Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Jeff Bezos's mission: Compelling small publishers to think big - Fortune Tech

Excerpt:

Fortune: As the devices mature and the market grows, do you think the idea of what a "book" is will shift?

Bezos: I think the definition of a book is changing. It's getting more convenient. Now you can get a book in less than 60 seconds.

But in some ways, books are also staying exactly the same. The whole narrative isn't changing. The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

There's another way that it's not changing, and that's that the book -- the physical book -- is designed to disappear and get out of the way so you can enter the author's world. So when you're reading a physical paper book, you're not thinking about the ink and the glue and the stitching. All of those things vanish so you can focus on the author's words. The Kindle's designed to be the same so when you're reading, the whole device vanishes, so that you're left with the author's world.

Jeff Bezos's mission: Compelling small publishers to think big - Fortune Tech

2 comments:

Thad McIlroy said...

" the whole device vanishes, so that you're left with the author's world."

Until the battery dies.

pbokelly said...

:) always good to plan ahead in that context