The Amazon Imprint

I bought a Kindle this year, and am still waiting for that magic moment when, I'm told, the device disappears and it's just you and the text. So I found this story more than mildly interesting.

I do understand that the e-book is still young in its development and that the designers had to make hard choices on what they could and could not do, but the choices themselves are telling. The first thing I really missed was the cover art. It's not just advertising to impel the customer to 'Pick ME!!!!' off the book store shelf. Once you have the book at home, it also reinforces the title and author, no matter which way you lay the book down. The first book I read (completely) on my Kindle was fascinating, but I have a terrible time remembering the title and author, since they were only listed on the device's index (not on the cover, not on the individual pages), and the title was too long to be fully represented. The Kindle does display a graphic image when you turn it off (alternating images of Western literary icons who have been oddly beautified) -- why could it not display an image of the cover art specific to the book you're reading? The fact that so little attention was given to the cover, and to displaying the title and author within the book, implies more than a lack of technological design.

More subliminally, the graphic design of the cover comes to represent the book in your mind. A re-issued book, with new cover design, is never quite the same book or reading experience that it was when you read the original. I have associations with the copy of Jane Eyre that I read as a teen, and they are indelibly linked with the design of that particular book. The copy we have in our home these days is somehow different, and somehow less engaging. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold conjures up the dark and moody cover art of the 1970s edition I read as much as it does my introduction to George Smiley.

And of course there's the issue of inner-page design (fonts, contrast between ink and page, and the tactile feel of the book), but these I can understand and with enough use I can probably get over it. I don't expect an exact replica of the book experience with an e-book. But, digital information about the book -- why is this a trade-off?

Perhaps some of the difficulty is just technical (the photographic images contained in an e-book are rendered so poorly that they I found archival images just impossible to interpret) -- but I think the issue is simpler than that. Amazon's needs have been served once you've purchased a book for your Kindle, so why bother? They aren't publishers; they're merchants. A merchant only cares that you buy a book - some book, any book -- and that the transaction works well enough that you return for future purchases. Publishers, though, need to engage the consumer with their brands -- and authors are integral to this -- so that you choose their books, not just any book. So titles and authors matter a lot -- if you can't come up with either when you're recommending a book to another consumer, or when you are browsing a bookstore, future sales are jeopardized. Amazon understands this when they are selling books: they have a great search engine, a fast site, and continue to enhance the experience of learning about a book before adding it to the cart. But once it's paid for -- well, they're done.

There's a lot to like about the idea of an e-book reader, more so than the reality today. To make this transformative is not just a matter of throwing more technology at it. If the merchant would make a fundamental shift to digital publisher, how they build the devices would change radically, perhaps enough to realize the potential that readers seek.