Is Bezos Crazy Like a Fox, Or Just Crazy?

Nobody Seems to Understand What Jeff Bezos is Doing. Does He? - Farhad Manjoo via PandoDaily

Jeff Bezos once famously declared that, in the service of innovation and its long-term success, Amazon is “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” He was being a bit modest there; Amazon is not merely “willing” to be misunderstood, it often tries to actively sow widespread misunderstanding. This works it its advantage; if competitors don’t know what Amazon is up to, if they can’t even figure out where and how it aims to make money, they’ll have a harder time beating it.

But all this misunderstanding can’t be an unalloyed good. Amazon is so opaque, with so many mysterious businesses and revenue streams, that you’ve got to wonder whether the people who work there even understand what it’s up to. In business, simplicity often wins. Selling me a device to get me to buy a membership in order to get a book for free. Is Bezos crazy like a fox? Or is he just plain crazy? We have no idea.

But Bezos is involved in a land grab: he wants people to use Kindle and buy books from Amazon long enough to become a default standard. If he has to extract value from the publishers and authors of books to do so, he will.

Bezos is looking over his should at Apple (and more distantly at Google) who are developing the most dominant mobile devices on the planet, and he knows it is all converging. People — given their druthers — would rather have a single mobile device to do everything: read books, surf the web, write email, blog, social network (yes, I am using that as a verb).

So the only question is, why doesn’t he put a phone on the Kindle? It’s already a (bad) browsing device with an embedded whispernet data connection, so perhaps he is planning to give away phone service to Amazon Prime subscribers, too.

Just In The Nook Of Time?

Microsoft settles some patent disputes with Barnes & Noble’s Nook division by investing $300M into the company. The market cheers. Am I missing something?

Microsoft’s Nook Deal, Aiming at Amazon, Sets Up Battle in E-Books - Michael De La Merced and Julie Bosman via NYTimes.com

Microsoft agreed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division on Monday, giving the bookstore chain stronger footing in the hotly contested electronic book market and creating an alliance that could intensify the fight over the future of digital reading.

The deal, which gives Microsoft a 17.6 percent stake, values the Nook unit at $1.7 billion — roughly double Barnes & Noble’s entire market value as of last Friday — and bolsters the bookseller’s efforts to make its digital business the linchpin of its future growth.

The announcement was the latest surprise in an unpredictable and rapidly shifting e-book market, which is crowded with technology giants trying to chip away at Amazon.com’s dominance. Amazon once had close to 90 percent of the e-book market, but since then, a handful of players, including Apple, Google and now Microsoft, have edged in.

So, B & N is a bookseller, with hundreds of stores. Remember when Borders went bankrupt? And Tower Records? The days of blazing a new trail in retail by undifferentiated sales are done.

Stowe Boyd via stoweboyd.com

Successful retail in the US is falling into two categories: companies selling their own products, like Apple, and focused specialty providers, like Trader Joe’s and Uniqlo. Otherwise: a wasteland. And soon we will be dismantling all the big box stores.

So, this is a bail out. B & N needs big cash to compete against Kindle, because Amazon is underpricing the device to hold onto the market in the face of growing market penetration of iPad and iPhone as better mobile reading devices. Microsoft, who completely missed the ereader market and who is fighting Apple and Google in the smart device marketplace, hope that a strategic partnership with B & N around the Nook can help, but how?

Unmentioned is the idea that some soon-to-market version of the Nook will be a Windows 8 device, instead of running Nook’s proprietary OS. And a spin-out of the Nook division into a new company, called Nook, with even more cash from Microsoft. Otherwise the whole thing makes no sense.

Social Reading

Clive Thompson is a bit behind the times:

Nick Bilton, Roll-Up Computers and Their Kin

Clive Thompson, a science and technology writer and columnist for Wired magazine, said that if “publishers are smart — and readers lucky” the content of the e-books of the future will be more open and collaborative.

“You’ll be able to cut, paste and exchange your favorite passages, using them in the same promiscuous way we now use online text and video to argue, think, or express how we’re feeling,” Mr. Thompson said.

In other words, e-books will become social experiences, with sharing among readers and even the ability to see the most popular passages as other readers highlight and comment in real time. “E-books will display their social and informational life,” Mr. Thompson said. “On which pages do readers most linger? What are the world’s best comments for this passage?”

The ‘popular highlights’ feature of Kindle has been out for some time, where Amazon aggregates highlights from other readers, to let you know which passages are more popular. So Thompson is presaging something that is here already.

The most obvious social affordance of books — sharing them with others — is lost with the current restrictions on ebooks (as Verlyn Klinkenborg noted recently). I guess I gave up on sharing albums with friends long ago, and so that dimension of music listening has been long gone. But I still feel more secure in a room lined with books. Perhaps in another 10 years all my books will have been donated to the library, and I will be reading — and sharing — online, as Thompson suggests.

Steve Berlin Johnson Doesn’t Buy Nick Carr’s ‘The Shallows’

Like Steven Pinker, Steven Johnson makes short work of most of Nic Carr’s hand-wringing about the Web ruining our minds, and by extension, Western civilization:

Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social

Mr. Carr spends a great deal of his book’s opening section convincing us that new forms of media alter the way the brain works, which I suspect most of his readers have long ago accepted as an obvious truth. The question is not whether our brains are being changed. (Of course new experiences change your brain — that’s what experience is, on some basic level.) The question is whether the rewards of the change are worth the liabilities.

The problem with Mr. Carr’s model is its unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading. For society to advance as it has since Gutenberg, he argues, we need the quiet, solitary space of the book. Yet many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise. (Gutenberg himself borrowed his printing press from the screw presses of Rhineland vintners, as Mr. Carr notes.)

It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading.

Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.

And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.

Johnson also touches on the new Kindle ‘popular highlights’ feature — where Amazon aggregates highlights from other readers, to let you know which passages are more popular — but doesn’t mention the inherent creepiness of Amazon watching our reading activities. It appears that turning this feature off requires disabling backups of all annotations, which seems like a Facebook-like coercive agreement.

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Books As Social Objects

Verlyn Klinkenborg makes some astute observations about his use of iPad and Kindle as a reader of books, in particular the role that books play in social intercourse and how this is diminished because of the restrictions that digital book tools place upon us:

The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first — and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your device. That goes against the social value of reading, the collective knowledge and collaborative discourse that comes from access to shared libraries. That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers or our culture.

Removing the social affordance of loaning someone a book is perhaps the worst crime perpetuated by the new world order of digital content. The communitarian aspect of shared books in libraries is similarly damaged.

Books should be social. Our personal property should be ours to loan to friends.

Imagine if Sears mde it impossible for me to loan my chain saw, or if fingerprint recognition on my VW made it impossible for a neighbor to borrow it?

But, in the name of countering ‘piracy’, we can’t loan The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress to a friend. And our society is lessened because of that.

Related articles

• Editorial Notebook: Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader (nytimes.com)
• In Ink on a Flyleaf, Forever Yours (nytimes.com)