When the Amazon Kindle was first released, it was easy to fall prey to emotion and focus on all of its obvious flaws. (”A disgustingly white piece of plastic with a huge keyboard? Puh-lease!”) Reading any article praising the Kindle elicited the same derision, but a thousand popular press articles later and I’m forced to admit that maybe the Kindle got something right.

To be honest, if the Kindle were a piece of software, it would still be in beta, if not alpha. The tools are there, but the interface is still too clunky. That about sums up the problems with the Kindle specifically (as compared to the problems with e-readers in general), but I want to talk more about the tools, because from this is where any use of words or phrases like “revolutionary” and “iPods of books” are coming. Despite any design flaws, Amazon has again (see: 1-Click) released something that significantly facilitates the user experience.

Indeed, the Kindle is almost just an extension of the “Buy now with 1-Click” service, except now customers are able to click, buy, and use. And customers can do this anywhere, anytime thanks to the built-in Whispernet/EVDO/Sprint wireless connection. If the Kindle fails horrendously, left to smolder buried under a stifling DRM and horrid design, it will forever be remembered for this; for showing how simple and easy the process of finding, buying, and reading an e-book can be. The iPod and iTunes did the same thing with music, and thus I think the comparison is valid (even if Amazon should have been going for the “iPhone of books”).

Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times also discusses why the Kindle’s use of EVDO is astounding, and not because it allows you to download books five miles from the nearest hot-spot:

1.) The wireless connection isn’t Wi-Fi. It’s a direct connection to the Internet via Sprint’s high-speed EVDO network. If you’re anywhere within Sprint’s national cellular coverage area, your Kindle can reach the Net.

2.) The Kindle also includes … a Web browser. This browser works great with the mobile editions of Google Reader and Bloglines — you know, those free services that automatically track, organize, and display the freshest content from any blog or Web site you care to bookmark there.

Deep breath, now:

3.) There is absolutely no additional monthly fee of any kind for using the Kindle or the Internet connection.

This is such a great insight, and I think its implications could completely change what the Kindle will be known for in the future. Sure, you can buy the Asus Eee PC for $100 less, and get a device just as small and fast (with the power of speeding locomotive, not a graphing calculator), but does it work anywhere? Does it last on battery power for two days? No, only the Kindle, as Ihnatko says, “moves web sites into the real world”. Furthermore, used this way, the device’s design becomes much more acceptable.

Unfortunately, I have the sinking feeling that any abuse of this idea would lead to the Kindle’s downfall, or at least a monthly wireless charge (perhaps subsidized by the cost of the e-book downloads for “genuine” users). I mean, what’s stopping some intrepid programmer from hacking the Kindle apart and creating some software that shares the free always-on wireless with other devices? Hell, with enough gumption, you could splice together the Kindle and the Asus Eee PC and get a powerful, portable device that works everywhere. Combined, the two would be about three inches thick and weigh less than three pounds (and that’s including the weight of all the necessary duct tape). Nerdgasm!

If you have been somehow living under a hyperrealistic rock, Amazon recently released the Kindle, the company’s foray into the world of e-readers. (Though I say “world”, I really just mean a very boring planet made only of Amazon and Sony.) Most notably, the Kindle can download content from anywhere you get cell phone service, holds 200 books to start, lets you subscribe to newspapers and blogs, and looks like someone took a piece of cardboard and painted it white.

The Kindle’s been available a few days now, and I’m a little late to the game (I blame Thanksgiving), so everyone has already said everything I’d want to say. Thus, today’s post will be as long as ever, but much less work for me. That’s right: quotes!

John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

Why not bundle the Kindle e-books with the good old-fashioned shareable, preservable, paper books? Change the pitch from “buy digital e-books instead of paper books” to “get a digital Kindle e-book with each paper book you buy from Amazon”.

(As I suggested earlier, if Amazon really wanted to get aggressive, they could offer to Kindle owners not just digital versions of each book they buy from Amazon going forward, but also digital versions of each book they’ve already bought from Amazon.)

John Gruber again:

Kindle supports a few other formats than its proprietary .azw, but the only way to use it for its main purpose — as a digital reader for popular mainstream books — is via its own proprietary DRM-protected format.

First, Lev Grossman of TIME magazine’s “Nerd World”:

Has anybody written anything about the fact that digital books could kill off the publishing industry really really easily? I mean, like that? Music and movies have some resistance. With them, the file sizes are big, fidelity is lousy, and those artists have lots of ancillary revenue streams to live off once their stuff starts getting mass-pirated. But books are tiny, they come through at ultra-high fidelity (duh, words don’t get compressed), and authors don’t tour or sell merch or sound any better at the multiplex. Seriously. The Internet is the common cold, and music and movies have some antibodies to it, but book publishing is the boy in the bubble. E-books better have some sick DRM on them, or we’re looking at a mass die-off.

Second, it seems like a big deal-breaker to only “experimentally” support PDF. I am not much of an e-book guy, but any e-book I have downloaded has been in either TXT or PDF format. Not offering good support of PDF, more than other format, could easily stop anyone from buying a Kindle if they are interested in going beyond Amazon’s digital downloads.

(This bit also makes me wonder if companies are neglecting a whole market of potential users: researchers. Imagine a device that lets you subscribe to scientific journals, or even authors or topics, automatically downloading the newest papers. You would then have a portable database of your entire scientific field, searchable by author, subject, journal, year, and so forth. No more looking through, or even having, cabinets filled with papers.)

As far as interface goes, Craig Hunter has a great piece on how to improve the Kindle:

We might not have given it a second thought a year ago, but in a world enlightened by the iPhone, having a fixed keyboard on a device carries some big questions nowadays.

But what about a better Kindle? Say one that ditched the fixed keyboard, the goofy pointing device, and the page turn buttons in exchange for a touchscreen a la iPhone. Wouldn’t that be cool? Imagine having the ability to flick from page to page, point at individual words with a finger tip, or use pinch gestures to change text size. Everybody is talking about how Kindle is the ‘iPod of Books’ or something like that, but the iPod is so yesterday (even Apple knows it). If Amazon really wanted a breakthrough, they should have aimed for the ‘iPhone of Books’. That’s a better way to out-book a book.

Even if Amazon refused to have a touch screen, they should at least have looked to see what Sony was doing with their Sony Reader. Sony has a bit of experience by now, and its Reader recently went through some design changes (for instance, putting the page-turn buttons on the side, like a real book). The Kindle could easily have been the “iPhone of Books”, but at least should have been on par with Sony’s Reader. The whole big, white, fixed-keyboard look is a few dozen steps in the wrong direction.

Lastly, beyond the strengths and weaknesses of Kindle’s design, there has also been an reoccurring image of what any e-reader would have to be like in order to succeed. Basically, everyone wants a literary cross between a Zune and a Toughbook; something social and durable, just like one of those old-timey “book” things everyone’s in a hubbub about.

(And just for the record, are simultaneous Jimi Hendrix/Fahrenheit 451 jokes not cool anymore?)

What fills the Web Design Hall of Fame? Google? Amazon? MySpace? Undress Me Robot? Each website would pass for inclusion on some basis, but inevitably fail on another. While print and other media have a solid canon of wholly successful designs, the web seems to be lacking. Armin Vit over at Speak Up asks us, “Landmark web sites, where art thou?” His short discussion does not offer any answers, instead simply spotlighting the dearth and turning to the masses for salvation.

Perhaps it’s the short lifespan of the web that hasn’t allowed any specific web site to become a de facto choice for design immortality; but Seven was released in 1995, becoming an instant classic, so age is not quite an issue. Or maybe it’s the perennially ephemeral nature of the web, where web sites can change every year, month or week if desired, rendering the sense of commitment less ominous than that of printed or branded matter. It could also be the giant amount of crap that one has to wade through on the internet, but not much more than the amount of bad logos, brochures or signs found day in and day out. Or maybe I’m just thinking about this the wrong way.

So Vit is hard-pressed to find a cause for the web’s lack of such great heights. Here he knocks down possible sources of this dearth, and later he knocks down certain sites’ inclusion in the Hall of Fame. (Google may be a great search engine, but default blue links and bevel and drop shadow logo? For shame!) For any hypothesis on the cause of the web’s impotency, we’ll have to turn to Khoi Vinh’s argument that the web lacks great designers who both think and do. My question to Vinh is this: why is this true only for web design? It is tempting to restrict your vision to only web design, but I find it extremely hard to believe that great print designers are not also graduating to managerial positions.

Then again, maybe Vit is thinking about this the wrong way. At the very least, his logic seems a bit inconsistent when dismissing the age of the web as a non-factor. Certainly, a genuinely classic design could be recognized as such within days or weeks of its creation (as in Seven), so it is not that the web has not been around long enough for people to recognize a web design’s success. However, Seven was released almost a century after the inception of motion pictures, and its opening does not utilize any techniques significantly different than what was available in the previous decades. The world wide web (not the Internet), on the other hand, is like a baby. At most just a bit over a decade old, web technologies are still in early development. Hell, even half of what you find on the web today was impossible five or ten years ago.

While age of the medium is hardly necessary for a design to be considered a masterpiece, it is very influential when considering what the medium can do. Are we yet at a point where web designers can create a site as beautiful as the best Flash website, but as usable and functional as Google? Cascading style sheets bring us very close, Javascript and PHP (and the like) even closer, but I would argue that we are not quite there yet. It will be a couple more years until designers have fully stretched the boundaries of today’s emerging tools.

But should we even try to apply conventional graphical design to web design? Joshua Porter prevails upon us to recognize the web as a different beast, and act accordingly. However, as Jeff Croft points out in the comments, Porter is concerned entirely with interaction design. Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay are all very usable, but they lack any stunning aesthetics (though Amazon’s recent redesign has brought the site closer to Vit’s Pinnaclism). Assumedly, Porter would also see the conventional dictionary as a design success, with its extreme ease of use, but can we really lump it together with Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map?

Vit would reply with a resounding NO. How a user accesses and interacts with data are important aspects of design, but how that data is displayed is just as important:

When it comes to web design it’s rare that all elements — functionality, clarity of information, and subjective beauty — come together to create a result that is widely admired, recognized or lauded in the same vein as anything resembling the likes of Saul Bass’ AT&T logo, or Susan Kare’s icons for the original Mac OS.

I think web designers are still grappling with how to handle both data and aesthetics. Dynamic websites and visually appealing websites are both relatively new phenomena, each still coming into their own. This all goes back to Mark Boulton’s point that separating content and presentation has led to cookie-cutter websites [1]. When dealing with small website of just a few pages stunning, unique examples definitely already exist, and I think Vit will be satisfied once designers are able to take that beauty and create something that is both expansive (handling large amounts of variable content) and exquisite.

[1] Don’t you hate when you incriminate yourself?

Amazon MP3 launched today, offering over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists and over 20,000 labels.

Songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, and albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. Most of the top 100 best-selling songs are 89 cents, and the top 100 best-selling albums are $8.99 or less. (I always love when stores sell the good stuff for cheap, hoping that customers will stay and buy some more expensive items as well.)

Amazon MP3 opens as direct competition to the iTunes Music Store. Both offer DRM-free music (Amazon: mp3, iTunes Music Store: m4a) at 256-kbps, and have the support of major labels. Currently, Amazon MP3 offers less than half of the music selection as the iTunes Music Store (2 million songs compared to 5 million), but from looking at the Top 100 page, they have all the big names covered. Furthermore, you don’t need anything except a web browser to purchase from Amazon MP3 (a small application is needed to download whole albums, but not individual songs). The iTunes Music Store has always bugged me since it is unreachable except through iTunes.

At this rate, I am interested in seeing who takes over the internet first: Google or Amazon. I can see Amazon acquiring eBay and PayPal, and becoming the eCommerce warlord of the internet. From there, Amazon would simply need to leverage its myriad Web Services (S3, Mechanical Turk, etc.) and purchase and integrate Microsoft’s Live Search. Of course, by that time Google may have eaten the media and the internet may have been transformed into GoogleNet.

Then again, maybe our future is Googlezon.