Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Jobs Kicks the Kindle

In the bits blog on the NYTimes Steve Jobs gets it right for the Kindle but for all the wrong reasons:

Mr. Jobs can be like that when he assesses the competition.

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Unfortunately, that's hard to take seriously and I would have expected better. I would always have given Apple and Jobs more credit in understanding market dynamics and trends. On the surface his comment is partly accurate, but there is no cause and effect here.

Does this mean we aren't about to see books on the iPhone in quantity? Of course, it could be misinformation.

From another perspective, it has been the media industry and the publishing community specifically that has kept this company (Apple) relevant for the past 15years (at least) via their loyal devotion to the Mac platform. To all those dedicated authors, marketing and design professionals in the publishing industry locked into the Apple mystique this comment should come as a kick in the processor.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's worth remembering that Jobs also said they had no interest in making a phone or being in the phone business. The follow-up to that quote at some point in the future may be "don't read... until we made this fantastic new thing." Just a thought.