Kindle Concentration

Image by LA100RRA 3logs via Flickr

Does the Kindle help you concentrate? Over at PaidContent.org, Tom Weber (my wife’s former boss) makes the case that it does and that this concentration effect might be the key to getting people to pay for content:

Here’s why. The problem right now isn’t just figuring out what type of content people will pay for. An overlooked part of the puzzle—one that’s finally beginning to get more attention—is what type of environment will foster that willingness to pay. And an environment that helps overloaded infovores regain their concentration could have appeal.

Remember when charging $2 for a cup of coffee sounded wacky? When Starbucks arrived in cities across the U.S., it didn’t just bring a better (to some) cup of joe. It also created an environment intended to increase coffee enjoyment—bringing comfy chairs and room to sit. In most of my local Starbucks, those chairs have been replaced by less comfortable, more efficient versions—but the price point of coffee has been moved higher forever.

In digital content, the equivalent of a comfy chair has been difficult to find. The web has been the driving technology. And much like the frog in hot water, we’ve been able to overlook how chaotic the experience can be. “Tabbed” browsing was a boon for multitaskers, but it encourages users to flit back and forth among windows. And when reading news on the web, how often does your email inbox interrupt with its chime?

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Scrolling through an online newspaper or magazine can be like strolling down a state-fair midway, with dozens of options bleating for attention. We’ve accepted information overload as the price we pay for all the other benefits of interactive content.

But there are costs. Amid so many choices, it’s easy for high-value information to be diminished, reduced to just one more electronic input. And as psychologist Barry Schwartz outlined in “The Paradox of Choice,” sometimes too many options at once can overwhelm the consumer, leading to anxiety.

That’s why the Kindle experience stands in such great contrast. When my Kindle arrived from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) earlier this year, it felt at first like a severely crippled computer. After all, it has a display screen, a keyboard—even a wireless connection and a web browser of sorts. But every time I tried to indulge my digital-media-trained attention span, pausing in the middle of a book or article to check baseball scores or skim a few blogs, the experience was too cumbersome to enjoy.

Over a few weeks, I rediscovered my ability to simply read the book or article I had punched up in the first place. (Just like—gasp!—old-fashioned printed matter.) It’s particularly enjoyable when reading a newspaper or magazine—enough so that I’ve been routinely purchasing some of these publications when I could have grabbed my laptop and read them for free on the web. In effect, I’m paying for the lack of distraction.

To be sure, there are plenty of people who can’t get enough of multitasking. But I suspect many also crave some help narrowing their focus.

I don’t have a Kindle, and the device has not appealed to me, generally. Why have another device when I already have a laptop, PDA, TV, DVDs, etc.? But plenty of people are clearly in love with the already-retro-looking little bugger. And the lack-of-distraction is clearly a factor.

The problem is that the lack-of-distraction is mostly the product of the device’s technical limitations and what I can only assume is somewhat poor design. (Amazon, presumably, didn’t want the Kindle’s Web functions to be “too cumbersome to enjoy.”) A less technically limited and better designed Kindle will likely have more distractions, just like every other tech product in existence. While “lack-of-distraction” is something Amazon could retain as a feature in and of itself, it seems more likely that future versions will play music, give you Twitter updates, and stream video ads.

The good news is that digital distraction is not nearly as bad as everyone wants you to believe. First of all, the idea that pre-modern society had fewer distractions is largely false. Furthermore, distraction has been proven to have positive effects, such as improving decision making and enhancing creativity.

Maybe a stripped-down Kindle, now and forever, would be the path to profit for Amazon and the publishing industry. But despite a lot of fussing, people seem plenty able to handle distraction — and they seem to outright demand it in their high-tech devices.