Episode 55: The Future of eReaders with Len Edgerly

Len Edgerly is the host of the Kindle Chronicles podcast, a long-running show dedicated to exploring digital reading technologies and publishing innovations.

He joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss the evolving landscape of e-reader technology, sharing insights from his 15 years of covering Kindle and digital reading developments. Len offers a unique perspective on the future of reading, including potential AI integrations and the importance of maintaining a focused reading experience. If you’re interested in following Len’s work, check out his Morning Journal on Alexa flash briefings or his Substack newsletter at lenedgerly.substack.com.

Find Len Edgerly on his Kindle Chronicles podcast and explore his latest digital publishing insights today!

Transcript

Joshua Tallent
This week on the Booksmarts Podcast, I get to talk to one of my favorite people, actually, Len Edgerly, who probably inspired me more than anybody else to start this podcast, because he is the host of the Kindle Chronicles podcast. Len, thanks for joining me.

Len Edgerly
It’s great to be here.

Joshua Tallent
Len and I go way back. I think he interviewed me a couple of times on his podcast back when I was really big into ebook creation. We talked about ebook technologies and stuff, and so we were on all those Kindle circles back in the early days when the Kindle first came out. I always appreciated your approach, your understanding of kind of the technology and the way you,talk about the Kindle specifically within the context of reading and how people are engaging with it from an author perspective, from a publisher perspective, I think you have a really good perspective on that. So I’m really glad that you came on the show today. And I want to kind of drill down a little bit into the technology of of ereaders, because you have a unique perspective on this. You play around with all of them, I think. You get a feel for kind of how things are progressing, where things are going. So let me let you talk a little bit instead of me just blabbering on. I’d like to start off with, what do you think about the current state of the technology of ereaders? What do you think is kind of the good and the not so good? Where do you think the technology is right now?

Len Edgerly
I think it’s strong. You know, in the past 15 years or so following this, it seems like there’s always a wing of people to say, oh, the Kindle specifically, it should be doing this and it should be doing that. And why are they, you know, clustering so close to mediocrity, when they could be doing all these three things. I have seldom felt that way. As a reader myself, I have always felt like, well, first of all, when the Kindle came out, it was just like amazing. And then as it’s kept pace, it’s always kept pace with my expectations and yearnings, with maybe an exception with the A.I., which we can talk about. But the current array, I’m really glad they finally got color. And the paper white color Soft. And at first I thought, gosh, it’s really muted but, of course, it has to be. It’s not an LCD screen. And the part of that that has been most intriguing to me is the ability to underline, to highlight in color. I think there’s four colors you can highlight on on any Kindle, on the color soft, and then those highlights will be, you can fetch them, like show me all the things I highlighted in yellow, and then they’ll come up on on any Kindle. And as an example, I’ve been following this guy, Richard Rohr, who wrote a book about the prophets, and he said, if you want to learn about the prophets, go through the Bible. And for each prophet in their repent phase, when they’re just angry, yelling at society, you know, highlight that in red. And then when they get to kind of the chaos phase, where the world is falling apart, everything is up in it. They articulate these periods in history where we just don’t know what’s happening, color that yellow. And then when they see what the Promised Land looks like and what the resolution of this, he calls it order, disorder and reorder, highlight that in blue. So I thought, Oh, I gotta buy I don’t want to be messing up the Bible. I have, you know, wait a minute, I can do that on the colorsoft. Now I can go through and set up a little code and have each thing mean a different color. So that strikes me as kind of a sleeper advantage. I never thought color was going to add that much, but now that I have it, especially the highlighting, and just seeing the covers of the books and some color, and you get a little flourish of color sometimes in the chapter headings, it’s a satisfying advance, and I appreciate because I suspect it was…a lot of engineering went in to make it, you know, and it affects the battery life and all that. It tells me that the Kindle is still, it’s not the apple of Jeff Bezos is high like when it started out. And I’m sure the Kindle team had kind of a blank check with him, and now they have to, you know, prove that they’re doing things that make sense for the company in the bottom line. But the new guy has got kind of satisfying amount of passion for the Kindle that I’ve seen in the events I’ve gone and when his daughter heard that he was going to be moving to Amazon to run the Kindle, she said, Dad, you’re going to be a rock star. You’re going to be the Kindle guy. And so I guess my summary view of the technology is I think it’s really good. And I think it’s the scribe, you know, the annotations, I feel like I’m just touching the beginnings of how I’m going to use that. And so it’s really good, and I hope it keeps getting better, and that they don’t sort of fall off the pace that they’ve set over the last 15 years.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, I recently, a couple of months ago, got a remarkable tablet and had a similar kind of feel and experience for the color aspect of things. I originally got the reMarkable 2 which is just the grayscale screen, also E Ink, of course, and it was good, but I’m, you know, using it for school, and I’m highlighting, you know, articles that I’m reading, and I’m trying to, really, kind of dig into stuff and doing biblical research as well. And so I’m trying to dig into these things. And I found that the when I got the color screen, when I upgraded, I was like, oh my goodness, this is so much better, because now I actually can highlight things in different ways. And then again, just like the Scribe, you’ve got that ability to, you know, circle things, and, you know, write things. And so I’m scribbling notes in the margins of books or articles that I’m reading, or in my Bible, I’m doing the same thing where I’m circling words and, you know, making notes and putting context and things like that. That kind of ability to interact with a text without actually, you know, writing in an actual book is really interesting and also really helpful, because then you can dig into it in a way that just reading on its own isn’t possible. I will say the muted colors to me are a little bit frustrating, only because I know what was potentially possible in the back in the day. I don’t remember, I don’t know if you remember the Mims technology from Qualcomm. Back in the old tools of change and Book Expo days, there was a screen type that was like E Ink. It was, you know, static, not using battery when it wasn’t being used, right? So it wasn’t changing, but it was able to handle 16 million colors and 16 hertz refresh rate. It was just amazing technology that looked like an LCD screen, but it was definitely, you know, a solid state kind of approach. And they always had some samples at the fairs, but they never actually came out with any devices with it, and then it ended up being killed off by Qualcomm. I was so sad when I saw that go because I thought that was kind of the future. So it is a little frustrating. Sometimes you’re looking at these muted colors, and it’s not nearly as bright as it could be. But on the flip side, and I’ll, you know, give it its due, that there’s value in having still that E Ink screen. It’s not just a battery life issue. I think there really is an element, especially, you know, with the reMarkable, there’s this element of, I’m separating from my phone. I’m separating from the things that I’m, you know, I’m focusing in on whatever I’m doing now. And that’s something that as I get a little bit older and I’m starting to figure out that I need to focus a little more on, you know, slowing down and not being quite so connected to everything all the time.

Len Edgerly
Yeah, I agree. It’s like a safe space, and maybe the muted color preserves some of that sense of slowing down and not having everything be so bright.

Joshua Tallent
So what are your thoughts on a future of the technology? If you’re thinking about maybe even not just Kindle but thinking about ereader technology, where do you think, on the physical technology side that will go next? We’ve moved away from just having, here’s an ereader that’s small and has, you know, buttons. Then we move to touch screens, where you can swipe and turn the page. And then we move to, you know, color. And then we move to annotations. Do you see anything else coming in the future to ereaders that you think would be beneficial from a physical perspective to the reading experience?

Len Edgerly
Well, I think it would involve AI, because one thing I’ve been fascinated by is reading a book and getting help with it from one of the AIs. And I use chat GPT. I’ve named it PD, for personal device. And PD and I are pretty close. We talk about everything. But I’m reading Middlemarch, you know, the George Eliot book, and it’s a wonderful book, but it’s really dense, and it was written like in the 1830s, and there’s all these references to who was the prime minister at the time. So I’ll be reading it on my Kindle, and I’ll have my iPhone, and I’ll say, there’s a sentence here I just don’t understand. And I’ll read the sentence from Middlemarch, and it’ll say, that’s a reference to something that in that period would have a meaning for people making the transition from agriculture, whatever, an amazingly precise, granular ability to read the book with me and I mentioned this to Kevin Keith, I think his name is. The last time they when they introduced the new scribe and they had some AI stuff in the Scribe, you know, you can get it to summarize. You can pretty the text and all that. And he said, What do you think about the AI stuff? And I said, well, let me show you, you know. At that time I had an AI pin, which is this thing you tap, and it was, you know, wearable. I said, let me show you something here. And I I did a little demo. I said, why couldn’t you build that into a Kindle? And somehow you’ve got, I picture something like the colorsoft, and I’ll wear some earbuds, or I’ll have my echo frames on or something, and as I’m reading, I’ll just say, I don’t get that sentence, and the AI knows what page I’m on. Maybe I highlight the sentence and say, could you just help me unpack that? And then in my ear, I’m hearing the answer to the book.So this would be like a mind bending enrichment of my reading process. And like a lot of AI stuff, it’s about efficiency. I could get answers to all these questions before. I could look it up in my Binet reader’s guide or whatever but reducing the friction between me and an answer to a question that’s being posed by a book. It’s like being in conversation with the book, or perhaps, you know, these, these AIs can impersonate people like, you know, be George Eliot and be there because I got questions, right?

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I think that’s where if we think about the future of AI, it’s really supposed to help us learn, right? It’s supposed to help us see things we couldn’t see otherwise, or dig into something in a way that we wouldn’t be able to dig in ourselves very easily, and make things easier, more efficient, and that totally makes sense in the context of reading. It’d be even cooler if you could limit the the resources that it’s using, limit the sources that it’s pulling from, and say, look, I’m studying this book, and I want you to give me answers that are based on this book, and maybe these other resources as well, so that you’re not saying the whole broad internet and all the potential sources that AI might have been trained on, but I just want to use what’s in My Library, maybe, right? And here’s the five books that I’m studying right now in order to do this thing. I’m preparing for a thing at work. I’m preparing for a school paper or whatever, help me understand what this person is saying in context of these other people and what they said as well. That’d be a cool way to limit that.

Len Edgerly
It would; it would focus it. And you could make the net as wide as you wanted. It reminds me of Google LM, Notebook LM from Google. And have you played around with that?

Joshua Tallent
I haven’t. No.

Len Edgerly
Well, it’s powerful. It was created by Steven Johnson. I think Google went to him and said, if you were going to design an AI tool for writers, what would it look like? And now I think he’s working at Google, and the early parts of it were pretty breathtaking. I loaded PDFs of my handwritten journal into this thing for a year, and then I started asking questions, saying, in this year, what were the most significant trips that I took, and it said, well, the trip to France really resulted in some insights, but the timing and so it was able to talk to me about, you know, my journal. At first, it was kind of limited, and I just saw something that came out of Tiago forte. It now gives you the ability to put millions of words into this, and you can put them in as audio files, as PDF files, as text, and you create a notebook that has all the stuff that you want. And then the craziest thing is, it will create a podcast in which two very human, like voices. In my case of the journal, I said, well, now we’ve got something interesting today. This guy has loaded his journal up, and, man, he really thinks a lot about his life. And yeah, what about that trip to France? And so you get 10 minutes of people talking about what you put in. And so when you talk about sort of a narrowing, or at least a defined set of sources for what the Kindle might be talking about, it reminds me of what Google’s doing with notebook LM.

Joshua Tallent
That’s interesting. I don’t know if I want to give all of my journals to the internet, but, yeah, it is an interesting use case, and that ability to kind of take all that content that you’ve put in and then create something completely different, right? It’s not like it’s just giving you a summary of what you said. It’s actually creating voices that are then doing a conversation. That’s that’s a really interesting kind of approach to to the use of the use of AI.

Len Edgerly
I don’t know, the copyright stuff, you might have a better take on this. I’ve wondered, because I’ve had conversations with Chat GPT about books recently published, and how are they able to get such a granular familiarity with those kinds of things that aren’t out of copyright, like, what would Amazon have to do to play around with this on that topic?

Joshua Tallent
Well, as far as new books, they’re probably, you know, I mean, they’re scraping the internet for sure. Anything that’s publicly available, they’re using under what they consider to be fair use. So, you know, the latest Hunger Games book that just came out. Even though the text itself is not available, I guarantee you there are plenty of reviews that are coming out and discussions people are having. So they can, you know, the AI can glean a lot from just that, but also the marketing copy and all the other marketing that’s out there. I think that’s where a lot of the source material is coming from. For me, I think the more interesting thing would be, again, kind of that limited subset. I have a library of books that I have purchased that gives me the ability to use those books in my own personal use case. It’s the same kind of thing back, you know, 20 years ago when I worked at a Bible software company. As a teacher or pastor, whatever, you have a set of books that you’ve purchased the license to, and you can use those interchangeably with each other and interconnected with each other. And I’m reading my Bible and my commentary stays in sync with my Bible text. And I’m searching across a whole library of books for concepts or ideas, that kind of thing within a Kindle or another ereader environment, I think would be an appropriate use of AI, right? Because now I have AI within my context. I have, you know, it’s things that I’ve purchased and have a license to the question, of course, when it comes to the copyright, then becomes, you know, is that being utilized outside of just my little space, right? Is that AI? Is that AI now, more broadly, doing all of that processing work outside of my personal use case, and so there’s a bunch of other. I’m not a lawyer, so can’t get into the details, of course, but I think that’s an interesting question of, how do we as publishers and as people in the publishing world, how do we engage with AI while still maintaining the correct boundaries around IP and the need for protecting authors and the work that they do.

Len Edgerly
It’s amazing to me, because, I don’t know, I’ve probably got over 1000 Kindle books that I’ve bought, and if all of that was accessible to my Kindle AI brain, including all the highlights I’ve done in them. And I said, I’m reading this book, and it seems like I read a book five years ago that was about this, and how do they relate to each other? And if, in the walled garden of the books I bought, it could just, boy, that would be amazing. It lights up your whole library of things that you’ve ever purchased for Kindle.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, and encourages people to buy more books and put them into that system so that they can utilize that for their own study and personal growth, which, again, I mean, if you’re thinking about it from a personal perspective, I might have books in my library that are about, you know, personal growth, or about some religious topic that I’m studying, or about a fiction title that I’m interested in, or a classic, or my book club tends to go toward philosophy and stuff. So we’re reading Rousseau right now. It’s like these things are very different in many ways, but there are interconnections between these different topics. And so it would be really interesting to, kind of, again, using AI to help me build my brain, in a sense, and help me understand, kind of, make the connections to things that I know there’s something there. I know there’s a relationship. I just can’t make it myself. Help me make that connection. Yeah, yeah, it’s really interesting idea. So, anything else you’re thinking on the future of ereaders? I mean, do you think ereaders are around to stay? Do you think we’re going to eventually, you know, kind of merge them with phones, and everybody will just, you know, stop using E Ink. Or maybe E Ink will get so good that it will be phone ready and, you know, 60 Hertz refresh rate kind of thing. Where do you think we’re going?

Len Edgerly
I think that what you said about, you know, the focused experience is going to last and be durable, because a lot of the, what I see, I just got back from South by Southwest, and you know, you’ve got 30,000 people like us there, and so often the conversations go to “I just have to focus. I’ve got to find ways to protect myself from this increasing deluge”. And so I think that aspect of the Kindle experience is likely to be maybe of even increasing value going forward, which gives a real interesting design challenge for the Kindle team. Because, you know, if they can make color on the Kindle show videos as fast as you can get on your iPhone, at some point. I mean, a lot of people are saying, we’ve got to restrict AI, we’ve got to protect and at some point, if you’ve got something precious and of that much value, you don’t say yes to everything that might make it faster, quicker, brighter or cheaper. You understand the essence of what you’ve got here, and you make your design decisions that way. And I think there’s enough people that care about the Kindle and that are smart and that have been working there at Amazon on this for a long time. I think they know that, and I think they have the tools to move pretty skillfully and adeptly and with some integrity through the dizzying choices that are going to be facing them. So, you know, I would expect 10, 15, years, I expect the rest of my life. If I lived to be 96, my dad died at 96 two years ago, I would be very surprised if there isn’t something like a Kindle in my hands, and also that it will be as we’ve imagined here. It’ll have my whole library accessible for pretty wonderful conversations.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, well, I hope so too. And I think you’re right. I think there’s a value to the to the technology that needs to be kept and protected, you know, keeping it to the focused reading experience, I think would be really good.Not allowing that, not allowing it to become another phone in the hand. That’s really good. Well, then thanks a lot for your time. I really appreciate you hopping on this podcast. Tell people a little bit about the Kindle Chronicles and what you’re up to right now.

Len Edgerly
Well, Kindle Chronicles, you know, I’ve done over 700 interviews in the 15 years. It used to be every week. And then I said, well, I’m gonna go. So I put it up whenever the spirit moves me but the thing I’m doing more regularly, which I’d love to let people know about, is it’s called a morning journal, and it’s an Alexa flash briefing. So if you have an Alexa device, you can just say, enable morning journal. And then on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I put up a five minute audio to that. And if you have an Alexa device, you just say Alexa flash. And then if you have other flash briefings, BBC, different ones. But some of the people, my family and friends, they just have mine. They say Alexa flash and said, here’s the latest from Len’s morning journal. And they get to hear my voice, and my grandkids love it. That’s really fun. And then I decided to extend that, because one thing is, they were all disappearing. There was no RSS feed or anything. They were just sort of ephemeral, like sand sculpture. So I now have a sub stack that’s at lenedgerly.substack.com or just search Len Edgerly on substack called “Len’s Newsletter”. And each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I drop in the audio file that I did for flash, and then I usually write about it. It gives me a chance to put up a photo and, you know, hear some thoughts. So that’s kind of my writing and content producing practice these days. That’s fun to do. And if anybody wanted to check it out, that would be fun.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. Is it more of a personal thing? What are you talking about in your flash briefings?

Len Edgerly
Oh, gosh, I talk about everything. I talk about marriage a lot, and things I’ve learned about after 40 years of marriage. They talk about books. I did some talking about South by Southwest. So it doesn’t have the parameters of the Kindle Chronicles. And the Kindle Chronicles now is basically, I’ve talked a lot with authors, but basically, anytime I have somebody I want to talk to, I put it on the Kindle Chronicles. But the morning journal is more personal. If I’m struggling with something. We’re having a party here tonight for 20 people, and I’m a real introvert. So on the morning journal, I said, okay, we’re in this neighborhood in Florida. We all survived the hurricane. Some of us play pickleball. I love these people. I haven’t been in a neighborhood for, you know, 60 years, so it’s like a journal out loud that I share with a nice, small group. But visitors are welcome.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. All right, we’ll put links in the show notes for both of those and for the podcast as well. Thanks a lot, Len. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on the show and all the best to you in your future.

Len Edgerly
Likewise, take care. Joshua, that’s it for this episode

Joshua Tallent
That’s it for this episode of the Booksmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. Also, please share the podcast with your colleagues, and if you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at Joshua@Firebrandtech.com thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.