Steve Jobs Disses the Kindle

Posted on January 19, 2008

At Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air -- a super thin laptop computer that looks fabulous but doesn't have much power and only one USB port. In an interview Jobs took the opportunity to slam Amazon.com's Kindle reading device, saying that it's "going nowhere."

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "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 is a genius, but he's wrong about reading. People still love to read books. It's only the technology of how they read that is changing. In Japan, for instance, people are absolutely obsessed with reading novels on their cellphones. And the Kindle sold out at Christmas. Sure, it's not gorgeous like the iPhone, but it does what it was designed to do -- perfectly.