Dear Jeff Bezos (one-week Kindle review)
I've read two books on it, which explains why I haven't been on Twitter very much in the past week. But the Kindle really bugs me now. I'm hitting all sorts of little things that the Kindle team simply didn't think through very well.
Context & Ripple Effects
This one-week verdict lands days after Rough Type's 'Luddite dream' critique of Bezos's reading philosophy, and it sharpens that argument into something concrete. Where that piece attacked the idea, Scobleizer tests the object itself: after two full books on the device, the reviewer reports a pile of small oversights the Kindle team didn't think through.
The friction has a philosophical edge, because Bezos has said outright that the Kindle was built to reproduce a solitary, pre-Web reading experience rather than crowd-driven web content. A reviewer whose default habitat is Twitter going quiet for a week to read on the device — and coming back annoyed — is exactly the user that design choice was aimed away from.
First-order effects
- Scobleizer's list of unpolished details hands Amazon a specific, public usability punch-list within days of the Kindle's launch window, from a high-visibility early adopter whose audience overlaps the device's likely evangelists.
Second-order effects
- The review forces the design debate out of abstraction: any rival e-reader can now compete on execution polish against a product its own creator describes as intentionally book-like, making 'fixes the Kindle got wrong' an obvious positioning pitch.
Third-order effects
- If Bezos's stated aim holds — a device that recreates solitary print reading rather than joining the connected web — then e-reader design splits along a durable axis, book-replication versus web integration, and reviews like this become the recurring test of which side ships better hardware.
The trend: Early-adopter reviews are turning the e-reader category into a referendum on whether dedicated devices should replicate the book or integrate with always-on web life.