Kindle: The Next Generation

I like the Kindle. But I don’t quite love it. The biggest advantage is, of course, the lack of screen glare that’s a problem on the phone or the iPad. Sadly though, the touch leaves a lot to be desired and, as Eugene Wei wrote, “typing on a Kindle hardware device is for masochists”. Wei wrote this great article suggesting how the Kindle could become the social network of book readers! I sure hope Amazon implements his ideas.

Wei describes the problems many of us have with reading in the Age of the Internet: we have a “promiscuous attention span” that aligns with blog and tweet sized content, we “crave more novelty and diversity” than can be offered by any single book at a time, we resent many otherwise good books that get bloated in size just to fill some physical book era page count rules, and our “best ideas come from the interaction between concepts in different fields”.

So what are the solutions Wei suggests that the Kindle implement? He’d like a home feed on the Kindle that serves “chunks from all the books I'm reading into small chunks, interweaving them into what would be something like a series of blog posts”. If you were lost about the context of the chunk, click the TV style “Previously, on ” link at the top! If you want to continue reading some more, press the Read More link.

Next, Wei suggests providing a way for readers and Amazon itself to provide links to parts of other books of relevance. If you’d already bought that e-book, clicking the link would open that part of the book. Otherwise, it would show a snippet from that book and have a Buy button below it!

The book site, Goodreads, recently asked me if I’d like to submit a question to Richard Dawkins for an online Q&A session. (To make it clear it wasn’t just spam/random, they went on to mention they picked me because I’d given high ratings to several of his books). My problem? Questions pop up while reading but ask me months/years later and I may not remember. Wei seems to have a solution for that: he recommends that the Kindle allow readers to throw questions at the author. Who could then choose to respond and clarify. And oh, also get a feel of their readers’ pulse. On a somewhat related topic, Wei also suggests a Follow feature similar to Twitter, whereby you could choose to see the Notes of people whose comments you appreciate.

As Wei acknowledges, none of the above may sound new to many:

“This may sound a lot like the basics of modern social networks and hypertext. And it should. No need to reinvent such elegant ideas, refined over so many years.”

C’mon, Amazon: let’s take Kindle to the next level!