Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of “aha” moment in your memory — the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.
I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone’s touch interface.
The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.’s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I’d bought and downloaded Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty. By the time the check arrived, I’d finished the first chapter.
I knew then that the book’s migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways.
