reflections

Kindle will win and the reasons why are plentiful.  It may have to share the pie with other players but those will only be small slices. 

I’ve posted before on a platform based reason why Kindle will win but if you missed it, here it is:

Then there’s the obvious advantage that Amazon has due to its status as the premier online retailer for reading materials. 

The thing that sealed it for me is the genius of the product team and how they keep rolling out incremental features or UX that actually makes the core product better and not more cluttered of confusing.  If you’ve ever made anything you know just how hard that can be. 

Sure having it available on all desktop and mobile platforms makes all the sense in the world. 

Making the text reflow nicely across those devices? Great.

Having your reading library and current position in each of your books automatically sync across all of your devices?  Pure magic.  

Adding bookmark/dogears, highlights and notes and having those sync too? Awesome. 

This morning while reading Brad Feld’s “Do More Faster” I went back to reread a couple paragraphs and noticed a line that was underlined/hyperlinked.  I didn’t remember the link being there last week when I originally read that chunk nor did I highlight it myself. I also figured that I was on the subway and not online so it couldn’t work right?  Turns out it was a sentence highlighted  by most readers of the book.  In essence they’re passively crowdsourcing potentially important bits of the book I was reading. Genius.