Last time Jeff Bezos was in the building, we were chatting with him about the Kindle — the first version of the Kindle, which kind of doesn’t count. He was talking about how, for the last twenty years, the momentum of technological change has all headed in the direction of shortening attention spans, destroying the impulse for leisurely consumption, obviating the possibility of contemplation. We’re paraphrasing a bit, but that was the gist. Bezos continued, saying that he believes the technological pendulum will begin to swing back, that devices like his Kindle will, for some significant portion of the population, reverse that momentum. And in the cases of the few hundred thousand who have owned the Kindle for a while, that is clearly happening. The people we know who own Kindles read more books than they did in the recent past. They consume a variety of traditional media on Bezos’s original device, despite the fact that it was pretty crude, really limited.

Continue reading the review here.