Bezos stressed adding a keyboard so that it makes it easy for readers to search for books and make annotations. He wanted a simple yet classy looking device that disappears in the reader’s hands. The Pentagram designers worked on the Kindle for two years, until LAB126 hired their own design team and fired Pentagram.īezos was meticulous on what he wanted from an electronic reading device.
In order to design the perfect e-Reader, they studied the physics of reading and how readers turned pages and held books in their hands. The Fiona design was initially outsourced to a British firm called Pentagram. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/ Indian Express) The Kindle was designed to be a single-purpose device, rather than a multifunctional device that invites distraction. The name was taken from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a novel about an engineer who steals a rare interactive textbook to give to his daughter, Fiona. The Kindle was internally known by the name of Fiona. The only e-Reader that used E-Ink was the Sony Libre, but it was a massive failure. Zehr and his team decided to power the e-Reader using e-ink, instead of traditional TFT and LCD displays that most of the previous e-Readers had come up with. Soon Amazon told them to start working on an electronic reading device. They thought that Amazon would want to develop an MP3 player or set-top box. Initially, Zehr and his team were not told what product they would be working on. Steve Kessel, the Amazon executive, led the launch of the original Kindle e-reader. Kindle was developed at Lab126, the secret hardware lab that was set up in 2004. Jateen Parekh, a former engineer at set-top box maker ReplayTV was the first employee. Kessel finally hired Gregg Zehr, former VP of hardware engineering at Palm Computer to lead the Kindle project. Kessel had no prior knowledge of making hardware, so he headed over to Silicon Valley and started meeting hardware experts from Apple and Palm. And when Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the first hardware product, Bezos apparently told him, “You are basically already late.” There was fear that if Amazon didn’t push hard in this category, then Apple or Google would. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job,” writes Bloomberg Businessweek writer Brad Stone in The Everything Store, a biography of Amazon.
Sometime in 2004, Bezos called Kessel into his office and told him to lead the digital efforts “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. (Image credit: Jeff Bezos/Twitter)īezos placed his bets on Steve Kessel, who was heading the book category at Amazon at that time. To mark the 10th anniversary of Kindle in 2017, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos tweeted the image of the original Kindle (left) alongside the Kindle Oasis (right). The challenge, however, was the lack of expertise in developing hardware. Bezos not only wanted to create an e-Reader for long-form reading but wanted publishers to adopt the e-Book format. The idea of a dedicated e-Reader was born. Bezos saw an opportunity in eBooks as the future of bookselling. After a lot of discussions, Bezos decided to focus on being a bookseller in the digital world. He wanted to control the end-to-end customer experience like Apple did. At that time, Apple also had a huge impact on music, something Bezos wanted to replicate in Books. In 2004, Bezos thought of a new digital strategy to compete with Apple, which was on the top of the game, thanks to the massive success of iPod.
0 kommentar(er)
