Tropophilia

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, recently sent out his annual letter to shareholders [warning: PDF file]. I’m not a shareholder [yet], but the letter is currently linked on the Amazon homepage.

Bezos writes almost exclusively about the Kindle, the e-reader created and sold by Amazon that seems to be constantly going out-of-stock. While the whole letter is interesting and informative, I found that one paragraph in particular clarified something about the Kindle that I hadn’t though about before: the Kindle not as the harbinger of informational ADD, but as the savior of long-form reading as we know it. I especially like the term “information snacking,” and you’ll probably see me use it more and more here on the blog.

Here’s the paragraph in its entirety*, and I’ll leave it at that for you to ponder and comment on:

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning.

Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop.

As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.

I realize my tone here tends toward the missionary, and I can assure you it’s heartfelt. It’s also not unique to me but is shared by a large group of folks here. I’m glad about that because missionaries build better products. I’ll also point out that, while I’m convinced books are on the verge of being improved upon, Amazon has no sinecure as that agent. It will happen, but if we don’t execute well, it will be done by others.

* I broke the paragraph up into four pieces to make it easier on the eyes (and brain).

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user etech.