In November 2007 an article appeared in NewsWeek magazine announcing the introduction of a brand-new electronic gadget named the Amazon Kindle. It was a hand-held device dominated by a 6-inch oblong E Ink display with a version of a QWERTY keyboard underneath it, and was intended to allow the owner to carry a library of books in his or her pocket or bag rather than having to lug a case of physical books around. The Kindle also included a free wireless connection to the American Sprint EV-DO network, named Whispernet by Amazon, that allowed books from a library of 90,000 volumes to be downloaded to the device anywhere with a wireless signal. The owner could literally finish one book while sitting down enjoying a coffee, decide to start reading the next book in the series and have it on the screen before the coffee had even cooled.
Amazon offered the Kindle for sale, only in the United States, on 19 November. The entire first production run sold out in a matter of hours, despite the hefty $399 price tag and the device almost immediately acquired the description ‘the iPod of reading’ as it was thought that the device would revolutionise portable literature in the same way that the iPod had revolutionised portable music.
Amazon had chosen the name well: one definition of the word kindle is ‘to light or set on fire or to arouse or inspire a feeling or emotion’ and the Kindle certainly did that. What nobody could have even guessed at the time was that the Kindle would change the world of publishing in much the same way as the invention of the printing press by the German inventor and goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg in about 1440. In fact, you could argue that the publishing world is still coming to terms with the concept of the electronic book and the Kindle a decade and a half after its introduction.
The first Kindle was not without its faults – page navigation wasn’t easy and the E Ink display refreshed quite slowly – and it was followed in February 2009 by the Kindle 2, which offered more storage capacity, faster page turns and a screen that refreshed much quicker, all for a lower initial price of $359 that later dropped to $259. The available library had also expanded to almost a quarter of a million titles.
Just over a year later, in July 2010, Amazon introduced the Kindle 3, later known as the Kindle Keyboard, with a more conventional keyboard layout. This was the first Kindle available in the UK. It offered access to almost half a million books and the Wi-Fi only version cost only $139/£109.
Amazon’s pace of development significantly increased, with the first touchscreen version, the Kindle Touch, being introduced on 28 September 2011, simultaneously with the Kindle Fire. The storage capacity of the new device was increased to 4GB and it offered a battery that would last for weeks, all at an even lower price of $99 for the Wi-Fi only version.
That was followed by the Kindle Paperwhite a year later and a raft of other models including the Kindle Voyage and the Kindle Oasis, along with revisions to the earlier versions as part of Amazon’s well-established corporate ethos of continual development and improvement.
And in parallel with the hardware, the Kindle itself, Amazon was also making it far easier for anybody, Irrespective of their talent or literacy – or lack of either or both – to upload self-published books onto the Amazon platform. For the first time ever, anyone could become an author and see their books for sale across the entire world. Suddenly, literary agents were no longer the gatekeepers, and commercial publishers were no longer the only players on the field.
I’ll cover the implications of that in my next blog.
