Please Make a Better Kindle

It must be a nightmare to become a Kindle product manager. 

You show up on the first day of work ready to reinvent the most important advancement in human intellectual history—the book. You sit down at your desk. You notice it is not a desk but is instead a blue door turned horizontal and stacked between filing cabinets. 

I don’t mind the desk door, you tell yourself. I am here to reinvent the book.

The book! THE BOOK! The vehicle of every important event and person in recorded history from Moses, to Jesus. From Aristotle, to Aquinas. From Newton, to Shakespeare. From William James to E. L. James.

You pull out the prep you did for your first day and lay it out on the desk-door in front of you.

You have drawings and diagrams. You have charts and graphs. You have case studies and research notes and prototypes out the wazoo.

You have rethought highlighting and search. Evernote and Notion and Roam will flee your wrath—for you have solved the problem of remembering what you read. You have single-handedly smote SparkNotes with an AI-based summarizing tool. You have created new collaboration features (everyone needs new collaboration features.) 

You even have a memo prepared. An internal press release outlining the next-generation Kindle you’ve so lovingly envisioned. In true Amazon style, it is—dare you say it—customer obsessed. It compacts your genius into just a few lines of black-and-white text.