new book, I can start it more or less immediately. No more reading about it on Sunday, ordering it, receiving it on Wednesday, and never getting into it. Old-school folks might criticize this as being a result of our on-demand culture, but I think it’s great.

The Kindle is a great piece of hardware. And for those of us who like to settle in with a book, newspaper, or magazine for more than a few minutes at a time, e-ink is vastly superior to the backlit, have-to-move-your-finger-across-the-screen-to-change-the-page interface of the iPad. When I open a book or magazine on my Kindle, I forget in seconds that I’m not reading a traditional book.

I love the way that I interface with newspapers and magazines, especially; I can get a table contents for each section or leaf through article-by-article. And none of the “Continued on page A12″ nonsense. It’s all there in the most easy-to-read format imaginable. The newspaper metaphor stands in a way that newspapers on the web just don’t. For magazines, I love paging through The Atlantic or Reason on my Kindle.

But I’ve been wondering recently: Are you pulling a Pete Rose and betting on the opposing team? Are you heavily invested in Apple stock?

I ask because Amazon seems to have made some decisions to make the computer-based aspect of the Kindle suck as much as possible.

Take your recent Kindle for Mac application. The other day at work I used the app to open a book I’d bought on my Kindle device to search for a phrase I remembered. But guess what? No search. You don’t offer it on the Windows version either. What gives? I can’t imagine Apple releasing an app without search. I know you say you want to have it in a future version. But that doesn’t do a lot of good right now. How hard could it have been to put this functionality into your current version? And what’s with the font rendering on Macs?

I know, I know, you wanted to get something to market, and you’ll fix it later. But that’s the problem. For those of us between about 25 and 45, “get it to market and fix it later” is what we’ve come to expect from Microsoft’s storied line of mediocre operating systems. The usual MS MO seems to be to release something and then, a couple of service packs or a paid upgrade later, it finally works as advertised.

Your competition now is Apple. They don’t release half-ass products into the market (anymore). Later versions improve on previous versions, but they don’t release products in glorified alpha state. In other words, Steve Jobs wouldn’t pull the crap you’re pulling now with your desktop applications.

And the Kindle store on Amazon.com. Where do I begin? You’re getting more Kindle newspapers listed all the time. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how one is supposed to find out what papers have been added recently. Same for magazines. If you even have a page up in the Kindle store with these listed, I can’t find it. I don’t think it would break the norms of e-commerce to have a page highlighting new listings. That seems, well, pretty damn obvious.

And books. Oh, books. Through your Amazon Associates program, you give commissions to people like bloggers who link to Amazon books and get people to buy. Not so for the Kindle. The Amazon API is powerful, and if you gave people a profit incentive to use it to create new ways to display your content, much of what I’ve outlined wouldn’t be an issue, since people would take care of it for you. But you haven’t done this. Why not? You get between 30 and 65 percent of the purchase price of books. It’s not like paying a four percent commission to someone who came up with a neat way to sell your books would be a deal killer.

So, Jeff, I guess I’m a huge fan of your hardware. But your software is pretty mediocre. That’s kind of ironic, isn’t it, at least in the way that Alanis Morissette butchered that word? Don’t you think? I mean, Amazon built its reputation and business on the web. Hell, you defined what web commerce could be. You didn’t make your name in publishing. You certainly didn’t make it in hardware. But now you’ve built an incredible piece of hardware that has revolutionized publishing. And your web site that supports it, and the apps you’ve put together for desktop computers, are between bad and mediocre.

I really like my Kindle. I want to keep liking it. But in a couple weeks, you’re going to have to compete with something that claims to be a Kindle-killer. And I’m not sure that you’ll be able to compete.

So please, Jeff, don’t saddle me with an (admittedly lightweight, well-designed) obsolete antique that will fall into the where-are-they-now world of hardware. The Kindle isn’t the final word in e-book readers; it’s a proof of concept for what can be. Improve on it, not just in the hardware but in the web and desktop experiences. What you have out right now in hardware — even though Amazon doesn’t have its own line of fanboy-beloved operating systems and computers — can compete.

But it’s going to require a lot more innovation and work that Amazon currently seems willing to put into it.

Thanks for reading.

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