Kindle - A New Bet ?

Jeff Bezos has been talking (up) recently to the wall street journal and in his ultramodern view apparently todays books are like 'horses'. Which can only be great news for Paddy Power and all the other on-line gambling providers that allow you to enjoy a flutter. Wonder what odds you'd get on JKR coming first past the post again ? Anyway there's the whole aura of risk and innovation, exclusivity even, that's been created around the kindle - when to this observer it's really a one horse race at present (Sony hasn't got out of the gate really) and with the ridiculously low levels of content innovation it's turning into a one horse race on the flat.

But then hype and business and the business of hype ensures that we're cleverly fed intimations, cheap psychology, safe and tested communications, it all gets repackaged to make it sound as if it's actually new thinking. I have heard the book/horse analogy many many years ago, I added the (very entertaining in it's own right) clip below from last years TED where the Lady Erin uses that exact analogy just as a matter of record for anyone who thinks that Jeff Bezos is somehow engaged in innovative or new thinking on the subject, basically if you have a business plan and you have become the hulking tanker of an org that Amazon has become then you can't really apply agile thinking to your outlook - even a big famous powerful individual sometimes gotta do a bit of that stolentelling thang to get by.

All of which reminded me of that great Tommy Cooper Joke:

I backed a horse at twenty to one.



It didn't come in until quarter past five.