In Defense of the Kindle

My colleagues and I at E-Reads haven't been exactly effusive about the merits of Amazon's Kindle (though, compared to some blogs we've read, our comments will seem absolutely benign). However, I do want to say something positive, indeed something very, very positive.

For the past twenty years or so, since I first laid eyes on CD-ROMs, I and a host of cockeyed visionaries like me have been obsessed with the dream of a handheld book reader. Early in the 1990s I wrote for book trade publications about the possibilities and was so certain the day would come that by the mid-1990s I got tired of waiting for someone to invent one and spoke to some technical people about developing one myself. Luckily, the introduction of the Rocket Books in 1998 put an end to my quixotic and potentially bankrupting scheme. More significantly, it also called to arms the community of futurists who'd been doing more than sketching -- they'd been developing the hardware and programming the software and waiting for their moment. And now, in 1998, it was here.

The moment may have been there but the handheld book reader was not: the technology, business model, rights management, and culture were immature. And despite the Sony Reader and the Kindle, they still are.

So what's my defense of the Kindle? Simple. It brings us a gigantic step closer to the dream. Whatever you want to say against it, it combines three superpowerful forces: a flawed but demonstrably usable device, a blitzkrieg of a marketing campaign, and the limitless content of amazon.com. The public's perception of ebooks can never return to the flash-in-the-pan flop that scoffers have branded it.

Maybe the Kindle is the wrong product, but at least it's the wrong product at the right time. However limited the success of Amazon's gadget may be – hell, even if it's a total flop – there's no going back on ebooks now. A wave of technologists will be inspired by the Kindle to do the job right in the next generation of ebook technology. It may still take years but as far as I'm concerned the game is over and the cyberbooks dreamers have won.

Thank you, Kindle.

- Richard Curtis