How the Kindle was designed through 10 years and 15 generations

The Kindle has become one of the most ubiquitous pieces of specialty electronics in the world since it launched ten years ago today^[1], but the device has changed so much since its debut that one can hardly believe the oldest and newest models are meant to do the same thing.

Amazon’s Chris Green, VP of Design at its Lab126 hardware arm, talked with me for a retrospective of the design choices that have defined and redefined the device, and the reasoning behind them. Green has been at Lab126 for a long time, but not quite for the entire Kindle project, as he explained to me.

“My first day at Amazon was the day the Kindle launched – November 19, 2007. I walked into the office and everyone was going crazy. I thought that’s what it was going to be like every day,” he recalled. “Then the next morning I went in, they had sold all the Kindles in one day and everybody was panicking. so that was an interesting first 24 hours.”

For the next decade he’d work on getting the Kindle closer to what he called the “gold standard”: paper.

“We can never be better than paper, but we can be as compelling,” he said. “We really didn’t want any bezel or bling or even page turn buttons — everything we’ve done over 15 generations has been to reduce it to basically a piece of paper.”

That may come as a surprise to those who remember the first Kindle, which with its chunky angles, slab-like buttons, and aggressively ergonomic keyboard, seems almost brutalist. I’ve always thought it would look at...