Digital Revolutionaries in an Analog World
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Consider the book.
It’s one of the greatest data-dissemination devices ever conceived, capable of transmitting content in a variety of formats. If handled correctly, it can safely store data for centuries. It’s portable and some versions are even pocket-sized. It has a highly intuitive user interface and nobody has ever complained about its slow boot-up time. It can be cheaply mass-produced and readily recycled. Its fans avidly collect them and those collections can confer a certain social cachet.
It’s a proven technology—scholars say the first products we’d recognize as books came from Egypt in the first century, but centuries before that, Hindu scholars pioneered the concept, writing on leaves they later bound with twine.
And while improvements in its manufacturing—most notably, the printing press—have steadily lowered costs and improved quality, at its core, the book hasn’t changed much since Johannes Gutenberg hosted a 15th-century product demo for a Strasbourg investment banker who ended up fronting him 800 guilders to develop his prototype and take his boot-strapped startup to the ramp-up stage.
“People forget that the book itself is a technology, and it’s evolved from clay tablets to parchment and all kinds of things,” Jeff Bezos told TV interviewer Charlie Rose in 2007. “You forget, because you’re so accustomed to it, that you forget that it’s a technology.”
Five-and-a-half centuries later, he and Seattle-based Amazon.com are trying to improve on that state-of-the-art technology with the digital technology of the Kindle.
“Books are the last bastion of analog,” Bezos likes to say.
Build a better mousetrap, Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, and the world will beat a path to your door. That’s been the key to success for many of Washington’s signature companies for generations: Boeing built a better airplane, Nordstrom built a better retail model—Amazon itself used technology to build a better bookstore.
But in some industries, the basic technology has worn so well and endured so long, it’s not even thought of as technology any more. Books are a great example, but so are water meters.
The same
