I am intrigued by Amazon's Kindle, now sold out through December 17th. Though I am a paper-and-ink guy, the idea of carrying around 200 books at once, downloading them instantaneously from anywhere, and being able to do book-like things like underline, take notes and dog-ear (virtually) pages, seems like a fairly brilliant application of interaction design. In other words, it seems like everything you can do with a book, you can do electronically with Kindle. And of course, you can do more, like get The New York Times delivered to you poolside as you are being fanned by bikini-clad nubile vixens while vacationing in St. Lucia.
Now come the part I don't understand. I watched the 6-minute Amazon video that's there ostensibly to explain Kindle and excite prospective buyers about it. Man, did it suck. The "talent" was talentless. He certainly couldn't act, he was stiff and un-fun and boring. The film was informative, but why did it have to be so dull. Dull from about a million different angles. It seems to me that Amazon could have gotten virtually anyone in the world to act in and put together this short movie. In fact, they have another film on their site which features Toni Morrison. But the dweeb movie is the key-note. I'm not sure why.
This only re-affirms my belief that people don't take the importance of production values on the web seriously enough. Or they fail to equate production values with the value of the brand. This is lamentable. And dumb.
I buy approximately five books a week, so my apartment is bursting at the seams with erudition. I will probably buy a Kindle at some point. However, I might have bought it today, if its online commercial didn't suck so bad.
1 comment:
aside for the usefulness of the kindle, which is indeed an intriguing product, i also agree with you on production values online.
sure, there are some example of production values.
but whereas a TV spot somehow required production values, it's almost as if the web doesn't. and that is sad indeed.
it's almost symptomatic that with every technological breakthrough we tend to become more stupid and less invled towards quality.
storytelling and books where as good as they got a thousand years ago, music never better than in the 18th century, movies where fantastic last century. Some call it progress.
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