After graduating, I wrote on nights and weekends for ten years, working on a colossal sprawling novel set in the 1930s. I had a bunch of day jobs during this time—I ran technology for a number of companies on the East Coast, and I built Motorola’s first e-commerce system. But during the dot-com boom, I took a sabbatical from work and moved to New Mexico to finish writing my novel. Everyone was making their dot-com fortunes, but I was writing about the Great Depression!
When it was done, the book was a million words long and illustrated. I put it online as the web’s first internet novel; it was an ebook before there were ebooks. You could turn pages in your browser, annotate words or sentences you liked, and bookmark pages. If you stopped and later wanted to resume reading, you’d continue where you left off. I created all these features from scratch, little knowing that I was laying the groundwork for the first e-readers.
Halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was living in the wilds of New Mexico again, and I heard that Amazon and Google were working on book digitization projects. As a word lover and text aficionado, I was intrigued and applied for jobs at both companies. I went through grueling interviews with each, basically locked in a conference room all day. You spend an hour with each person who comes in to interview you, and you write code on a whiteboard or draw architecture diagrams.
It’s tough and rigorous: people sometimes leave the interview crying, knowing they’ve failed, and are escorted outside by security. Not only are the interviews hard in general, but many tech companies also throw in “bar-raisers” who ask you questions so hard that you’re supposed to feel like you’ve failed the interview.
There I was, dressed in cowboy boots and a trippy paisley shirt, talking to overworked engineers with barbeque stains on their T-shirts. I talked about linguistics, about Sanskrit, a language I had been teaching myself; I talked about publishing, my love of books, and writing. Finally, I talked about my technical expertise and my visions for the future. I aced my interviews and played Amazon against Google during salary negotiations.
Amazon had a director call to sell me on working there. I still remember where I was the day I spoke to him—sitting on my floor in a patch of sunlight, listening to his voice crackle from more than a thousand miles away on my rural phone line. I lived in a remote place, at the very end of the power and phone grids. Through the static, he hinted that Amazon was working on a secret ebook project, and he offered me any position I wanted on it.
I chose the hardest one—working on a team that had to invent a way of making ebooks from physical books. I was in Seattle two weeks later at new employee orientation, watching an overhead projection of Jeff Bezos’s head welcoming me to work, telling me to have fun and make history. I joined the Kindle team, and for a few years, I worked in a modern version of Gutenberg’s workshop. Most of what we did on Kindle was digital, so you can’t physically see it; it’s like the part of an iceberg below the ocean. The outward form of what you see is a piece of plastic and metal, a Kindle.
What you don’t see are the warrens of cubicles from which Amazon reps called publishers every day asking for more books. You don’t see all the engineers, all the code they’ve written to make payments to book publishers happen every month or to manage wireless downloads or to audit the books in users’ libraries to make sure they’re still there. The Kindle itself is just the tip of the iceberg, and its true workings are invisible. That’s exactly how Amazon wanted it to be.
Yes, I did have fun at Amazon, and I made history. I first joined a team that built the electronic books for Kindle, but I went on from there to do it all. I invented some of the technology used in ebooks and launched the first few Kindles. I traveled to book fairs in New York and London and Frankfurt to evangelize ebooks. I watched ebooks being made in the Philippines and supervised the assembly of Kindles in China. I talked to the White House, former presidents, and astronauts about ebooks. I worked with Wired magazine and Random House. I talked about the future of books with the commissioner of the NFL and the founder of Wikipedia.
I also joined a crazy tribe whose members share their word-sparks with one another. And by this I don’t mean just Amazon: members of this tribe come from all avenues of publishing. A special kind of person is drawn to publishing—they’re often idealistic, as their decisions are made for the written word itself, for something greater than themselves, some spark or idea they want to share with others. These kinds of people are the innovators, the idealists, and they are a vital part of this book because they’re revitalizing how we read. They’re breathing new life into books.
This book talks about publishing, authorship, and the myriad ways we engage with the written word. While my perspective is rooted in my experiences working at Amazon, this book also discusses Apple and Google and publishers large and small. Like others at Amazon, I took my turn spinning the Kindle flywheel, from when it was just a glint of an idea in Jeff Bezos’s eye to the whirlwind it is now, a phenomenon fanning the flames of reading around the globe. This book is the story not just of Kindle, but of the ebook revolution itself—what it is, where it’s headed, and what it means for all of us, for good and for bad.
Introduction to “Bookmarks”
In the ebook revolution, the nature of books and the reading process is changing. Ebooks include everything useful that came before them in books. They add to the reading experience, not detract from it. But many now-familiar elements of print books are going the way of the dodo. Some will die out entirely; others will morph into something new. In part this is good—who’s going to miss paper cuts, after all? But with this change also comes the loss of familiar friends.
The “bookmark” at the end of each chapter takes a look at an element of print books we have come to love or loathe and how it will be affected, transformed, or eliminated by the move to ebooks. As used here, the term “bookmark” is kind of a visual pun. Not only does it refer to an artifact from traditional print books, but each “bookmark” also is a small interlude that describes the ways books have indelibly marked our lives and our culture of reading. These sections are at once sentimental and speculative and appear throughout the book like bookmarks between chapters.
I will explain later in this book that I think there’s really just one book, the book of all human culture. I’ll describe what this one book might look like—as a sort of Facebook for Books, where all books can interact and link to one another in the same way that we ourselves are linked together on Facebook, as friends, coworkers, and family. We don’t have this singularly hyperlinked book yet, but in an effort to build it, I’ll invite you to talk with me and other readers throughout this book.
At the end of each “bookmark,” you’ll see a link you can—and should!—click to continue the conversation online. And I do encourage you to click each link; it lets you into a social reading app that connects you (via Facebook or Twitter) with other readers, with me, and with surprises all along the way. This app is simple to install and unlocks the brave new world of what I call “Reading 2.0.” It’s a world that combines a conversation with the author, a virtual book club, and a thoughtful friend who brings you special notes and treats. Please note: the web page is an independent site maintained by me and is independent of this book’s publisher.
Clicking the link at the end of each “bookmark” unlocks a sequence of surprises and gifts—starting with a personalized autograph, bonus chapters, unexpected objects falling out from between the “pages” of the book, ways to carry on the conversation with other readers, and a personalized message upon completing the book. You need to click each link to unlock all the surprises.