The Future

Some provocative stuff here. I'm interested in your take. The future of books...

All Things Digital
The Way We Read
Amazon.com's Jeffrey Bezos on why books are like horses
June 9, 2008; Page R3
Jeffrey P. Bezos, as chairman, president and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., made e-commerce mainstream when Amazon started selling books over the Internet in 1994.

Since then, he has turned the site into a virtual shopping mall, where the company and thousands of independent merchants sell just about anything from abacuses to zithers.

THE JOURNAL REPORT



• See the complete Technology report.He spoke with The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg about cloud computing, streaming movies and why books are like horses. Here are edited excerpts of that conversation.

Why the Kindle?

MR. MOSSBERG: You're doing digital downloads, and hardware with the Kindle [Amazon's e-book reader]. Why not just stay in your powerful niche of being the go-to place that most people think of as where I buy stuff online?

MR. BEZOS: Most of the extensions we've done to our business over time, we've questioned ourselves. People thought music and DVDs made sense. But we started selling electronics and toys and apparel and shoes. I'm amazed how many shoes we sell today. It's so many that we've started a focused Web site to just do that.

People understand those product extensions at this point. But [with] new hardware, people look and they say, "What are these guys thinking?" We get there by basing our strategy first and foremost on customer needs instead of what our skills are. It's important to take an inventory of your skills and try to do things that match up with your skills. But if you only do that, then eventually you will be outmoded because your customers will eventually need things that you don't have skills for. So you need to renew yourself by developing new skills.

We had been selling electronic books for a long time, and you needed a microscope to find the sales. What customers need is a device that made it very, very frictionless to buy and read electronic books. We wanted to build a seamless, vertically integrated experience, and that required us to develop this whole new skill set.

MR. MOSSBERG: How many have you sold?

MR. BEZOS: We're not disclosing that. I can give you a new stat that we've not shared before. We have 125,000 book titles available for Kindle. When you look at Amazon's physical book sales of those same titles, the Kindle sales are now more than 6% of those total sales.

MR. MOSSBERG: What about the whole idea of people reading on a screen? Just as other kinds of media, like newspapers, see a line of growth for digital and decline for physical, is that going to happen in books?





Jeffrey Bezos
MR. BEZOS: Over some time horizon, books will be read on electronic devices. Physical books won't completely go away, just as horses haven't completely gone away. But there is no sinecure for any technology. If you think about books, it's astonishing. It's very hard to find a technology that has remained in mostly the same form for 500 years. And anything that has stubbornly resisted improvement for 500 years is going to be hard to improve.

That is what we're trying to do with Kindle. We see this as an effort to improve upon the book, even though it's resisted change for 500 years.

To do that, you have to capture the essential element of a book, which is that it disappears when you get into the flow of the story. None of us when we're reading a book think about the ink and the glue and the stitching. All that fades away, and you get into the author's universe.

Sometimes big, heavy hardcover books do break you out of the flow because you get hand fatigue. Or turning pages can be loud if you have a spouse sleeping next to you. There are things about physical books that we're accustomed to but that actually aren't very good.

But you also can't ever out-book the book. You need to look for a series of things that you can do with an electronic device like Kindle that you could never do with a physical book.

Some of them can be pretty simple, like dictionary lookup. I find I don't know what lots of words mean, and I used to guess because -- am I really going to get up off of the sofa and go find a dictionary?

Changing the font size, a very simple thing that's much appreciated.

And then some whoppers. The big whopper is wireless delivery of books in less than 60 seconds. You don't have the cognitive overhead of thinking about your monthly wireless bill. You don't have to know who the wireless carrier is. We're hiding all of that complexity.

MR. MOSSBERG: When I did my Kindle column, I got quite a lot of email from people who were talking about the tactile feel of the book -- the hard-to-describe intangibles around reading a paper book that you lose on an electronic device.

MR. BEZOS: I'm sure people love their horses, too. But you're not going to keep riding your horse to work just because you love your horse. It's our job to build something that is better than a physical book. The reason we love physical books is because we have had so many great experiences with that object in our hands that we have nice associations with it.

We're not trying to displace people's love of that physical object that is the book. It's a hallowed invention. The thing to keep in mind is what's really important is not the container, it's the narrative. Long-form reading is important for our society.

Over the last 20 years, most of the tools that we humans have invented have made it easier for us to be information snackers. If one of the outcomes of Kindle and other devices like it [is] making long-form reading more frictionless so that you end up doing more of it, I think that's a good thing.

Streaming Music and Video

MR. MOSSBERG: You're also moving heavily into selling downloads of music and video onto computers and onto TiVos even. How serious are you about that business?

MR. BEZOS: Very serious. It's a much more difficult business in some ways because there are so many market participants. Video and music have that glamour element, which is always unfortunate, because it attracts people.

What we're working on is a new version of video on demand at Amazon, which is going to be a for-pay streaming service, which we'll release in the next several weeks.

MR. MOSSBERG: And why do you think that that is the right way to go, or the better way?

MR. BEZOS: I don't know if it's the right way to go. Usually, in these markets, it's not winner-take-all. Usually there are a bunch of different customers out there that have different needs. If the market sizes are big enough, a few different models can be supported. And I think the video market's like that.

Is there going to be an ad-supported video? Yes. Is there a commercial-free environment for people who want to pay a little bit of money to not have to watch any commercials? I think so. I think there is a subset of people out there that value their time very highly and don't want to be interrupted. If they want to, they could skip having a latte that day and watch a show commercial-free.

MR. MOSSBERG: ITunes has a very high share of music and also a decent share of video. Do you see that as a temporary thing?

MR. BEZOS: It's very hard to know the answer to that question. They have executed so well and created such a good experience. That's the key issue for people who would compete against them. What we're doing is very different.

We don't have a hardware device. We have DRM-free MP3s, 5.2 million tracks now. It integrates with iTunes, so you can download the songs. You can play them on your iPod.

MR. MOSSBERG: Are you benefiting from the fact that the content companies, at least some of them, are not always very happy with Steve Jobs?

MR. BEZOS: I would frame it slightly differently. I would say that it is clearly in their enlightened self-interest to have a vibrant multitude of companies distributing their music. The music [intellectual property] owners are watching our growth rates very carefully. And I think they're very happy.

Future in the Clouds

MR. MOSSBERG: The other really interesting thing to me that you're doing -- and a lot of people don't quite get it because it's not very consumery -- is this S3 [Simple Storage Service] thing [a pay-for-use data warehouse]. Can you talk about that?

MR. BEZOS: The Web services you're talking about are what we call our infrastructure Web services. They allow you to build applications in the cloud without owning any hardware of your own. Just by writing software, you have a data center.

We live in a weird multidecade era right now where people build their own data centers. I was recently in Luxembourg, and I went on a tour of a brewery. It's a 300-year-old brewery. They showed me their museum. In the museum, they have a 100-year-old electric power generator. And 100 years ago, they had to generate their own electric power, but that didn't make their beer taste any better. They got rid of the electric power generator as soon as they could hook up to the grid.

The computer grid, utility computing -- people use different names for this right now -- is a good idea. And it is going to happen.

MR. MOSSBERG: Are you seeing the effect of this economic slowdown? Or do you worry about it?

MR. BEZOS: As you can see from the last-quarter results that we just put out, we haven't seen that. You can never know for sure because I don't know what our growth rates would've been in a stronger economy. There are some things working to our advantage in this kind of economy.

Gasoline is expensive. Driving to the store is expensive. You take a 2,000-pound car to pick up five pounds of stuff. It's the least efficient transportation network in the world. So, there are some positive factors in our business in that regard.

MR. MOSSBERG: But if I buy a five-pound thing from you, some guy in a 4,000-pound truck is going to deliver it to my house.

MR. BEZOS: But he goes on a route, and that route is very efficient. Half of our deliveries are done by the U.S. Postal Service. They're driving around anyway. And they stop at almost every house. It's super-efficient relative to driving yourself.

Publishers Uneasy

I like mine, and it is a less expensive and more eco friendly way to read. But not everyone is happy about The Kindle.

Far Out

Purely in the interests of giving weirdness a fair shake, sailing in from the Far Right of Literary Criticism, there's this about Hell's Bay.

Cleaning Out the Stream

It was warm today, the first day in a month I've been able to wear shorts. Florida wuss that I am.

So I used the late morning to clean out the stream. This mainly consists of picking up fallen limbs and pulling jewel weed. But it also involves rearranging the rocks in the stream bed to increase the water flow.

The ultimate end of doing that is to send a faster flow over the waterfall. It's not a big waterfall as you can see from the brief snippet. It only falls a couple of feet. But look at that wonderful boulder in the background. It's fifty feet tall.

Anyway, every year I return to the stream to see how the rocks have rearranged themselves in my absence. Over the years I've given up trying to totally redirect the stream into one single path downhill. It wants to go into a lot of little branches under roots or disappear completely underground, and no matter what I do to coax it into the main streambed (all in the interests of increasing the drama of the waterfall), during the winter the stream decides where it truly wants to go.

So I make my small changes each spring, knowing they will be undone over the winter. So be it. In Robert Frost's words this is my "temporary stay against confusion." A small, albeit transitory attempt to impose my own will on something that ultimately refuses to be ordered and reined in.

I'm okay with that. I don't think I do any permanent damage to the stream by "fixing it" each spring. It amuses me and it's a good workout, and for a time the results are visually pleasing. But I know who's boss. And it's not me.

Last Politics for A While--I Promise

No Rush. What's the hurry?

Here's what I mean. From two years ago. Oh, that Scalia. He's been listening to Rush as well.

That's the environmental side of things from my point of view. Then there's this from Ken, which I include as fair and balanced equal time. Some very good arguments and reminders.

Pass this On to Rush

Well, the White House is coming clean.

Why Summer in the Mountains?

Here's one reason.

And it was only a cat 1. We made it through Andrew with the walls shaking and floors sinking and all the avocado trees and mangoes and the Indian rosewood coming down. An acre and a half of shade gone overnight. Our neighbor's second story was blown away. All around us was devastation that took more than a year to fix. A month without power. Six years without shade. We've paid our dues in south Florida summers.

And then there's this:

It's Here

It's heeeeeeere.

More About Writing

I wrote this short piece for the Edgar Awards Program this year, 2008. The question each of the writers was asked was: "Why do you write this stuff?" Here's my answer:

Why Do I Write This Stuff?


For over fifty years I’ve been in school. As a student, a graduate student, and for the last 35 years as a professor, teaching literature and writing to college students, and to grad students in an MFA program. I have a Masters Degree and Ph.D. in literature which means I spent a few fairly intense years trying to learn how to footnote.
The credentials of a certified snob. I’m not a cop or an ex-cop. I’m not a fishing guide or an ex-fishing guide. I’m not a journalist. And I’m certainly not an ex-trial lawyer. I’ve had no other job (except for the host of colorful summer ones) since I was a paperboy. Books are my business.
Last semester I taught a course in First Novels to a bunch of MFA students who desperately want to write and publish their own. I started with The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which one of my brightest students had the temerity to call “nap inducing.” We also studied To Kill a Mockingbird, The Sun Also Rises, then moved on to more modern fare like The Lovely Bones, Fight Club, and Bright Lights, Big City. We ended the semester by looking at two mystery novels published by two former MFA students. Both of those students, now authors, came to class and shared their experiences, both the creative struggles they went through while writing their first novel, and their subsequent education in the world of publishing. It was quite an amazing arc for fourteen weeks. From Joyce to Gagliano.
After the semester ended, my bright grad student sent me a note to thank me for making her read Joyce. What she’d called “nap inducing” earlier in the semester she now considered “a great gift” I had given her. She also really dug the mystery novels. Which was kind of the point. Great stories, great characters, great writing. High culture, low culture, who the hell cares?
I hadn’t read Portrait of the Artist in many years when I assigned it. I found it a bit “nap inducing” myself, but by the time I finished it, I remembered why I loved it. I first read it when I was fifteen at the urging of a teacher who saw some weird urges in me—let’s call them inchoate creative desires. I probably understood one-tenth of what I read at the time, though I remember being awed by the salaciousness of certain passages. It wasn’t long after that when I read my first Ross MacDonald novel. I liked it even better than Joyce, and understood a lot more of it. Then came Hemingway, Fowles, and Lawrence Durrell and John D. MacDonald and Hammett and Chandler. Oh, and Dickens too then Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton and on and on.
I was a voracious and indiscriminate reader and felt no compelling reason to draw distinctions between Pearl Buck and Sinclair Lewis or Agatha Christie and Jane Austen.
Maybe if I’d gone to grad school at any other time in American history, I would have been bullied into taking a more snobbish position on literary values. But in the Sixties when I was working my way through academe, the doors of perception were opening. Popular culture was gaining status. Sci-fi suddenly had integrity. More than one important literary critic admitted in print to a sinful predilection for mystery novels. High road, low road, it all seemed so passé. Still does, only more so.
Though the pressure wasn’t as intense as it might have been, I do remember some pretty vicious arguments with fellow doctoral candidates. One guy kept going on about Huck Finn. He claimed Twain had created a culturally complex story with layers of irony and vast symbolic resonance. I argued that any ten year old could read Huck and understand it perfectly well. Over the years, I’ve taught the novel a few times and I now believe we were both right. Twain is as simple as pie, but complicated as hell.
Same with Frost. For years I specialized in Robert Frost. I could scan his poems in my sleep, which means I could tell you where he varied from iambic pentameter and why. He was a masterful writer, one who hid his technique so skillfully that anyone, and I mean anyone, could read his best work and understand it the first time through. Yet those very same poems would reward intense scrutiny and study. I have found little gems of literary virtuosity hidden within the measured cadences of his most transparent and accessible work.
Teachers of literature get off on stuff like that. The little tricks, the pirouettes of language, the mot juste. It’s one of the cool things about teaching lit. You can examine the brushstrokes, the subtleties and nuances of language, the image patterns, the devilish ambiguities, or you can skip that entirely and still have a rewarding time. You can simply frolic with the story and the characters and the pulse of whatever rousing good yarn is before you.
Twenty years ago I wrote Elmore Leonard a fan letter. I’d taught LaBrava in one of my classes and wanted to let him know that not only was it a super enjoyable read, but it “stood up to literary inspection.” My students found, for instance, patterns of black and white imagery running through the novel. Amazingly, he wrote back. He thanked me for my kind words, then went on to say that he didn’t think he’d do very well in my class since he had no idea what an image pattern was. Oh, that Dutch.
Great writers like Leonard or Frost or Twain reward the careful reader as richly as the reader who doesn’t give a damn about any of that fancy crap. The best writers always do that. They have it both ways—one foot on the high road, one in the gutter. It’s pretty simple really. That’s why I write this stuff. I want to learn how to do that.

Something About Writing

I wrote this short essay about writing a while back for the Mystery Writer's Association newsletter. Thought some of you might find it interesting:



“Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.” So said T.S. Eliot. He wasn’t encouraging plagiarism, but was distilling into a sentence a general approach that all writers use whether they are conscious of it or not, to develop their craft.
In all the centuries before there were coast-to-coast creative writing programs, ordinary folks had been learning to write poems, novels, plays, and stories quite well. Though I’ve been teaching in a university writing program for thirty-five years and am absolutely certain that the service we provide to aspiring writers is of an overall benefit to many, I am equally certain that attending an academic institution to learn to write a novel is not necessary, nor is it necessary to read how-to books on plot or character or the use of setting. Everything a writer needs to learn her craft is sitting on her own bookshelf at this moment, just waiting to be plundered.
This may sound like heresy. A writer, and writing teacher, making the case for stealing the work of others…well, yes, heretical it may be, but it’s also the truth, and it also works. I learned this the hard way, starting my own apprenticeship as a writer with four failed novels. I spent about ten years trying without success to write a serious literary novel.
After reading many biographies of great writers, and from talking to writer friends of mine, I estimate that the average apprenticeship for any writer, from the day that she makes writing a central, dominant part of her workday, to the point at which she is actually publishing and getting paid for what she writes is roughly ten years—about how long it took me. Some manage to cover this ground more quickly, some take longer. Some write four novels that fail, some write two or three, some write and rewrite the same one until they learn their craft. But ten years is a ballpark estimate. Which suggests to me that you sure as hell better love the daily process of writing if you’re going to sustain your enthusiasm through that long trek. (And it wouldn’t hurt to have a day job, too.)
After failing four times, I reached the conclusion that even though I had a Ph.D. in literature and had published short stories and poems in literary journals for years, I was simply not smart enough to write a novel. But stubbornly, I still wanted to do it. So I hit upon the simplest strategy I could think of. I sat down and dissected a book that I dearly loved, a popular novel (that will go unnamed), one that while not exactly of high literary status, had been a reaonable commercial success and was close to the kind of novel that I thought maybe, just maybe, I could write.
I dissected and dissected, outlined, made notes. Chapter by chapter, page by page. Scene by scene. I scrawled observations in the margins of the novel. I even typed out verbatim whole pages of it, dialog, setting, action, all of it. I was determined to absorb this book on some cellular level, digest its rhythms, its pace, its narrative techniques and so on until I could mimic it in my sleep.
Then with the book open beside me at my computer, I wrote my first chapter. Same number of characters, same number of words, same amount of dialog, same quantity of action, a dash of setting, some quick character descriptions. I didn’t steal the words, the idea, the plot, or anything beyond the most elementary aspects of the book’s architecture.
When I’d finished the first ten pages, which was very close to the length of my model’s first chapter, I turned to the second chapter and repeated the process. I consulted my model every step along the way. Every paragraph, every page. I tried very hard to avoid using even a single word from the original, or to duplicate anything in it beyond the structural elements.
Then something surprising happened. By chapter seven I found myself not paying nearly as much attention to the novel that lay open on my desk. Because the the novel unfolding on my computer screen was taking possession of me. I think of this process now as being like the booster rocket that pushes the heavy payload off the ground and propels beyond the pull of gravity, then when it’s served its purpose it drops away and the space capsule (your own novel) continues on its own course, and finds its own orbit.
This finished novel became Under Cover of Daylight and it was published by W.W. Norton in 1987. It was reviewed favorably, sold more copies than most first novels do, and it started a career in novel writing that I’m still engaged in twenty years later.
About a dozen years ago when I decided to try to teach a novel writing course in the MFA program at Florida International University where I work, I decided to use this same approach. The course was titled, “Writing Your First Novel.” Rather than rely on one of the many fine fiction writing text books that are out there (Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction being the best of the lot), I had each student spend a couple of weeks deciding on a particular novel they would use as their model.
That’s the first issue we discussed, and it’s a crucial step in this process. For some beginning writers there’s no doubt in their mind when it comes to selecting a model. They know and love a particular book with such passion that it stands apart from all other books they’ve read in its influence over them. For other beginning writers choosing a model for their own work can get confusing. They like so many books, admire the abilities and styles and skills of so many different writers that picking one out of that huge assortment is a daunting task. But it must be done to follow this method.
Of course, we are all influenced by many of the books we’ve read. We admire certain writers for certain aspects of their craft, and other writers for completely different skills. For instance, I think of John D. MacDonald, the creator of Travis McGee, as an incredibly good writer of action scenes. When two men are fighting, his descriptions of the physicality of the events is nearly without parallel. Ross MacDonald is great with faces and expressions and eyes. James Lee Burke is fantastic with weather, and Elmore Leonard is the master of dialog. Sue Grafton has a voice, wry but tough, that I dearly love. And on and on.
But when it comes to choosing a model for your first novel, you MUST, focus on only one. More than that confuses the issue. The novel you choose should be one that will sustain your long term interest. (That sometimes won’t become clear until you’ve tried out this method for a month or so.) It should have been commercially successful (though not necessarily a blockbuster). It should have been written within the last fifty years or so. (Times and fashions change so radically, and it can be dangerous to choose a book that was popular in some bygone era but that seems silly in our current one.) And the book you choose should fall in your comfort zone. (You don’t want to pick a Tom Clancy novel as your model if you have no patience for research, or don’t already possess a vast storehouse of information about some area of expertise.)
Hemingway had Sherwood Anderson’s stories open on his desk when he struggled to write his own first stories. He was convinced he could write at least as well as Anderson. He stole a great deal from Sherwood Anderson and were it not for using Anderson as his model, many of the stories in In Our Time (Hemingway’s first collection of short stories) could not have been written. Great writers steal. Which means they don’t simply take someone else’s work and slap a fresh coat of paint on it. They take someone else’s work and digest it fully, absorb it into their own chemistry and what was once Sherwood Anderson is transformed into something all new, totally fresh, with only the faintest echoes of the original.
Several students in that long ago class went on to publish novels. All of them are still publishing novels today, even in a very competitive marketplace. I’m not trying to take any credit for their success. They learned to write their novels the old-fashioned way, the way writers have always learned to write. They didn’t study literary theory. They didn’t analyze Aristotle’s Poetics to learn to plot their novels. They sat down with a pre-existing version of the thing they wanted to do, and studied it till they knew it inside and out and could use that model to support them through the long and difficult stages of composition, until they were ultimately able to give birth to their own creation.