Kindle 15th anniversary and the problem with US broadband

This week on the flagship podcast of mounting TVs way too high in the hospital room: The Verge's David Pierce chats with Russell Brandom about the state of US broadband, and what we learned from 22,000 people’s internet bills. David also talks with Verge managing editor Alex Cranz about the Amazon Kindle's 15th anniversary, why the Kindle has been so successful, and maybe also why it hasn’t done more. Keep listening for Alex's review of the Kindle Scribe. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of mounting TVs way too high in hospital rooms. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I just had a baby. As you're hearing this, he's about five days old. Everybody's doing well. He has really strong opinions about PS4 and Xbox and iOS and Android and which streaming service is the best. And you're going to hear from him a lot on this show at some point, I suspect. Thank you to everybody who heard on the Friday show and sent me nice emails and tweets. I really appreciate it. He is also the reason this is one of the last episodes you're going to hear me on for a while. You're in such good hands with Liam and Andrew and Neelai and Alex and the whole Vergecast crew, but I'm going to be gone for a few months. I will miss you all terribly. In the meantime, we have an awesome show for you today. We're

• 0:45David Pierce?

  going to talk a lot about ebook readers and Kindles, because this is not only right around the 15th anniversary of the Kindle, it's also the time that the Kindle Scribe, which you could argue is Amazon's most ambitious Kindle ever, is coming out. So we're going to dig into what all of that means and whether the ebook market is headed in the right direction. We're also going to talk about a big study we did with some partners where we got 22,000 people's internet bills and tried to figure out, what do you get when you pay for your internet? Are you paying the right amount? Are you getting the right speeds? It's all a little bleak and very interesting. All of that is coming up in just a second, but it's just about checkout time for me. So I gotta go figure out how car seats work and then try to steal everything from the hospital. This is The Vergecast. We'll see you in a sec.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:02David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So last year, in partnership with Consumer Reports, The Verge asked readers to share their internet bills. Basically, we wanted to find out how Americans are getting online and what it costs. We ended up getting more than 22,000 bills submitted to us. The Consumer Reports data team then spent over a year poring through all of that data and all of those bills, because bills are messy and complicated. And together, we've assembled a kind of snapshot of how much people are paying for internet access in the United States. Russell Brandam worked on The Verge's end of that project, and he's here to talk about the findings. But before we get into it, I just want to reiterate something you're about to hear us both say a bunch. This is not like a scientific paper with peer review and a perfect study of US broadband.

• 3:46David Pierce?

  That's basically impossible to do for a bunch of frustrating and important reasons you'll hear about as we talk here. But this is still a big study, and we learned a lot. So we're going to get into it. Anyway, let's go.

• 4:00David Pierce?

  Hi, Russell. Hi. Let's just start at the very beginning. So what was the idea behind this big survey that we and Consumer Reports and others did on people's ISP cable bills?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there is not a lot of information about the sort of state of broadband. And then to the extent that there is, it tends to be about like, coverage. Like, is there an accessible broadband connection in this county in Nebraska or wherever? A lot of the FCC data is self-reported by ISPs, and they kind of exaggerate, and so people have a problem with that. And I think a lot of people anecdotally probably know about this, that just the process of paying for the ISP, like, just paying for access, varies a lot from service to service, and sometimes is a little like, scammy and weird, right?

• 4:51David Pierce?

  Sometimes it's also a lot scammy and weird.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, data caps are the big one, and we didn't quite get as much information on that as we wanted from this, but we got sort of general prices, and we got a lot of information about fees, which like, there are just a lot of fees that are made up, basically.

• 5:11David Pierce?

  Right, yeah, okay, so I want to get into all that, but so basically, what was it, 22,000 people sent us their cable bill?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that wasn't just us, that's Consumer Reports too, but we put a big thing on The Verge, and they put a big thing on consumerreports.com, saying like, basically, send us your internet bills. You know, there was a whole secure system for getting them, because there's a lot of private information on there, and then also, you know, once they were in the bucket, there was a lot of like, we're gonna make sure that this isn't accessible to just random Joe who works at Consumer Reports. And so the process of getting the data from that many bills was a whole elaborate thing that I did basically none of. So I always want to give credit to the people who actually put in the legwork.

• 5:53David Pierce?

  Okay, and so the hedge, before we get into what we learned, is basically, this is not a representative sample of Americans' cable bills, because like you were saying, that essentially doesn't exist, right? And I think that's actually like, important context behind all of this, is, we talk a lot about US broadband, and access, and prices, but the honest truth is, we don't know. The data sucks.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:14David Pierce?

  The data that exists, like you said, is mostly self-reported, all of it is imperfect, and I just think about it as like, the best thing we have is like, those maps that T-Mobile puts in commercials, where it's just like, 98% of America is pink, and it's like, I don't know what to do with that information. As far as I can tell, on any of this, we don't have literally, basically, no more granular information than that.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think of it in some ways in terms of like, what phone should I buy? What TV should I buy? We actually have pretty good information about like, what does this particular TV cost? What is a reasonable amount to pay for a 36-inch TV this year? Like, we actually know that pretty well. And if someone comes along trying to charge another one, they have to put it up publicly and we will be out there saying, that TV is too expensive, right?

• 7:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  And it's just very hard to do a similar thing for internet because we're so deep in the weeds of like, you just move in to your home or wherever and it's, well, who do I pay for internet? It's this guy. He's your only options for many, many, many people.

• 7:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, again, not representative sample, but big sample. So we learned a lot of useful information here. Let's start with price because I feel like that is kind of the big question. You should sort of explain how you look at the data because you spend a lot more time with it. But to me, the range seemed to go from like, slightly more expensive than it seems like it should be to massively more expensive than it seems like it should be. That seems like the range Americans live in.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. The sort of middle of our sample was around $75, which I think as someone who has lived many years buying US internet access, sort of sounds about right to me. I'm like, okay, like, that's about as much as a person pays. That is much more than you would pay in many parts of Europe. So this is a different survey, but there's this survey that the Open Technology Institute did that we linked to in the piece that looks at different places all around the world. Extremely expensive in Hong Kong, interestingly. I don't know why that is. It seems like a densely populated island, so it can't be that expensive to lay the fiber, but maybe interconnection is weird.

• 8:24David Pierce?

  Also, everything's expensive in Hong Kong. I went there once and it was like the most expensive vacation I've ever been on in my life. So it might just, might have something to do with that.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, large parts of Western Europe are much, much lower. And so Paris, London, you're talking 30 or 40 bucks a month. So I mean, I think that is the basic thing of just like, our expectations are to pay a lot for broadband. I was expecting, I mean, I looked in the data thinking, is there some class of people who are just paying 150 bucks a month? And that didn't really show up. It is true that there are like, six bills out of the 22,000 where people are paying more than $200.

• 9:03David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Which seems obscene, but also it's six out of 22,000.

• 9:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  So like, the high end's very high. I maybe would be willing to believe that those people have special circumstances, or like, are using some obscene amount of data, or they're just constantly sort of streaming in 4K because they run a in-demand YouTube channel. And it's just extremely, I mean, I don't, I don't, yeah. There are a lot of YouTubers in the Verge audience, and they're eager to send their internet bills, so.

• 9:32David Pierce?

  True that.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  But yeah, I was not shocked by the high end, I will say. It was hard to look at it in a way where it's like, actually, a significant number of people are paying like, really shocking amounts. That didn't seem like it was happening.

• 9:45David Pierce?

  Okay, and that's actually somewhat surprising now that I think about it. Because another thing that you guys dug into is basically how many choices people have, right? And the thing we've railed on a lot on this show is that most people don't get to choose their provider. You need broadband internet. It's like, this is just sort of a life-critical thing now. So it's actually, to some extent, surprising to me that some of these providers are not out there being like, okay, well, you don't have anywhere to go. We're just gonna jack up the prices 40 bucks a month, because what are you gonna do?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I also think one of the dynamics that became clear, so we also did a survey of, it was a little noisier because like, we were doing it by zip code, and we're like, what happens when there's more than one provider in a zip code? And the price does go down. We're like, it's statistically messy because of all the sample issues we've been talking about, but you do sort of see the line going down, and it makes sense. The weird thing, so like, you need broadband, but then what? Or measuring is actually providers and there's a lot of situations where there's a single broadband provider, but like Frontier DSL is out here or you know, whatever DSL provider and they're like, we can give you something that will load a webpage.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  It's not like really the modern internet speed. And again, I mean, that's because that's sort of, you don't have to run a whole fiber optic line over to do it.

• 11:05David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  So I think that's a real pattern in like US availability is that you'll have one good one and then a bunch of crappy ones that are sort of bringing up the rear.

• 11:15David Pierce?

  Got it. So, and then maybe the bad ones, they don't keep the good ones fully in check, but they're at least enough that it's like, if my bill went from $70 to $200, that's when you get a bunch of people who are going to be like, okay, I'll take, I'll take worse internet for a price I can actually afford. So they maybe don't keep it all the way down, but they keep it a little bit in touch with reality.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this is a sort of big, open question is how much they're actually helping us by like having the DSL option out there. And I also think another thing that I worry about is, you know, the big picture anti-monopoly claim is if you only have one option, then they're sort of in a position of power and like they can charge a lot, but that's not the only way they could use that power. So the other thing you might see is just like worse service, that that ISP doesn't have reason to kind of invest in a good technician to come by when a squirrel chews through your fiber optic line and your internet drops because they sort of know that people in that region are going to be

• 12:16Speaker 02

  customers no matter what. And so they can just let that slide. We'd have to do another survey to find out if that's true, but I think that is kind of another place for that energy to go.

• 12:26David Pierce?

  That makes sense. That also brings us to the fees, which I think is the piece of this that actually to some extent surprised me the most because like, we pay too much for not very good internet is kind of like an unproven, but sort of truism of like anybody who pays attention to this industry. But you went and found that basically we are, in addition to all of that, just getting nickel and dimed to absolute death. Like, what, what did you guys discover?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  So we gave him a pass on equipment fees. We didn't do that, but this is another thing that Virgcast listeners I'm sure know well, is that ISPs love nothing more than to rent you a bad router.

• 13:00David Pierce?

  They love it.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Sort of indefinitely.

• 13:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  And it's like, you're paying $5 a month, every month for a $15 router. And that is, in some sense, like, it's bad. And I don't want to say it's your fault, but you can buy your own router and you probably should. And you will, they will stop charging you the rental fee for the router if you buy your own router.

• 13:20David Pierce?

  Not probably, by the way, you absolutely 100% should. Like, if you are listening to this now and you are renting your router, stop it. Like, go buy a router. They're on Amazon, they're very inexpensive, super easy to set up. They all pay for themselves, like, within a year. Just go do it. Bro, I promise it's worth it.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  So those aren't even represented on the chart, but it's worth talking about. Because then, so the next level is data caps, which are just bad. Like, again, it's sort of fair play because they're telling you upfront, like, this is the amount of thing. But it is just not the way internet service should work. It's not the way any actual things that you use on the internet work. And so that is represented in here because just the fact that people are paying huge amounts for that is sort of a big part of what the story of internet fees is. And then the third thing is they will just make something up. That is like internet infrastructure fee. DNS services, because DNS is famously, if you use more of it, we need to charge you more.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Like, it's just, I mean, one, there's no reasonable relationship to the amount this costs and the amount they're charging you. They're just sort of made up. They named a cost of their business and they were like, this is a fee for that. And then also, this is not how anything you buy works. The line we use in the piece is that it's like you bought a sandwich and they're like, well, there's a 50 cent mustard fee. It's like, okay.

• 14:40David Pierce?

  And you're like, I don't want mustard. And they're like, yeah, it's the fee.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  I guess I'm paying for mustard. You might, if there's mustard on the sandwich, you might just include that in the price of the sandwich.

• 14:49David Pierce?

  No, to me, this is like, so I just bought a car a couple of weeks ago and we were sitting there buying the car, talking about all the prices. And there's a certain set of things, right? That it's like, if I want the leather seats, I'm going to pay more money for that. Like, I get that, but we didn't want the leather seats. And so we go through the whole line and then we get to the end and it just says $899 processing fee. And I was like, I literally was like, we're, we're just sitting here filling out paperwork. Like, what is the $900 processing fee? Like, if it was $9, I would have been like, okay, it like costs you money to store papers somewhere, but like $900. And the guy said- Selling us the car literally goes, I don't know, that's just what the manager decides. I was like, what are we doing here?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  You don't want to skimp on the processing because then a year later, your processing valve is going to go out and you're going to be right back in the shop.

• 15:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's just nothing you can do about it because again, like I needed a car, the guy knew I needed a car. Just is what it is.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:35David Pierce?

  He literally goes, my mom paid the processing fee.

• 15:39David Pierce?

  But anyway, these to me are like the most monopolistic thing that came up in this whole survey. Because this is just the nonsense you can get away with when there's nobody out there to do better.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  I will also say, and this is like not to defend enormous telecoms, but.

• 15:54David Pierce?

  Bold strategy, friend.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  I know, this is like really like in the Vergecast listeners are like, what's he gonna say? You see AT&T on the logo or Xfinity or any of these huge companies. And a big part of what has happened, like AT&T probably didn't lay the fiber. They are corporate conglomerates.

• 16:15David Pierce?

  Right.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  And their ISP holdings are conglomerates of other ISPs. So some of it, they laid the fiber, but some of it, it's like, we just bought this business that was a smaller ISP. And we are in the process of AT&T-ifying it. But like, sometimes that's a long process. And so it's a real patchwork. I'm not, I'm using AT&T as example, like they're not especially like this. But any big company, you would think, okay, there's some basic standard of like the fees they're charging and the sort of service setup. And it's really a patchwork based on like the legacy of what ISP used to, like how recently another ISP was operating that network.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  And like, you have no real way of knowing that. Which is also why like then they don't want to suddenly stop charging the fee and the ISP becomes unprofitable. But they committed to this thing. So like, it's not that we could find, this is why it was so important to sort of gather all of these bills. Because the fees are really all over the place, even within one company.

• 17:20David Pierce?

  Interesting. Okay. So are there any good actors in this space? Like, is there anybody out there saying just because? You know, we either have to do right by people or we're in a position to or just because, you know, we're the rare good guy who gets into the ISP space. Like, is there anybody we found who it's like, you know, good job, ran to Midwestern ISP?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  This is my personal ISP.

• 17:42David Pierce?

  Oh, OK.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  And I would not say that my experience has been spotless.

• 17:46David Pierce?

  If you're listening, please don't turn off Russell's internet.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  But Optimum, we had more than 400 bills and the average fee was less than $4, which is like, pretty good.

• 17:59David Pierce?

  Whereas I think Xfinity, which is mine, was something like $31.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's more than 250. AT&T was high, but in fairness, we have to say we don't have a lot of AT&T bills. So it's like, it's 25 bucks, but it's only 11 bills. So like, maybe someone ran into a lot of data charges and we just got a weird sample of it. The other one I would say, and I don't know a ton about this, but Sparklight was 300 bills, 401, decent stuff. The other one, and this is a whole section in the piece, is satellite internet, the fees get really high because you have to buy a dish.

• 18:31David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  I mean, that's the equipment fees, but then there's also like, I think HughesNet is one of the big satellite operators and they have a lot of like, again, I would have to look into the HughesNet offerings, but the average fee for the 20 HughesNet bills we have are like, it's like 70 bucks. So, and I imagine that that has to do with the cost of operating satellites and just like, delivering internet that way, that like, some of that just gets rolled into the fees.

• 18:54David Pierce?

  I'm glad you brought up the satellite, actually, because that is one of the things that the people in this space see as like, a potential equalizer, right? That like, maybe Starlink ends up being everybody's competitor or some of these other companies, that satellite becomes the thing where you don't have to lay new fiber, you don't have to deal with all of the bureaucracy of bringing a cable competitor to a new neighborhood. Like, there, Verizon is installing fiber on my street and they're out there basically right now doing it. And I was like, oh, when do you think it's going to be live? And they were like, I don't know, we're thinking like, two or three years. And so it's like, wow, this is, this is a whole thing. Whereas like, in theory, right, Starlink could show up and scale pretty fast, but is there any sort of evidence for optimism that satellite can start to? Do some of that good work people are hoping it might do?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Again, this is tricky. Like, I think the scaling fast bit in particular is tricky because they have to, like, launching satellites is harder than just putting wires in the earth.

• 19:50David Pierce?

  I don't know. I think these dudes who have been on my street might disagree with that assessment, but you're probably still right.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, but how long would they take if they were launching things into space? So I know it's tricky. Like, I think the big hopes for satellite internet are largely like about the future, that like five or 10 years from now, this will be a much better way, rather than being like, I can do this right now. You know, this was a survey of what people are doing right now, and almost no one is getting satellite internet. Like, of the bills we got, we got like 270, 274 satellite internet bills. So like, I guess it's around 1%.

• 20:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  It's a little more than 1%, but like, that's really not a lot. And the other thing is, and this is not going to shock people who have considered doing it, it's like not cheaper right now.

• 20:36David Pierce?

  Right.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Right? So, again, it's possible that it will become cheaper in the future. I think that's part of the idea, but they're also still in the process of building out the network and they have to, they're investing in infrastructure still, so we're not, I don't think anyone's expecting like huge reductions in the cost of Starlink in the next year. Actually, this is the other one. So 41 Starlink bills, two others with over 100. So ViaSat and HughesNet, and this is part of the other thing, is like Elon comes in and likes to pretend he invented things. Starlink does have, they're doing a lower earth orbit thing, and it is like a technical advantage over the existing ones, but less than 20% of the actual satellite bills we got were Starlink.

• 21:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  There are these other bigger providers who have been doing it for a long time, and I think are not as aggressively investing in infrastructure, and their service is also like not hugely adopted and not wildly better than just terrestrial fiber.

• 21:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's going to be interesting to see if that goes from like, will it be readily available? Seems like if you fast forward far enough, like probably yes. Will it solve these existing problems that we have, or just be another option? That has all the same problems. I would also say probably yes, but hey, maybe we'll be optimistic about it. Is there any prognosis that comes out of this? Like, is there anything we can sort of look at and be like, OK, here is a problem with a solution? Or it feels like in a lot of ways, this just kind of confirms in a, in a real way, what a lot of people have kind of instinctively felt for a long time.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  So like, usually, we talk about broadband and we're like, we need more fiber. Like, there are these people living in rural areas that can't get broadband. And then the telecoms say like, well, it doesn't make economic sense to run all this fiber all the way up to them. And, and we go back and forth. And it, it does feel like in some ways, a political sort of stalemate. We can pass laws about how bills are allowed to work. And I will say there, one thing that's happening right now, and this is out of the FTC that we hear about, like, trying to break up Facebook and Instagram and everything, but they also have much simpler things where they're like, you can't, the rule about surprise billing, where you're paying like 40 bucks a month for six months, and then it gets, suddenly, you're paying 100 bucks a month, is they're passing rules about, hey, you

• 22:53Speaker 02

  can't do that. It's very easy to imagine saying, OK, you can rent them a router, you can charge data charges, but you cannot do fees beyond that. Those are the only kind of fees that are allowed. You know, we, we wouldn't need an act of Congress for doing that. FTC would just have to say, we consider this anti-competitive, you're not allowed to do it anymore. I'm sure we would have fun in the courts with that, but that's like, a real thing that could happen. And I think part of the new kind of antitrust consumer protection push, this is like the lower hanging fruit, so it's not as sexy as breaking up Facebook and like, you know, requisitioning. They want to take Mark Zuckerberg's dog and have him owned by the state.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  And it's not as sexy as that, but it is just, in a very real way, these fees are annoying. They make a lot of people's lives worse in a very small way, and it would be better if we got rid of them. And I think that's, if you will it, it is no dream. We can live in that world if we want to.

• 23:52David Pierce?

  I like it. That plus buy your own router. We can at least make the world a little better.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Take the law into your own hands. That's how you can fight fees at home.

• 24:00David Pierce?

  Vigilante router ownership. I love it. All right, Russell, thank you. Appreciate it as always.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 24:08David Pierce?

  We're gonna take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about E Ink because this is the Vergecast and we like to talk about E Ink. We'll be right back.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Company spending is complex. Managing it should be simple. AMX Corporate connects cards, expenses, and payments to streamline the way you work. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMX Corporate. Get started at go.amx slash AMX Corporate. Terms apply.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 25:17David Pierce?

  Welcome back. A couple of weeks ago was the 15th anniversary of the introduction of Amazon's first ever Kindle. It's kind of hard to remember now, all these years later, but the first Kindle was a big deal. It's really funny to listen to the videos explaining how it worked from 2007, before anybody knew what this thing was.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  When you want to pick a new book to read off of your home screen, use your thumb to roll the cursor up or down, and then press the select wheel to make your selection. If you need larger letters, change the size of the text by pressing the text key on the keyboard. There are six font sizes to choose from. Use whatever works for you, big or small.

• 25:53David Pierce?

  The Kindle had a big promise. It was gonna change the way that we think about book reading and even the way that books themselves work. So, after 15 years, did it? Has the Kindle changed reader behavior? Has it changed books forever? I wanted to talk about this with, of course, Verge Managing Editor and E Ink superfan Alex Cranz. Alex continues to be the only other person I've ever worked with who thinks e-readers are interesting. And she's right, and so am I. They're interesting. There's a lot to get into here, so let's just dive in. Hi Alex.

• 26:24Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 26:25David Pierce?

  This is the most Alex possible Vergecast segment. I could not be more excited that this is what's happening here.

• 26:30Alex Cranz?

  I'm very excited to talk about E Ink.

• 26:32David Pierce?

  So it's the 15th anniversary of Kindle. What was your first Kindle?

• 26:36Alex Cranz?

  My first e-reader was not a Kindle. It was the OG Nook.

• 26:40David Pierce?

  The OG Nook was very good, underrated.

• 26:43Alex Cranz?

  It had like the light up screen at the bottom and everything. Loved that. But my original Kindle would have been, I think, maybe the OG Paperwhite?

• 26:52David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 26:52Alex Cranz?

  Because I was real Nook until then.

• 26:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's a definite like how Barnes and Noble blew this so badly story to be done at some point in the future. They're still making Nooks, which I think is sort of lovely and charming.

• 27:05Alex Cranz?

  Next week on the Vergecast.

• 27:08David Pierce?

  Eight hours on the new Nook. Yeah, so I think, I think we probably got into it about the same time. The first one I remember having was the Kindle Touch, which was like the first one that had a touchscreen. It just had that little like hamburger menu button at the bottom, but everything else is a touchscreen. And that was the first one I actually like plunked down money and bought. And the thing I didn't realize, and this is one of the things I want to talk about here, was that by buying that Kindle, I was signing myself up to only buy Kindles for the rest of my life. Because the Kindle lock-in is so, so, so, so strong. And once you're in, you're in, and there's no leaving. And I now own, I don't know, hundreds of books on Kindle, and I can't use another device even if I want to. And it's 2011, me was not aware of this, and yet here we are.

• 27:52Alex Cranz?

  I distinctly remember being very upset because I was like, I've got all these books on my Barnes and Noble account. I can't, I gotta, I should be able to transfer those over. And then I found Calibre, which is one of the most powerful and horrible pieces of software ever made. It's ugly. It is a nightmare to use. I hate it with a passion of a thousand suns. But it works because I took all of my Nook books and ripped the DRM off, which is totally legal, I'm sure, and put them all on my Kindle. It's a lot harder, it's a little harder to do the other way around. It's possible, but it's a little bit more of a hassle.

• 28:26David Pierce?

  It's messy. And Amazon has never been particularly interested in making it easy for you to leave the Kindle ecosystem.

• 28:33Alex Cranz?

  Amazon makes it so easy to do so much, right? They make it easy to just get the Kindle, you turn it on, you download the book, you read it, you're done. That's super, super easy. There's no weirdness there. If you ever want to be like, explore, you're like, oh, don't want to get a book from the library? Ooh, did somebody send me something to read?

• 28:53David Pierce?

  No.

• 28:54Alex Cranz?

  Terror.

• 28:54David Pierce?

  Not allowed.

• 28:55Alex Cranz?

  You're just gonna be sad.

• 28:55David Pierce?

  Well, and that to me is like the sort of story of the Kindle. So I was going back over all the, all the old Kindles and two things jumped out to me and we can dig into whichever one you want to first, but two things jumped out to me. One is that it's very odd that the very first Kindle was by far the most feature-rich one. It had a headphone jack, it had a speaker, it had an SD card slot, it had always on 3G.

• 29:21Alex Cranz?

  It's a dial?

• 29:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, like it was such a powerful thing and all they've done in 15 years since is just strip stuff away. And I kind of get why, but I also think that's a bummer. And then the second thing that jumped out to me was that Amazon, it appears never for one second invested in Kindle software. Like it is insane to me how similar it is to what it was 15 years ago on all parts.

• 29:44Alex Cranz?

  Amazon doesn't really invest in software across the board, right? Because like you go and you use Goodreads, which is the de facto book tracking software website, whatever you want to call it, that we all use. I now use Storygraph more because it's prettier and does the job better and is not owned by Amazon.

• 29:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Alex Cranz?

  But like they bought it and they're like, we got it. All right. And it feels like the same thing with the Kindle. They're like, okay, we designed it. It works. We're out. To the point that like, when they did the merging with Comixology and they merged the two stores and libraries together, now I go to read a book and it's just like, would you like to read this Superman comic you bought three months ago? Because that's what we're going to suggest you read.

• 30:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 30:23Alex Cranz?

  On your, your beautiful Kindle. It's not a good experience, by the way.

• 30:27David Pierce?

  No, it's terrible. Well, and the comics is a real bummer, actually, because there have been a couple of moments where Amazon had a really, like, interesting opportunity to try new things. And I think, to some extent, the, like, reason it has gotten less feature-rich over time, I think, is because the goal is to have it for reading, right? Like, Amazon is crystal clear about this. And Dave Limb even said to us on this show not that long ago, that, like, they are not trying to build an iPad, they're not trying to build anything other than a device for reading.

• 30:56Alex Cranz?

  And I think that's the right call, by the way. I think that's actually, like, having done the devices that do everything, I totally think this thing just does reading is the perfect call.

• 31:06David Pierce?

  Yes, but...

• 31:07Alex Cranz?

  But, yeah.

• 31:09David Pierce?

  It just does reading, I think, is like a slightly larger umbrella than the things that Amazon covers.

• 31:15Alex Cranz?

  Just as Amazon's idea of reading.

• 31:17David Pierce?

  Right. It's for reading... Books on Kindle that have been there for 15 years and no one has touched since. Because it's like, I wrote this story five years ago, about, on the 10th anniversary, about, like, when is Amazon gonna follow through on its promise of, like, reinventing books? And they've sort of intermittently tried. There was, like, the Kindle Singles thing, and there was the Kindle Cereals thing, and those were basically just shorter books.

• 31:41Alex Cranz?

  Remember when they tried to, like, say, "Just do your fanfiction and we'll give you money for it"?

• 31:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Alex Cranz?

  And then everybody was like, "Copyright, sir, please."

• 31:49David Pierce?

  I wish they had tried harder. Like, could have been great. Like, what if every book you read was also like a wacky exploration through the world of the fanfiction of that book? That'd be so fun. I'm into that.

• 31:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:59David Pierce?

  But then there have been these moments. And I think comics is, like, the most obvious one, where to just say, "We are going to faithfully reproduce what it looks like on a piece of paper," is actually, like, an unimaginative version of the future. And they could have done so many cooler things with comics, and they just didn't. And I feel like it drives everyone insane.

• 32:16Alex Cranz?

  But it was wild, because Comicsology, I mean, we could turn this entire thing into a rant about Comicsology. But Comicsology actually did do more, right? When Comicsology app first came out, you would read a comic book, and it would actually be like, "Okay, we're gonna zoom in on this panel, and then we're gonna swipe over to this next panel," and it would give this additional movement to it, and tell you exactly where your eye needs to go. And that was really exciting and fun. And then, when this merging completed earlier this year, they were like, "No, no, no, no, that's all gone. You read it like a book, because this is the Kindle way."

• 32:46David Pierce?

  Which is so, it's just weird. Like, there's a religion on the Kindle team that I think is just wrong in that particular case.

• 32:53Alex Cranz?

  I think it's partially a religion, and I think it's partially a symptom of when you're the biggest player, when like the closest competitor in the United States is Kobo, which most people don't know, and Barnes & Noble, which most people forgot, sells e-readers.

• 33:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, Barnes & Noble is just an empty store at the mall.

• 33:09Alex Cranz?

  There's not a lot of competition. There's not a lot of need to go do more because the big competition is happening in other markets that Amazon doesn't really participate in, and it doesn't need to. And so it's like, yeah, why do I need to go do all this weird, wacky stuff? Why spend the resources on that?

• 33:25David Pierce?

  This is one of those interesting cases where like, I really wish there had been meaningful competition, because I think there's so much interesting stuff to do in ebook readers. And I also wish there were more competition on the like e-ink and e-paper screen side of things, because I think that has also held this whole industry back.

• 33:41Alex Cranz?

  It's just one company.

• 33:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. They're like, what if there were other people making this kind of thing instead of just this one unbelievably slow-moving company that doesn't seem to be able to ship its good ideas in any kind of meaningful amount of time? And so I think that has held Amazon back. Its ability to do whatever it wants because it just decimated all of its competitors basically immediately has held it back. And then there's this thing where I think they decided early on that they don't want to make money on the Kindle, they just want to make money on selling you stuff through the Kindle. So they basically got to a point where it was like, okay, we have to make this thing as cheap as physically possible, such that more people will buy it, such that we can sell them more stuff, and put all three of those two things together. And it's like, of course they haven't really innovated in any meaningful way. Like, why would they?

• 34:27Alex Cranz?

  It's a bummer, because it feels like, you know, there's the TV brands, and there's a lot of TV brands. And the one TV brand you never buy is the Best Buy in-house brand, Insignia, because it's like, so mediocre, that you're just like, well, it does the job, but what cost?

• 34:42David Pierce?

  Right. It is technically a television.

• 34:44Alex Cranz?

  It feels like sometimes with the Kindle, that Insignia won. Like, what if all the other TV brands went away and it was just Insignia? And so you're like, does the job, but couldn't it do more? And we've seen that. We've seen it from, we've seen it from Kobo, we saw the original Nook, we've seen it from a lot of these Chinese companies and German companies like Pocketbook. Like, there's more to it, and Amazon just doesn't have interest in that. But it still makes a nice device, a good enough device.

• 35:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, right? Like, I say all of this, and yet I love my Kindle. I have I have the latest Paperwhite, and it is, for the thing that it does, it is terrific. Right? Like, I do wish it had a speaker so that I could, like, put it down. One of, by the ways I use my Kindle is I like, I will like, read on the Kindle while I'm brushing my teeth or whatever, and being able to just be like, play for the next 30 seconds, and like, put it down on the sink and have it play out loud would be amazing, right? And it's like, it's just sitting right there, and it drives me nuts.

• 35:38Alex Cranz?

  It's just right there.

• 35:38David Pierce?

  But so, this is the thing that I've always had a hard time with with the Kindle, is squaring this idea of like, it's just supposed to be a reading device, they just want to make something that feels like a paper book, and actually, like, paper books don't have speakers, so neither should Kindles. Like, fine, with the idea that there's actually all this other interesting stuff out there in the e-reader space that Amazon should have done. So you have used all of these devices, like, are there things that you're like, if they put you in charge of the Kindle, that you would just like, lift off of other devices and be like, this needs to be in the Kindle tomorrow?

• 36:07Alex Cranz?

  The biggest thing that I like is is the flexibility of other devices, right? The reason I I keep going back to Onyx Books is because they have a really good version of an Android e Ink tablet, which means I don't just, I'm not just stuck in Kindle's universe. I can use the Nook, I can use Viz, which is like Manga and stuff like that. I can go to all these different apps and just enjoy them. And I don't have to worry about like, oh, is that, is there a Mobi version of this? Like, okay, I gotta go load in Calibre and like, convert it, do all of that. That's the biggest one, and I just don't see Amazon ever doing that, because, yes, we're gonna allow all of our competitors, no matter how small, onto our device. That's never gonna happen. But I do think there's like, a thoughtfulness to these other devices with how the page-turning buttons work,

• 36:51Alex Cranz?

  and how like, it took how long for Amazon to embrace USB C?

• 36:56David Pierce?

  Right.

• 36:57Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't experiment with Color e Ink at all, and like, Color Ink is not in a place where it's necessarily great. But it is in a place where like having a big color e Ink Kindle for kids to read like picture books on Berenstain Bears, all of that stuff, that would be great. That would be like an instant winner. And instead they're like, how about for $99, we give you the crummiest of Android tablets, just the worst of the worst for your small children. And it's like, or I could give them something for books and just books embrace the actual Kindle ethos with these things. Yep. So it's a bummer that they haven't embraced it and they're not looking to these other companies and how they're doing these things. And but mostly the companies, the big

• 37:41Alex Cranz?

  differentiation is flexibility.

• 37:44David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, to me, the middle ground there that I've always hoped Amazon would do is basically give you a useful service for sending stuff from the web to your Kindle. And this is the kind of thing that like, it technically exists. I used Instapaper for a long time and you could like send a digest of your Instapaper stuff to the Kindle, but it was janky and didn't look very good. And they have a desktop app that you can like download PDFs and upload them to your Kindle and that doesn't work very well. And it formats PDFs terribly. And it's like, what I always wished Amazon would do is exactly what Kobo did with Pocket, which is basically just integrate. You can just log into Pocket through your Kobo and read all of the stuff that you'd saved on the web in this nice, connected synced interface. And that to me

• 38:29David Pierce?

  is like, the simplest thing and the absolute only reason I can think that Amazon hasn't thought to do it is because it knows that's what people want, but it means they would probably buy fewer books. And again, that is the whole point of the Kindle is to just give you a thing that is easy to buy books from Amazon, because there is no chance that A, they haven't thought of it. Somebody I guarantee has been like, what if people could read the internet? Have we heard of the internet? And somebody shot it down because it would lead to fewer books being sold. And that's just the only way it possibly could have gone. And it drives me absolutely up the wall because it's just, it's just right there.

• 39:02Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's why like, there's no really streamlined library integration. The Kobo has a terrible library integration, by the way, absolutely nightmarish. I had to help my mom set it up. From many miles away and talk to like a librarian in Texas about it. It's terrible.

• 39:19David Pierce?

  And Kobo's the one that is like proud of itself for this. Like Kobo goes out of its way to talk about its library.

• 39:24Alex Cranz?

  This trash integration. And Libby knows that people have Kindles. And so it's like, okay, well, we're going to actually baby step, walk you through how to put this on your Kindle. We're going to figure that out for you. And it's like, or Amazon could just do that. And they're not going to, because instead they want you to go and buy Kindle Unlimited for every month and put your money in that way. And so like, they just constantly like to gatekeep. It's a bummer.

• 39:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's Amazon's whole thing. Like they're super customer first, unless you don't want to buy from Amazon and then get out of your face.

• 39:59Alex Cranz?

  Another thing, though, I will say, I think that they haven't really embraced that I think they could. And we're seeing it with the scribe, right? Is Wacom tablet, like that interface. Because e Ink capacitive touch is a nightmarish thing usually.

• 40:13David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 40:13Alex Cranz?

  You have to really, really tweak it because otherwise the time from touch to actually seeing something on that really slow e Ink display is super, super long and laggy and you want to kill someone. And some companies have figured this out, like the Onyx Books Leaf 2, which I've got a review of that coming up soon on theverge.com, has figured out that capacitive touch and made it a lot faster and made it feel snappier. Not as snappy as Wacom, but like snappy enough. And Kindle really hasn't done that. Kindle is kind of like, oh yeah, you can type on this, but we're going to make you regret it every step of the way.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, I remember, so I was listening to an episode of Ezra Klein's podcast a while ago. And he was talking about basically like how he gets all his reading done. And his thing was like, I read basically exclusively on a Kindle. Even if I own the paper book, I will buy it on Kindle because it's easier to take notes that I can then like search for and sync through. And I like really took that to heart and I was like, okay, I too am going to do this, right? I want to have all of my highlights and notes in one place where I can search for them. I can find them later, all this stuff. I don't think I have ever once typed out a note on my Kindle that was like not full of typos. Like it's just impossible.

• 41:22Alex Cranz?

  Horrible, horrible experience.

• 41:24David Pierce?

  Yeah. So now I have to go back through and be like, I typed herm yurt werf. Like what did that mean? It was a great idea that I had when I was reading this. All right, cool.

• 41:33Alex Cranz?

  You have to like do a couple of steps. You're all right. Kind of like plan it, pack in the time to interpret what you were trying to write. And it shouldn't be that way. Like, it is very, very easy to make it smart, but that would require having a slightly more powerful processor, which would increase the cost of the device. And they're like, no, we're going to put the most garbage processor in here. We're going to put good enough capacitive touchscreen in here. Like, we're going to do just good enough across the board. And if you want quality, go to China.

• 42:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. So, okay, so the last thing I'm curious about is this idea of like reinventing the book, right? And they, I think with comics and stuff like, I think we're very much on the same page that like, there's actually a lot more they should do there. But I think for a long time, Amazon used to say, to me at least, that they had all these big, interesting ideas about like, what a book should be, right? The idea that, oh, it's just a collection of chapters in a row is like an outdated thing. And now that it's digital, what if, what if it was remixable? And what if you could choose your own adventure through a book and people would read and, and I've sort of gotten to the point where I'm, I'm done waiting for that. And now I kind of think like, the Kindle will eventually just die at the hand of print books. And we're just going to go, we're going to go right back to where we started.

• 42:42Alex Cranz?

  I don't think it'll die at the hand of print. I think it's, it's the internet. I think Wattpad and Archive of Our Own are where we're seeing that kind of like future. And we're seeing that experimentation. And we see it trickle down into mainstream books a lot.

• 42:55David Pierce?

  Wait, like, give me an example. Like, what does that look like?

• 42:57Alex Cranz?

  I think one of the first examples I saw was when Wattpad and Archive of Our Own, we're like, okay, all of our characters are our age and we are 17 year old girls writing these, these works of fiction and we text all the time. And so for years, when you go and read a book and texting, it's like, this person says, colon, this italics. And it's just like this brutal, excruciating thing to read. And they understood, oh, actually, this is just how people talk. And so I'll just say, I text back and stuff. Or sometimes I'll do, they'll do a big text bubble and they'll go and they'll print it out, including all the different emojis that they want to use and put that in there. And when you watch that rendered on a Kindle, you're like, oosh, yikes. But when you look at it on the internet, you're like, that's sick.

• 43:42Alex Cranz?

  That's cool. I didn't even pause to think about it. I just kept reading because it made sense.

• 43:47David Pierce?

  I love that. And that feels like that's the kind of thing that I think is, again, it's right in that zone for Amazon, right? Like it's if people were like, oh, I want to watch movies on my Kindle, like Amazon, I think is correctly going to be like, no, that's not what this device is for. But that thing you just described, like that's, that's what books are. That's what books should be. Like,

• 44:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:05David Pierce?

  Get there.

• 44:05Alex Cranz?

  Get there. But they're just, when are they going to do it? I think it's only when people shout aloud enough. And they have to shout really, really loud, because how long have been people been shouting to improve good reads, to improve integration with these other services? And Amazon hasn't done it. So they have to first listen. And I don't know if they're ready to do that.

• 44:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, that is very fair. And I think the like, big goal that they've always had, that it should just feel like a piece of paper and be something you can like crumple and roll up and throw around is like, exciting and awesome. And I desperately also want that.

• 44:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 44:38David Pierce?

  It's also not up to Amazon. It's up to e-ink, this one company that I am sort of done waiting for to deliver this crazy vision to me.

• 44:45Alex Cranz?

  We're starting to see a little bit of change there, right? Like e-ink is, is, is starting to improve its development, especially in the color e-ink space. Because I think that's really where it comes. Like, they've hit kind of their limit with black and white e-ink.

• 44:58David Pierce?

  Like, it looks very good now. We did it.

• 44:59Alex Cranz?

  They did it. Like, the refresh rate is still really, really bad compared to an LCD screen. But like, everything else is good. If they can improve the color, then they can come back to improve the refresh rate. Then I assume they can get enough customers buying this stuff. Because right now, their market is like, Amazon, who's like, okay, we need like, a few dozen to sell Kindles this year. A few of these other smaller e-ink companies, which are still really, really small compared to phones and tablet business. Like, this is a very small business compared to them. And then like signage folks.

• 45:30David Pierce?

  Right.

• 45:30Alex Cranz?

  That's their customer base. And if you have the resources of an Amazon or an Apple, you could go and invest and really accelerate that development. But Apple doesn't care, because they have no interest in e-ink. And while I'm sad about that, I also understand it. It makes sense.

• 45:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're on record about that one.

• 45:47Alex Cranz?

  Amazon should care more. They should be putting a lot more resources into this. And they aren't. They, they kind of just say, okay, you've got the new displays in, cool. Give us like, six months. They're really slow on, on when they adopt these new display technologies from e-ink. And I just think it could all be a lot faster, but they would have to, again, care and not be in this race to the bottom of the price.

• 46:11David Pierce?

  Right, yeah, there comes a time when you would have to invest in that in a big way instead of sitting there and saying, we won this market, we will sit here and collect whatever spoils there are. So, okay, so my actual last question for you is, I have spent a lot of time over the years, basically using a Kindle a lot and then saying, this is ridiculous. Why do I just have this one device that just says this one thing, when I also have an iPad that does that one thing, not quite as well, but pretty well, and also one million billion other things, including all of the other apps I want to use to read. And I was going back to, you know, 2007, and it's like, they launched the Kindle into a world in which the iPad did not exist, right? And tablets just became such a thing, not that long after that, that

• 46:53David Pierce?

  like, and Amazon has spent a lot of time building its own tablets and making Kindle apps to support those tablets. And they've said a lot of things about like, we can't control where people read, we want to be everywhere that people are. Are you and I like the last two people left who think this is a good idea? Is everybody else just using tablets and happy with it?

• 47:07Alex Cranz?

  No, I don't think that's true, right? There's a lot of people who'd go out and buy these e-readers and they still care about them. And I think it's really important if you want to read a book, if you want to like immerse yourself in a book, because the minute you get a notification, you're taken out of the book. The minute you're like, oh, I want to just, we all get that urge suddenly to just go look at TikTok or Twitter or whatever and like, just be like, okay, I've read, oh, my brain, and go over to do this other thing. And it's really, really nice to be like, no, my phone's actually on the other side of the room, or whatever, and go back into the book. And I think that's, there's also that, everybody talks about the ease of it on your eyes. While I think there's zero science to support that, especially as these all now have big front lights on

• 47:50Alex Cranz?

  them that are glaring more light at you, it's still really true that it's great to go outside and read an e Ink device, and it's miserable to go outside and try to read an iPad, especially because the iPad is also, what, seven times more expensive at this point, something like that?

• 48:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Alex Cranz?

  And if you can keep like, that e Ink super focused device, still relatively affordable, it makes sense to be like, okay, this is my reader, this is what I'm going to bring when I have to go sit in the doctor's office. My tablet will stay at home, because my tablet does other things. But I'm going to sit in the doctor's office and wait four hours, because doctor's offices never keep appointment times.

• 48:31Alex Cranz?

  I got my Kindle.

• 48:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think the like, big galaxy brain take on all of this, right, is that like, maybe we're in a world where Twitter is collapsing and people are starting to think about screen time. And there's this idea of like, oh, I maybe shouldn't just sit here and be bombarded by all of my apps all day. And then there's the Kindle, which is this like, beautiful, quiet space in all of our technology that is actually, and I don't like, I think that's a, that's a life I'd like to lead. I feel like in a lot of ways, I'm a very like aspirational Kindle owner. Like, I sort of look at it and I'm like, ah, I love books. And then I like, hold my Kindle in one hand while I just screw around on my phone. But like, it does sort of represent like, a slightly better version of our relationship with technology that I think for me has just always been very appealing.

• 49:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think that's what I like the most about it. I've even gotten, you know, I go in and get these Android e Ink devices, which ostensibly let me do all of those things. But some of them really poorly. Do not watch a video on an e Ink device. Just don't do it. You'll be sad. And, and the more I use it, I realize like, oh, it's actually nice to just go back to this. Like, I've been connected to the internet since the mid 90s. I've been online all this time. And sometimes it's nice to not have all the distractions and just be able to say, I'm reading a book and not worry about somebody texting me or whatever. Like, we should embrace it more. And I don't want to be, start some weird cult about this. I know a lot of people are always like, yeah, I'm one of those people that logs off and is very performative and proud of it. But like, I think it's good

• 49:59Alex Cranz?

  for everybody to sometimes log off and think about that. And I think the Kindle is a really great way to like, still have that gadget, still have that moment where you're like, yeah, I'm using the technology, but also like, not worrying about what Elon Musk is saying on Twitter right now.

• 50:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. And if he is saying it's, it's over there.

• 50:15Alex Cranz?

  So far over, it's on the other side of the room. I have to like, get up, I have to pull the blanket off. No, too much work. Just keep reading.

• 50:24David Pierce?

  I hear that. All right, we gotta go. But what, what are you reading? Recommend something for the people.

• 50:28Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, what am I reading? Nona the Ninth. I am reading Nona the Ninth. It is from Tamsin Mir, and it is the third in her series about necromancers in space. The first one, Gideon, the Ninth, won a bunch of awards. The second one won some awards. This third one is a delightful romp, and I can't wait to see what happens or what happens in the conclusion. Electo the Ninth, which I think comes out next year.

• 50:55David Pierce?

  Nice.

• 50:56Alex Cranz?

  What about yourself?

• 50:57David Pierce?

  I'm currently reading a book called The Travelers. Came out a couple of years ago, I think. It's by a guy named Chris, I think Pavone or Pavoni or something. It's basically just like a super pulpy spy novel, which it turns out is my absolute favorite thing to read. Like, anything that involves like a, you know, renegade former CIA operative who like went out on his own but is still a good guy, taking down the bad guys is, I'll just, I will read infinity of those. And there are infinity of them. And The Travelers is really good. I'm a big fan.

• 51:28Alex Cranz?

  Well, I know what I'm doing next week.

• 51:29David Pierce?

  There you go. Okay, we need to take a break. But then, it turns out, we're not done with this subject yet. We'll be right back.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 52:05Speaker 08

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you, if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  This series is presented by EY.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 53:33David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So just to give you a little inside look into how the Vergecast sausage gets made, Alex and I recorded that last segment a couple of weeks ago, right around the Kindle anniversary. But then it turned out that Alex had her hands on the Kindle Scribe, the most ambitious Kindle Amazon has ever made, the whole time. So obviously, we needed to talk about it. Is this the next big thing? The revolutionary Kindle that Amazon has so far refused to make for us? Is this the next 15 years of Kindle? So I called Alex back to ask all these questions. Hi again, Alex.

• 54:06Alex Cranz?

  Hi.

• 54:06David Pierce?

  So you had a scribe the whole time we were talking about the scribe.

• 54:10Alex Cranz?

  The whole time.

• 54:11David Pierce?

  That makes me so angry, like in ways I can't even describe, like the rage that I feel in not knowing the whole time.

• 54:18Alex Cranz?

  I had to keep a secret, you know? I had to respect agreements. I really wanted to keep it to myself. I didn't want anyone else to know about it.

• 54:25David Pierce?

  So let's just like lay the land of the scribe. Cause I think my impression of it, I talked to a couple of people at Amazon before it came out and then like I wrote sort of the like, look, a thing, it exists story. And my take on it was basically like, this is a big moment for Amazon. They're trying to do like the newest thing with the Kindle they've done, like kind of since the first Kindle, right? Like, am I, am I overhyping this thing to come in here?

• 54:49Alex Cranz?

  No, no, I don't think you are. I think this was like a really big moment for the company. I think there was a lot of enthusiasm within the company with people I spoke with about it and, and people were really excited about it, but it kind of is also a product of Amazon. And all of the annoyances we typically have with Amazon, it not paying enough attention to software, it kind of just shoveling things in your face and not making any effort to improve experiences is there in this product. And it was just kind of like a bummer in that respect.

• 55:21David Pierce?

  That seemed to be the takeaway, right? Is that like, Amazon did roughly what you would expect, which is like, make a pretty good e-reader. But like, I got this sense of reading your review that you you left kind of disappointed, even though it's like, it's a pretty good thing, but it wasn't what you wanted it to be or what it could have been.

• 55:39Alex Cranz?

  You know, I really wanted to temper my expectations coming into it, because I do have a very strong like, feelings about Amazon as a company and how Amazon has handled a lot of its products in the past. And I tried to like, ignore that when I was coming into this device. And if I was gonna go get a note-taking device for my mom tomorrow, she suddenly said, I want one. I'd probably get her this, because it works well enough.

• 56:02David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 56:03Alex Cranz?

  But it, there's a lot of other stuff out there, and it doesn't come anywhere close to being as good as those other products. It's simply like, it's Amazon's take on this. So it's just like, meh, did it?

• 56:14David Pierce?

  But like, give me the, give me the vibe of it. Because I imagine, like, because you've raved about it a bunch, I got a Remarkable, just to goof around with and play with. And I have to say, the like, feel of taking notes on that thing is so much better than I expected it to be. Just the like, the way it actually feels like you're writing on the screen is really incredible. And it seems like Amazon didn't get anywhere close to that feeling like you're actually writing on a piece of paper with a pen, right?

• 56:36Alex Cranz?

  They got close enough. They got close enough with technological trade-offs, right? Because the Remarkable 2 doesn't have any sort of front light on it. So it doesn't glow at all. Generally, that's fine. You're probably taking your notes in a well-lit environment. But Amazon wants its device to be able to have those front lights, so that you can also read on it at night and stuff like that. And that means you're going to have this little gap between the the pen and the actual paper. And so that can be kind of frustrating. Other companies like Onyx Books have addressed that by making the pen move a little faster. Amazon didn't really do that. So there's feels like there's just this little tiny delay. And it's really noticeable versus the Remarkable 2, not as noticeable versus other e-ink devices or something like the iPad.

• 57:22David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah, it makes me think about like, do you remember in like the early days of touchscreen phones when some of them were like very close and it actually felt like you were touching the thing you were trying to touch. And then there were other things where it was kind of like you could sense that you're like touching a piece of glass above the thing and you move and then it reacts and it just like, it didn't feel like the thing on the screen and the thing you were doing were connected. Is this that again?

• 57:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's that exact same thing. It's not quite as bad as some of those early phones. Like it's passable and they did a really nice job with the texture of the glass and the nibs have like a little texture to them like the Remarkable nibs do. So you do get that that sensation of pulling it across paper. It's way better than writing on an iPad or some Samsung tablet or Chromebook or something.

• 58:06David Pierce?

  Nibs are very important, Alex. If you take one thing away from this Vergecast episode, it's that nibs are very important and you should never, never skimp on the nibs. That's, that's the tagline.

• 58:15Alex Cranz?

  Here is the secret. If you're whatever e Ink device you get to write on, doesn't matter what, go get the Remarkable nibs and you'll be fine.

• 58:23David Pierce?

  Oh, that's a good call. That's a really good call. Yeah, that pen is, is sick. It feels so good to write with that thing.

• 58:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I love it. I have my own stylus and I just use the Remarkable two nibs on it regardless of whatever e Ink device I'm writing on. And it's like, close enough that I'm like, okay, it's fine.

• 58:40David Pierce?

  No, I, that, yeah, I totally buy that. And the thing I think that bummed me out the most, it's like Amazon software is a weird thing because on the one hand, it's not very good in that like, like as an objective piece of software, it's like very slow, the, everything takes forever to load. It's like filtering the library stuff kind of sucks. But on the other hand, it's like, it's fine. Right? Like in, if its job is to like, open up a book and flip pages and find the book that I want to read, like, it's fine. It does the job. And for me, you and I are very different in this particular respect where like, I have been almost exclusively an Amazon book reader for like, over a decade.

• 59:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:17David Pierce?

  You seem to be like actively avoiding sort of throwing in your lot with Amazon as much as you can over time, whereas I just gave up a while ago and I'm like, all of my books come from Amazon. It sucks. I have a lot of feelings about Amazon as a company and its relationship with publishers and what it's done to books. But like, this is what it is. I own hundreds of Kindle books.

• 59:33Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I still own a ton of Kindle books like, like I have bought so many books on the Kindle over the year. I like reading on it, but over time I just got kind of fed up with particularly library integration. I didn't have any real clean library integration and it was a bummer. And then like, I enjoy, I enjoy fanfic. I'm, I'm an adult who, who likes to read about fictional characters, like they're dolls in a playhouse. So I, it does not work at all for that. And that's kind of what led me to get away from it as much as like, Amazon ruined the day was like, there were needs that the Kindle just doesn't meet. And that's because the Kindle's job is to sell you Kindle books and keep you in the Kindle ecosystem. It has no interest. And that's fine.

• 1:00:16Alex Cranz?

  I totally get that. I'm not going to like knock on them for that element of it. But the experience, even if you are in the Kindle universe, isn't super great anymore.

• 1:00:27David Pierce?

  I mean, let's not forget though, that this is the same company that you buy something from, and then it advertises that same thing to you all across the internet for the next like several years. So like, I agree with you that it's stupid, but I am also in no way surprised that Amazon is not good at this.

• 1:00:43Alex Cranz?

  And I think that's what bummed me out the most is that this felt like a big change for Amazon. It felt like this big turn, but it's just a big turn for the hardware division.

• 1:00:52David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:53Alex Cranz?

  Right? Every other element of Amazon is still Amazon. The software is still Amazon. How it's marketed is still Amazon. Like, and I get it. You can't turn a huge company like that and redirect them to improve things. It's going to take a lot more work than one kind of crummy e-ink tablet release. But it's still like, oh, it just is such a bummer. Cause it's like, okay, this is it. Like if I want to be using the best of the best in America, this is what I got?

• 1:01:20David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:01:20Alex Cranz?

  You know, like with phones, I've got an, like the iPhone is great. Is there a lot of frustration with its walled garden? Absolutely. But it's still like good software. It's still good hardware. And this is like, good hardware, terrifically bad software.

• 1:01:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I mean, it goes back to the same stuff we were talking about, right? Like, it was interesting, like, reading the stuff even that you compared it to in your review, because there's like, like you said, there's the Onyx book stuff, there's the Remarkable stuff, and there's a lot of things that do kind of slightly sort of overlapping things with the Kindle Scribe, right? Where it's like, if you want an e-ink tablet, this is not the one to buy, right? Like, if you, if you want to do lots of things on an e-ink tablet, and if that phrase even like means anything to you, do not buy the Kindle Scribe.

• 1:02:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, don't buy.

• 1:02:04David Pierce?

  No. And if you're like a lawyer who wants to read PDFs all day, like, buy the Remarkable, because that thing kicks ass. It's really expensive, but for that specific purpose, like, it rules. And I cannot recommend it hard enough for that specific purpose. But for Amazon, there's nobody doing this thing that Amazon is trying to do. Like, this is where I want like Kobo to make something awesome, or like Barnes & Noble to make something awesome, and it's just like, no one has. And so if it's like, I'm just like a regular person who reads books, and I want to be able to like, take notes and sync them to the cloud and find them later, like, there just isn't any competition. There's just none.

• 1:02:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's so competition. I mean, Kobo has definitely done like, kind of note-taking. They, they released a couple of devices, I think, that have a stylus and everything. But Kobo, I also think their hardware feels really cheap and like plasticky and annoying, and like, I feel like a baby when I hold it. And so, the Kindle Scribe feels gorgeous in your hands and everything. And then you're like, okay, I want to take notes. Okay, so I have five pen weights that I can choose from. I can't do pencil at all, which like, feels like just easy. And then like, okay, I want to sync whatever documents I have. And I have to email them to myself, and then it emails me a link to my PDF, which that, that link that you get, if anybody else has that link, they also get your PDF.

• 1:03:17Alex Cranz?

  So if you're like a lawyer, you cannot use the Kindle Scribe, because you're just creating a security nightmare for yourself. And that's like, you've got the biggest cloud computing company in the world in the same building as you. Why did no one make an effort to try to integrate this better?

• 1:03:33David Pierce?

  Nothing makes me crazier than how difficult it is to say, like, I have a thing on my computer and I would like it to be on my Kindle. There's like a bookmark that they have where you can send web stuff to Kindle or like-

• 1:03:44Alex Cranz?

  And it works like reasonably well-

• 1:03:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like I give it like a, like a C plus for like, it usually gets all the words on the page and puts them on my Kindle. But does it look insane? Yes.

• 1:03:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, if you're using like New York Times, you know, like if you're using like a very well, like, everybody reads it source, it's gonna transfer it fine. If you're like, I found this weird ass blog and I want to read it later from this guy who I've never heard of, it's gonna look like garbage on your Kindle Scribe.

• 1:04:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, all your like sick Tumblr fanfiction is not going to appear correctly on the Kindle Scribe?

• 1:04:17Alex Cranz?

  Not looking good. Yeah, I'm gonna be crying. It's fine. I've, I've worked through it. That's why I've got the other, the other e-reading devices.

• 1:04:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. So, okay, last thing and then, and we will, we will leave this alone for now. My sense is, most people's question is, do I buy the Kindle Scribe or do I buy a different Kindle? Like, I feel like ultimately I want there to be more interesting competition in this space, but it's kind of not, right? It's like, it's like the iPhone question, right? Like, people who have iPhones are gonna keep buying iPhones. Do I buy the Pro or the regular one? Like, this feels like that same question to me.

• 1:04:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, so like, if you're a person with not great vision, I say, as somebody with not great vision, the Kindle Scribe makes a lot of sense, right? Like, it's really gorgeous device. It, it just works like a Kindle, but it's big. And so I think that makes sense for a lot of people. And I think there are a lot of people that want that bigger device. I personally like a smaller device. I think like seven inch is kind of my platonic ideal for reading.

• 1:05:05David Pierce?

  Can you still kind of hold it in one hand and read it in bed? Cause that's like, for me, that's the thing. Like, sometimes I like the two-hand, but I also need to be able to like lie in bed and hold it above my face and still be able to read.

• 1:05:15Alex Cranz?

  You can, but I will admit, you won't be able to do this, David, but I definitely read it in bed, but like use my boobs as like a stand. If you don't have boobs, that's gonna be harder for you. But a lot of people are listening to this being like, oh, my God, that's how I use my iPad. But for everybody else, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's like, it's very easy to hold with one hand. It's very easy to walk around. Like, sometimes you do feel like you're in Star Trek and you're like, hold on, let me use my pad to send something to Picard. Because it's just like this big device.

• 1:05:43David Pierce?

  It's badass. Yeah.

• 1:05:44Alex Cranz?

  But it works fine. And I think if you just want a nice Kindle and you want to spend the money because it's expensive. It starts at like $330. Yeah, it works.

• 1:05:52David Pierce?

  I kind of came away from it thinking I'll probably buy a Scribe 2. And for now, I like my Kindle fine. I would like to have one with more note taking stuff, but like I can live with the keyboard typing notes for a little longer. And this does feel like the kind of thing that a year from now, with a little, little bit of software work. And maybe this is wishful thinking because we've been waiting 15 years for Amazon to have good software. And here we are. But like a little bit more work, a little bit more fine tuning, especially with like the pen and the display. And it feels like this is the kind of thing where like V2 has potential to be like a lot better in all of these sort of small ways that you're talking about. Is that a crazy takeaway?

• 1:06:27Alex Cranz?

  No, I don't think that's crazy. Even in my conversations with people at Amazon, like after I'd been reviewing this thing for a while. And I was kind of like, hey, here are some of my issues with it. They're like, these are very good things to know and like pass on to the engineers. I think there is a lot of like appetite there to improve all these devices. I just don't know. I don't know how confident I can be that they will do it because it's a huge company. It's hard to get everybody on to a project and get them like reorient everyone. And I think there's a lot that needs to happen to make this a really great experience. Instead of like, eh, I get my books, it's fine.

• 1:07:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Alex Cranz?

  The Kindle Scribe 2 will definitely be better.

• 1:07:04David Pierce?

  This is why I root so hard for Kobo. Like, I just root for Kobo, not because I want Kobos, but because I want somebody at Amazon to be like, whoa, that Kobo is good. And then feel like they have to go make better things.

• 1:07:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13David Pierce?

  That's like competition, people. This is all I want in the world, even though I'm going to keep buying Kindles. Like, I'm sorry, Kobo, I have too many Kindle books. I can't buy Kobos. I've literally, it's illegal for me to buy Kobos. I own too many Amazon books, but I want them to be good so that Amazon will make better Kindles. This is all I want in the world.

• 1:07:29Alex Cranz?

  I want Kindle to feel like, I want Amazon to feel a little heat.

• 1:07:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Alex Cranz?

  I want them to feel like they have to do a little more because right now it feels like they do the absolute minimum effort. And I go through a lot of my life doing the same thing, so I'm not going to judge them too hard. But come on, guys, just put in like a little bit of extra effort.

• 1:07:45David Pierce?

  I agree. All right, Alex, thank you. I have forgiven you for not telling me how to scribe, but I appreciate you coming back.

• 1:07:51Alex Cranz?

  Bye.

• 1:07:53David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for The Vergecast. Thank you, as always, for listening. There's tons more on everything we talked about: the broadband study, e-ink, Kindle Scribe, all that good stuff on theverge.com. You can also follow all of us on Twitter. Alex is Alex H. Krantz, Russell is Russell Brandom, and I'm Pierce. As I mentioned at the beginning, this is my last show full-time for a couple of months, but we have a ton planned for you on the Wednesday show in the meantime. Alex is gonna host a bunch. We're gonna have more Verge staff stopping by, and I'm assured by our producers that things are gonna get very weird. So I'm sorry, and buckle up and enjoy. Of course, the Friday show will remain chaos, as always. Don't you worry. And I'll be back in a couple of months to try and do all kinds of new stuff, too. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.

• 1:08:35David Pierce?

  Norrie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, newborn sleep tips, or just a long ride home today and want somebody to talk to, you can always call the Vergecast hotline, 866-VERGE11. If you don't have a phone or can't call, email [email protected]. We want all your big thoughts, all your questions, all your feelings about all things tech. All right, I'm off for now. I think my baby just woke up. Happy holidays, everybody. Rock and roll.

• 1:09:15Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Elie Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:09:36Speaker 08

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:10:13Speaker 05

  This series is presented by EY.

• 1:10:17Speaker 09

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.