Amazon’s reading device went on sale in November, sold out in under six hours, and has been unavailable ever since. Four months later you still cannot buy one, which is either a supply chain failure or the most sustained piece of scarcity marketing in recent memory.
The reviews concentrate on the screen and the industrial design. The screen is genuinely good and the industrial design is genuinely not. It looks like a prop from a film about the future made in 1994, the buttons run down both edges where your hands already are, and the keyboard is there because someone insisted on a keyboard.
Neither is the story. The story is that it has a cellular radio and there is no bill.
You do not sign up with a carrier. You do not enter an account number or top up a balance or pick a plan. You buy a book and roughly a minute later it is on the device, wherever you are, and nobody has asked you for anything beyond the price of the book. Amazon has bought the data wholesale and buried it in the cost of the content, and the entire mechanism is hidden.
I have been arguing for a while that the interesting products are the ones where the shop is the point and the device is the delivery mechanism. When Apple showed its television box last January, my objection was that it was a bookmark to a library you already owned rather than a way to buy something new. Amazon has built the same category of thing and got the direction right. This is not a reader that can also shop. It is a shop with a screen attached.
The display technology is what makes the trick affordable. Electronic paper draws power only when the image changes, so a device can hold a radio and still run for days. Try this with a backlit LCD and you get four hours of battery and a product nobody wants.
What I dislike is the part everyone is being quiet about. The books are locked to the account and the format is Amazon’s. You are not buying a book in any sense your bookshelf would recognise. You are buying permission to read a file on hardware Amazon controls, and that permission depends on a company continuing to exist and continuing to feel the same way about you.
Nobody minds yet because nothing has gone wrong yet. It went wrong for people who bought music from three separate stores that later closed their authentication servers, and it will go wrong here eventually, and the response will be that the terms always said so.
The hardware will get better and cheaper. Somebody will do this with a decent industrial designer in the room. But the free radio is the part competitors will find hardest to copy, because it requires being large enough to negotiate with a mobile network and patient enough to hide the cost.