Stephen King coined the phrase, “Books are a uniquely portable magic”.
I’m in total agreement – books are pretty much my joint favourite thing.
The trouble is, the other thing at the top of the list is travelling, so I really do need my books to be extremely portable.
Enter my Kindle, allowing me to take 300 books on the go.
It’s had more than its fair share of use over the last year or so though and is slowing down as a result, and though I could just go on less holidays, I decided a new Kindle was a better bet – it’d been to five of the seven continents, so a pretty good innings.
Prime Day provided me with the opportunity to make that happen, and with a “trade-in” deal, it actually cost me quite a bit less than I thought.
I applied for my trade-in, received a repaid DPD label, and worked out a super close local dropoff point, so I headed there and dropped it off.
Within 36 hours I had an email from Amazon saying my Kindle had been received, and that the discount and gift card I needed to use for my new model would automatically be added at checkout.
And they were.
No faffing with codes, applying for my discount, or waiting around. It just appeared by magic.
I went through the checkout, and the Kindle arrived the next day, just 52 hours after reluctantly surrendering my previous one.
I opened the box, expecting to go through the laborious process of logging in, connecting to the WiFi and setting it all up.
But the magic continued – I turned it on, it automatically recognised my WiFi network, and then automatically logged me into my Amazon account, with no input from me.
One minute later, my library was downloading.
You could look at this little story and major on the evils of Amazon stealing my data, and hand-wringing about “big brother tech”, but you know what?
It’s just too good to complain about.
Amazon is better than anyone else in the world at eliminating friction, and it’s no wonder they’re the global e-commerce leader by a country mile.
Sure, you might not be Jeff Bezos, but there’s plenty for all of us to learn from how easy Amazon make it for their customers – where’s the friction in your processes, and how can you eliminate it?
Right, I’m off to start choosing which of my 300 books I am going to read tonight!
