[ 3] Bezos, J. “A conversation with Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos.” By Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose. Public Broadcasting Service, 19 November 2007. <http://www. charlierose.com/view/ interview/8784>

[ 4] Sony eSupport. < http://esupport.sony. com/US/perl/model- tutorials.pl?mdl=PRS- 505&region_id=1.>

May + June 2009

[ 5] In their 1998 essay, “Metaphors We Surf the Web By,” on how novice and advanced users perceive movement toward information on the Web, Paul P. Maglio and Teenie Matlock define image schemata as “basic pre-concep-tual structures that arise from our embodied experience [and] shape both metaphorical and non-metaphorical thought.” <http://www. almaden.ibm.com/u/ pmaglio/pubs/meta- 4surf.pdf>

ing the new product. Just as important, the blend should not represent inappropriate properties from the inputs. Nor should it import any properties from input sources that are altogether inappropriate. The process was nicely illustrated in a 2007 Charlie Rose interview with Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder. Rose imagined Bezos’s creative process in developing the Kindle: “When I first heard about this, my instinct was that the beginning of this for you was that, always being interested in books, and certainly understanding the digital world and electronic books, you had looked at the success of the iPod and said to yourself, why can’t we do something like this for books?” [ 3] Here Rose is creating a new mental space in which the properties of the Kindle can be understood in terms of multiple input sources (books, digital media, the iPod). For his part, Bezos immediately “ corrects” Rose’s blend by explaining ways in which the Kindle is not like an iPod (it doesn’t require syncing with a computer, for instance).

But the e-books blend is not altogether effective, for at least two reasons. First, many properties from the known spaces, traditional books and digital media, are not adequately supported by e-book devices. Something as simple as page numbering is difficult to support on a device that lets users change font size. Something as natural as recommending a passage to a friend becomes difficult and awkward (“Check out page 36, FONT SIZE 4!”). So it is easy to find user support sites where baffled new e-book

device owners trade secrets on how to repaginate their texts, or how to use device workarounds (bookmarks, “ locations”) to recover some aspect of book reading that they assumed would be part of this new reading experience. Even the manufacturers’ official support sites are full of instructions on how to accomplish traditional-book tasks that most users would expect to be primary “properties” of a digital book, like how to view pictures; how to open and read a book; how to set and use bookmarks; and how to put a book into your library [ 4]. Likewise, with Digital Rights Management protections, e-books on the Kindle and the Sony Reader do not carry the defining property of digital texts; one can not make perfect copies of them whenever one wishes. Instead it is now more difficult to loan a book to a friend. This is merely to say that it is difficult to know what properties from these two input sources should be projected into the e-book blend, and which should be left behind. Those users who import irrelevant or misleading elements from the “traditional books” or “digital media” inputs will produce blends that make the devices more difficult to use and understand.

A second reason the e-book blend fails conceptually is that it has been used to describe products ranging from the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader; to Web-based multimedia versions of college textbooks accessed through “reader” software; to The New York Times’s “Reader,” which is simply a repackaging of seven days of newspaper

content synced to one’s desktop or laptop computer. This promiscuous use of the book metaphor degrades its utility in explaining what this new product category is and how it works. Just how meaningless the blend has become is evident in the Yogiism expressed in the Rose-Bezos interview, as Bezos explains why the company needed its own hardware device: “We’ve been selling e-books for a long time; nobody’s been buying e-books” The solution to this problem? Another kind of e-book (the Kindle) that further confuses real readers (humans) who are trying to develop a conceptual understanding of this new product space.

Our use of metaphors in the way we speak about technology reduces usability when it produces blends that contain inappropriate properties from the input sources. Novice users are still baffled by the process of moving files between two remote computers because we insist upon using the vertical spatial metaphor of up- and downloading. Up and down might be called “image schemata”: constructs of human experience that our brains naturally comprehend because they have always been part of human experience [ 5]. They contribute known properties (movement from high to low, or low to high; restrictions of gravity, etc.) to any blend that forms when they are used metaphorically, as when we speak of downloading video from a website or uploading content to a server. Because nothing is really moving “up” or “down” when data moves on the Internet (except in the case of satellite transmissions),