The Psychology Behind Why the iPad Didn’t Kill the Kindle

Amazon succeeds because their strategy catches the psychological fundamentals that drive consumer behavior, not short-term infatuation with bells and whistles.

When the iPad came out, many sounded the death knell for the Kindle. You have to admit, the iPad was, and still is, pretty slick, and on first appearance, Kindle’s future looked bleak. Nick Bilton’s NY Times post “Third-Generation Kindle Is Top Seller” talks about how Amazon was able to stay in the game.  From my perspective, Amazon succeeds because they understand the psychological shift taking place in our technology-rich environment. It’s not about the tools, it’s about what we want to do with the tools.

Amazon understands that, ultimately, it’s about user experience and meaning. As I wrote in a recent post (15 Techno-Cultural Trends for 2011), we will increasingly see a shift in focus from the thrill of owning cool technology to the goals of using it. Amazon is positioning itself to catch the psychological fundamentals that drive consumer behavior, not the short-term buyer infatuation with bells and whistles. This also isn’t about duplicating a current experience–Amazon isn’t making an eReader to be just like reading a “real” book. That would be as confining (and unsuccessful) as trying to duplicate the iPad.  Amazon continues to develop ways that help individuals to achieve their goals without being tethered to a specific technology. Very smart indeed.

There are lots of ways to think about mobile technologies–it doesn’t just mean a smart phone in your pocket. It means that the boundaries between technologies are blurring. The real successes in technology will be the ones where the technology disappears behind the function. People’s expectations about accessibility will be not just be asking “is there wireless here?” but expecting their life to move trans-device.

Amazon is willing to trust the market enough to allow the Kindle to be technologically nondenominational. You can read Kindle files on a number of devices–Macs, PCs, iPads, iPhones, Droids, Blackberries, and pretty much any other device that has Internet access. You don’t have to buy the Kindle portable reader to read a Kindle document.  You can love your iPad and your Droid and still be a Kindle fan.

With e-books, many aspects of reading books has been expanded. We have the portability of vast amount of written information and the ability to get what we want on-demand. With technology we also can address physical issues, such as type size and cognitive ones, with built-in dictionaries.  What needs to come next?

• The price of e-books should come down. It is still ridiculously high given that’s there’s no marginal cost for selling an e-book. What Amazon has done, however, is created an e-reader that, while still expensive, is much more economically accessible.
• E-books need to be able to be shared. This is one of the most common things people do with books, after reading them, of course. I use an iPad but am a loyal Kindle customer for my books because their usage policy is much more flexible than Apple’s. I understand all the copyright arguments, but if I have a book and like it, I want to be able to share it with someone else. With iTunes, I have to count how times I have downloaded it onto my own devices for my own use. I find it insulting when I can’t download something I already own without taking it off of something else or calling customer support.
• Note taking in books needs to be more natural. I have a hard time reading nonfiction without wanting to write notes on the pages-both things I want to remember and related ideas and inspirations. Note taking on ebooks is still too primitive to be useful or satisfying.

Don’t get me wrong. I love ebooks and the iPad and don’t underestimate the cultural impact of either. The iPad is extraordinarily beautiful and both its function and aesthetics have redefined the market. But Amazon continues to succeed because they are looking at the ways they can solve people’s problems, not design products that compete with existing solutions.

A famous quote from Thomas Edison sums up the new cultural expectations about what technology should deliver: “There are no rules here–we’re trying to accomplish something.”