November 19 2017 marked the 10th anniversary of the first Kindle. What’s easy to forget, Vice President of Kindle content David Naggar says, was the sheer wireless convenience introduced by the Kindle.

“It wasn’t the hardware itself,” he says, “that caused the Kindle to explode all of a sudden, or that it came from Amazon. It was the fact that it was the first piece of consumer hardware in history to be connected to a cellphone network where the customer paid nothing for it. You were able to sit anywhere—at a bar next to a friend who said, ‘I just read this great book, you should try it’—and 60 seconds later, that book was on your device and ready to read.

“That was the killer device,” Naggar says. “And then people started to enjoy reading on the devices, and that took off.”

Read the full article on the development and impact of Amazon’s ebook ecosystem on book publishing by Porter Anderson on Publishing Perspectives
here.