Steve Jobs Doesn’t Often Get It Wrong, But…

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don‚Äôt read any­more,” he said. “Forty per­cent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole con­cep­tion is flawed at the top because people don‚Äôt read anymore.”

That’s Steve Jobs com­ment­ing on Amazon’s Kindle book reader. It has to be said that part of Steve’s genius comes in being able to see the faults in a competitor’s product. The Kindle is flawed, some­thing I’ll return to later. The other part of that genius is seeing where a trend is going and respond­ing early. That’s part of what has made Apple’s note­book com­puters so suc­cess­ful (drop­ping old tech like floppy drives and SCSI and moving to new stand­ards), it’s behind the suc­cess of iPod, iPhone and iMac and the poten­tial for Apple TV and the MacBookAir.

But, people still read. OK, many (in one coun­try) do not and that figure might well grow. The inter­net may well be driv­ing folks away from hunt­ing for inform­a­tion towards graz­ing on it. But many is not all. Here Steve is making a pop­u­list fal­lacy, look­ing at the trend from the bottom up. Unlike the tech­no­logy trends, which are driven by the most informed, most savvy opin­ion lead­ers, he’s look­ing at read­ing by con­sid­er­ing the least informed. Bad move.

People read or else book sales would have totally stag­nated (they haven’t) and books would fail to register in the cul­tural sec­tions of news­pa­pers (they haven’t). If any­thing, we are living through a renais­sance in pop­u­lar non-fiction. Des­pite taking big hits, news­pa­pers have been unwill­ing to lay down and die as many prognosticated.

A book is dif­fer­ent to a com­puter — OK that’s obvi­ous. But, the act of read­ing a book is dif­fer­ent from the act of read­ing from a com­puter. It’s some­thing phys­ical and dare I say it, spir­itual. Recently I had the chance to test out a Kindle-like reader at Wan Chai com­puter market. It’s a nice machine, but I couldn’t ima­gine read­ing with it for an hour or two. It’s much less effi­cient, much more awk­ward and simply not comforting.

The Kindle is flawed not because people don’t read, but because it gives an unsat­is­fact­ory read­ing exper­i­ence. You’d think a guy who knows so much about design and inter­faces, like Steve Jobs, would have been more focussed on that issue.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Kindle, Design