Response to Amazon's Jeff Bezos about Kindle 3

USA TODAY Personal Technology columnist Edward C. Baig visited Bezos in Seattle to discuss Kindle, tablets and e-books in general. Excerpts, edited for space and clarity:

Q: Why not add multimedia to e-books?

A: You want to enter the author's world, the great novel or engaging non-fiction narrative. In the case of a physical book, you're not noticing the stitching and the glue and the paper and the ink. That all disappears. We're always trying to make Kindle get out of the way. 

If it's a book about music history, having music people can play at certain points in the book can be useful. Maybe biology textbooks can benefit from certain animations. You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

But readers aren't always enjoying literary classics, right? For wizards and witches, it's a shame that Kindle 3 fails to display the Daily Prophet all the time.

Q: Why didn't you add a touch-screen?

A: It'd be very easy to add a touch-screen; in fact, Sony has done it. We don't want to compromise the reading experience. Today's capacitive touch-screen technology is an extra layer on top of the display surface, and it increases glare.

There are a variety of touchscreen technologies, not just capacitive. At least, infrared and dispersive signal make no sacrifices of the optical clarity. Moreover, why not learn something from Samsung Super AMOLED which integrates the layer that detects touch into the screen rather than overlays it on top.

Lots of fun of reading comes from touching the book and pages. However, Amazon chooses to kill the delight instead of kindling it.

Q: Why doesn't Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we're moving very quickly to improve the state of the art. It's very helpful not to have to wait for some third-party standard to catch up.

Q: Are you concerned about growing competition?

A: All we can see is our sales are accelerating. When you think about things like tablet computers (and) the iPad, at Amazon we're excited because it's likely to be a driver of mobile commerce. We have this retail business, so we like it when people are connected to the Internet as often as possible.

There are going to be a lot of tablet computers — the Android ones are coming. Kindle works on BlackBerry, Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, PC and Mac. Our approach is: Buy once, read everywhere. We want you to be able to read your Kindle book on any device, then we want separately to make the very best uncompromised e-reader.

Sounds like fun to read a Kindle book on any device. However, it only holds on the premise that the reader can always obtain the book in Amazon's proprietary format. Needless to say, the dream hardly comes true in our lifetime unless iPad or Nook dies tomorrow. In the long run, Amazon's approach just spoils the freedom and comfort of reading as many books as possible on Kindle.

Q: How about a Kindle with a color screen?

A: If you could add color without compromising readability, great. But color is not ready for prime time.

An LCD (color) display (such as the one on the iPad) has many compromises: All of a sudden, you can't read outside; people like to read outside. All of a sudden, you have to worry about your battery. For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain. There's a whole bunch of reasons you want a display like Kindle.

Most iPad users hardly worry about the battery life. Besides, people are smart enough to find a cafe to sit comfortably reading. Anyway, just let us know that the next generation display technologies such as Pixel Qi's 3Qi, Mirasol, QR-LPD and LiquavistaColor are being evaluated in Amazon's lab, OK?