Score One for the Evil Empire

My Search for the Ideal Reading Tablet

Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate Amazon. Its labor practices. Its stranglehold on the publishing industry. Its threat to brick-and-mortar businesses. Every time one of its signature “swish” packages arrives at the door, a cold wind of disapproval from a certain other member of the household blows through the home. But there is one thing that Amazon has done exceptionally well, and that it has done at least in part because of, not in spite of, its vast monopoly power.

I have been fascinated with e-readers for a long time now. It probably has something to do with the fact that between graduating from college in 1983 and settling down for a long stay in Baltimore in 2000, I moved fifteen times, on each occasion lugging more and more heavy boxes of books with me. Already when I bought my first laptop computer in 1987, I wondered if manufacturers would ever offer one with a detachable screen that I could read like a book, while sitting in a comfortable position. Ideally, I would even be able to make notes on the reading material. In 2005 I wrote a mildly prescient article for The New Republic called “The Bookless Future,” which speculated about the rise of e-books, and I followed it up a few years later with another piece called “The Bookless Library.”

As early as the late 1990’s, dedicated e-readers had in fact started to come on the market, including now largely forgotten devices like the Bookeen and RCA’s RocketBook. They were clunky, kludgy, induced eye strain, and were designed above all to deliver paid content. You couldn’t make notes on what you were reading, and it was difficult to transfer your own files to them. They were not great commercial successes. But then, towards the middle of the decade, something new came along: readers using e-ink technology, such as the Sony Librié and the Irex Iliad. These devices were much lighter and more pleasant to hold and had far better battery time. The reading experience was different from reading on a computer screen because e-ink is not backlit, but reflects ambient light, just like a printed page. That saved on eyestrain—but only when reading in bright light, because the early e-ink backgrounds were a muddy gray on which black letters failed to stand out. So the experience was mixed, and it didn’t help that loading one’s own content on the devices remained a kludgy and time-consuming process, and that otherwise you were limited to a small range of books available for sale from the parent company. And you still couldn’t mark up your reading material.

Then came a game changer: Amazon’s e-ink reader, the Kindle, released in 2007. Amazon, already dominant in the U.S. book market, had the power and resources to offer, almost immediately, a far larger range of books for download than its competitors. Amazon also had the resources to develop a superior e-reader. The Kindle simply worked much better than the Iliad and Librié, or than its closest rival, Barnes & Noble’s Nook. I bought the first Kindle model, and ever since I have done most of my leisure reading on Kindles. Moreover Amazon, to its credit, kept making the product better and better. In 2012, it introduced a “Paperwhite” model that had a gentle backlight, immediately rendering e-ink text far easier to read but without the glare of computer screens. Another great advantage is built-in dictionaries, which are especially useful for reading in foreign languages. Just tap on a word and a translation appears. Kindle books are cheaper – often much cheaper – than paper ones. And, of course, you don’t have to load them in boxes when you move house.

This is where monopoly power actually helped promote innovation. Once Amazon had developed the Kindle, it could have just sat back and made money from selling books to the device’s customer base. But if it could make the reading experience significantly better, then it might persuade a large proportion of that customer base to upgrade—to spend even more money on a new device. The same logic is at work in the world of smartphones. Apple’s iPhone has more competitors than the Kindle, but Apple doesn’t produce better models every year just to stay ahead of Samsung and Google. It does so because its loyal customers will spend considerable amounts of money every few years in order to get a significantly better device. Companies classically take advantage of monopolies to jack up prices and reduce quality. But at least when it comes to devices like the Kindle, they have a strong incentive, because of their vast customer base, to take the more virtuous route of steadily innovating and improving quality.

The weakness of the Kindle, though, was that you couldn’t take notes on it. You could transfer your own files, even if pdfs did not show up very well (that has improved markedly since). But you couldn’t mark the files up easily. The best you could do was copy passages to a clipboard or type a short note on an awkward on-screen keyboard, and later transfer those passages and notes to a computer.

Yet even as the Kindle was changing the experience of reading for me and millions of others, the desirability of loading personal content onto e-readers was growing fast. Google announced its Google Books project in 2004, and soon, literally millions of books in the public domain, an unbelievable cultural treasure trove, became available for free, downloadable in pdf form. Meanwhile, thanks to services like JSTOR, virtually any academic article became available as well, at least to those with an institutional subscription. Today, a high proportion of new university press books are downloadable through university libraries. And professors like me constantly receive draft papers and book manuscripts from students and colleagues. But how to read all this material without having to stare at a computer screen, or feed ream after ream of paper into a printer? Amazon did not seem to be interested in providing an e-reader suitable for this purpose. The purpose of the Kindle was to sell readers books from its vast electronic storehouse.

In 2010, the debut of the Apple iPad seemed to solve this problem. This new device was just a little smaller than a piece of paper, and you could transfer pdfs to it easily. There were even apps that allowed you to mark the pdfs up with a stylus and transfer them back to your computer. Since then, iPads have gotten progressively lighter, thinner, and more powerful. Yet reading on the bright, backlit screen remains far less pleasant than reading on the Kindle, which has much more of a book-like feel. Writing with a stylus on the iPad’s glass screen feels awkward. And the iPad, unlike the Kindle, is basically a small, internet-capable computer. It takes only a tap, while reading a book, to check e-mail, or social media, or to play a video game: exactly the sort of distraction one doesn’t want when engrossed in a book. I have colleagues who swear by the iPad, but I have never warmed up to it.

But with a large market up for grabs, other companies rushed in with new e-ink tablets: the Supernote, the Onyx Boox, the ReMarkable, and many others. Of these, it was the ReMarkable that caught my eye, and that I eventually purchased. Developed by what sounded like a scrappy Norwegian startup, the product was sleek and attractive. Roughly the size of an iPad but much lighter, and more pleasant to hold, it promised exactly what I wanted: a large e-ink screen on which to read, and to mark up my own documents, including downloaded books, articles, and papers.

The ReMarkable worked, but not as well as I had hoped. Transferring files between it and my computer was kludgy, even when the company added integration with cloud services like Dropbox. Pdfs could not easily be resized, so small fonts were difficult to read. Most frustrating, the e-ink screen lacked the gentle backlight that Amazon had introduced for the Kindle many years before to counter the limits of e-ink, so that to read the ReMarkable comfortably, at least with my middle-aged eyes, you had to shine a bright light directly onto to the screen.

And the company seemed to care little about these problems. It advertised the device principally as a writing tablet, not a reading one. Its advertisements highlighted how natural the screen felt to write on, and the machine’s impressive ability to recognize and transcribe even sloppy handwriting. The ReMarkable was indeed a dream to write on, but I didn’t need it for this purpose. I wanted it to read, and while the device could have conquered the large and growing market niche for e-readers with only a few relatively small tweaks, the company didn’t seem eager or able to do so. I suspect this is because, as a small company, it had decided early on to focus on handwriting, and simply didn’t have the bandwidth to adapt and expand.

And so: Enter the evil empire. This spring, Amazon introduced a new, larger Kindle model, called the Scribe. It is roughly the same size as the ReMarkable and the iPad, and almost as light and comfortable to hold as the former. The screen is not quite as pleasant to write on as the ReMarkable’s, but close. Transferring documents back and forth to a computer is simple and reliable. There is a Paperwhite-style backlight. Pdfs can be resized to make for easier reading when necessary. It comes closer to the ideal e-reader I had been dreaming of since the 1980’s than any other device I have tried. And I can also read any of the hundreds of Kindle books I own on it as well—a nice added benefit.

Yes, it’s Amazon. But Amazon, unlike the designers of the ReMarkable, had the resources to work on, and perfect, every aspect of the device. They had a vast customer base to whom they could market it. It took them longer than necessary to develop and release it. But now that it is here, I suspect it will sweep the field. For academics like myself its utility is enormous, and more than worth the current $300 price tag for the cheapest model. So, yes: score one for the evil empire.