Jeff Bezos says books compete with blogs, news, and games for attention, so Kindle's mission is to make every book in print available in any language within 60 seconds. Reducing friction through price and accessibility is key to growing long-form reading.
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You're thinking about books. The most important thing to observe is that you have to draw the box big. Books don't just compete against books. Books compete against people reading blogs and news articles and playing video games. It takes many hours to read a book. It's a big commitment. And if you narrow your field of view and only think about books competing against books, you make really bad decisions. If we want a healthy culture of long form reading and you have to differentiate between short form reading and long form reading, you've got to make books more accessible. And part of that is making them less expensive. Books, in my view, are too expensive. You know, $30 for a book is too expensive. If you just think, I'm only competing against other $30 books, then you don't get there. But if you realize that you're really competing against, you know, Candy Crush, then you start to say, well, gosh, you know, maybe we should really work on reducing friction on long form reading. That's what Kindle has been about from the very beginning. We humans co evolve with our tools, we change our tools and then our tools change us. And in the Internet era, almost all of the tools for reading have been reducing the friction of short form reading. The Internet is perfect for delivering, you know, three paragraphs to your smartphone. The Kindle is trying to reduce friction for reading a whole book. And it's working. The vision for Kindle is every book ever in print in any language, all available in 60 seconds. That's a multi decade vision. We've been working on it for a decade now and we've made huge progress. We're making books easier to get, more affordable, more accessible. It's a fantastic mission. If you want to do more of something, make the friction less. If you want to do less of something, make the friction more. If there's a particular snack food that you like a lot and it's making you fat, put it on the top shelf where it's harder to get to and you'll eat less of it. Don't leave it on your kitchen counter.
