Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

The Kindle and the Nook and the Sony Reader and ebooks aren’t just helping destroy Publishing. They are collaborating with the good parts of the Internet and helping to destroy advertising and manipulation.

There are a lot of other good things that help. However, a large part stems from reading books for yourself and gathering knowledge from the Internet yourself and developing the faculty to reason independently.

Let’s look at each of the elements.

Advertising is on the Decline – Smarter People means the End of Advertising

Conde Nast just realized that it can no longer depend on advertising dollars -

 Conde Nast’s CEO, Charles Townsend, stated, “We have been so overly dependent on advertising as the turbine that runs this place, and that is a very, very, risky model as we emerge from the recession.”

What he really wants to say is -

People are no longer stupid and won’t just buy whatever they see in advertisements.

That means advertisements no longer make us as much money because companies don’t get the same returns on their investment.

The New York Times has a very good article covering Conde Nast’s move away from advertising. There’s the predictable disbelief that Conde Nast can get over a dependence on advertising -

other questions remain about the company’s future, namely whether it can wean itself from advertising dollars as much as it would like.

Its transition to a more consumer-focused business model will be difficult for a company that now earns about 70 percent of its net profit from advertising.

Predictably, advertisers think Conde Nast is risking everything. Read this post at AdAge – It sounds exactly like Publishers trying to convince authors they should keep handing over 75% of their revenue. The blogger thinks Conde Nast is making two wrong assumptions -

Assumption No. 1: Consumers are loyal enough to your brand to overcome their desire to consume free, or highly subsidized, content.

Assumption No. 2: Advertising prices are going to continue to free-fall.

Really? If Conde Nast doesn’t have brand loyalty then what’s the point. They aren’t your customers if they don’t have brand loyalty. It’s also impressive that’s he’s freely admitting advertising prices are in free-fall. Yes, that’s what happens when Facebook gets 500 million people to generate content for free.

Basically, advertising is in decline because people are getting smarter, they finally have the option to ignore ads, and are getting trained to ignore advertising. There’s an excellent post by Frederic Filloux about the end of advertising.

What’s going to replace advertising?

Well, there are two possibilities. The first is to find something more manipulative and compelling than advertising.

Newer and More Addictive Things are Rising Up to Enslave us

Paul Graham writes about ‘The Acceleration of Addictiveness’ and how more and more addictive things are rising up -

Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago.

Perhaps the most compelling part of his post is this -

More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about. Most people won’t, unfortunately.

Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart.

One sense of “normal” is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

Extrapolate his post and you see the emergence of two broad groups of people -

1. A group of people who give in to increasingly addictive and enticing things. They play Farmville and watch TV all the time or are addicted to drugs and prescription drugs or play video games all the time. They’re basically in a Matrix like world completely detached from reality.
2. A group of people who live in reality – even though it doesn’t offer the tantalizing escape from pain non-reality offers.

If we’re lucky the ratio will be 80:20. It’s far more likely to be 90:10. This sounds crazy until you consider that we are close to a point where robots take over all the menial tasks and leave us free to play Farmville and entertain ourselves with iPhone Apps all day long.

When you look at a social game like Farmville with artificial rewards that still manage to trigger the right chemicals or look at video games that offer virtual satisfaction and success for close to zero effort you have to seriously ask yourself – What percentage of people will stick with the real world where you have to work really hard to succeed?

Fortunately, there’s a counterbalance to increasingly manipulative and compelling addictions and enticements.

The Internet, Reading Books, and the spread of Knowledge are making people smarter

Advertising doesn’t work on the Internet. The only company that makes a ton of money is Google and it provides the starting point and it provides shortcuts. Notice that it only sends users where users ALREADY intended to go. That’s why it only does text ads and does its best to make its shortcuts look as different from ads as possible.

You could come up with lots of reasons why Advertising isn’t working. My assumption would be that people quickly realize who’s helping them and who’s manipulating them – this is helped by the free spread of knowledge. They then avoid or ignore the manipulative elements.

At its most fundamental advertising is influence. In fact, you could argue (and evolutionary psychologists do) that all communication is influence.

You need two things to be in place to influence people – An unhappiness i.e. a need that they feel is unfulfilled, an influential message that makes people feel that the product being advertised will fulfill their need.

With smart people you can’t really get either. Consider fashion -

A young, impressionable girl sees a fashion magazine and feels unpretty and links ‘being pretty’ with what is portrayed i.e. buying make-up and clothes and being ridiculously thin.

However, if that young girl has been taught or has learnt that beauty has nothing to do with the dictates of the fashion world then no amount of fashion magazines can convince her she’s unpretty.

Where would she learn this? Not from TV. Not from the magazines.

It would have to be from sources that seek to educate. Which would mean the good parts of the Internet and Books and Libraries and Parents and Teachers.

The role of eReaders in the rise of smartness

The good parts of the Internet and books have the wisdom of the ages. The bad parts of the Internet and TV have the manipulation of the ages.

With eReaders you’re finally taking books into the 21st century and getting more people to read. Instead of getting manipulated by tobacco and beer companies you get to learn from the best writers the world has ever known.

That’s influence too – they wanted to pass on their knowledge and paint a portrait of their time and achieve immortality. However, it’s a win-win sort of influence because it makes you smarter and more knowledgeable.

It’s just a choice – Lots of people will still prefer to farm on Farmville. However, it’s critical to ensure people get to choose freely and fairly. The combination of a lack of evolution in books and the gatekeeping of Publishers was locking out more and more people from books. Instead of choosing between reading and wasting time users had to choose between ‘putting in a lot of effort and money to be able to read books’ and ‘zero effort to waste time’.

With eReaders and ebooks and lower prices and convenience that’s changing.

People will argue that if young kids want to destroy their intelligence and sense of reality with countless hours of TV and video games and porn and social games that’s their privilege. Yes, perhaps it is. However, we should at least give them the choice between very compelling good options and very compelling bad options. Currently, nearly all the compelling options are bad.

Take any parent – What would they rather have their kids do?

We’re seeing attempts to kill off the Internet with the rise of numerous walled gardens and competing Internets (Facebook). We’re also seeing attempts to kill off eReaders (is it a surprise it’s mostly the Press who are dependent on advertising?).

However, we’re beyond the inflection point. Every person who’s buying an eReader is exchanging a world of manipulation for a world where they decide what direction they take. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Amazon or Barnes & Noble or a bunch of aliens from Mars who’re making the eReaders - As long as they are dedicated ebook reading devices they will play a crucial part in destroying advertising and fighting the newer more manipulative diseases we keep coming up with.

Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | ereaders vs advertising, good vs evil