Present Imperfect: Neither aroused nor inspired.

http://www.presentimperfect.com/archives/2008/01/neither_aroused.html
"Alrighty. Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we?:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
-Steve Jobs on the Amazon Kindle

I could spend the rest of this post saying things like “hey, Steve, doesn’t that mean that sixty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or more last year?” Or pointing in the direction of the nearest behemoth bookstore superchain whilst making “duh” face. Or mentioning that I don’t think Amazon became the number-one online retailer in the universe by selling flyfishing accessories.

The comments on every site that published this quote are positively aglow with this kind of gleeful reactionary outrage. All over a statistic I can’t find anywhere — except in that quote.

This is because crazy genius billionaires make stuff up.

In fact, most crazy geniuses become billionaires by making stuff up. iPod? That’s a word from a language I invented when I was eight in order to secretly communicate with my imaginary dog-faced friend, Jorb from Orb. Okay, no. But it could have been, for all its made-upedness. And the iPod itself is a shiny fruit fallen to earth from an enchanted tree in a mystical fairy land populated entirely by crazy geniuses.

Really great ideas tend to be unique. Or, at least, they transform just-okay ideas into really great ideas by adding something unique.

If the Kindle fails, it won’t be because it’s ugly or because it uses only one font or because people don’t read anymore. It will fail because of a lack of imagination. The book was a fucking great idea. Seriously ace. Thank you, Aldus Manutius, you 15th-century Venetian crazy genius. The Kindle is not a unique idea, nor does it improve on Manutius’s really great idea.

Arthur C. Clarke, who has written way more about failure of imagination, once said, “Nothing will ever replace books. They can’t be matched for convenience, random access, nonvolatile memory (unless dropped in the bath), low power consumption, portability, etc.”

Of course, that hasn’t stopped Clarke from giving Amazon whatever permission it needs to turn some of his works into Kindle editions. But, hey: Crazy geniuses can also become billionaires by hedging their bets."