Technology History | 201 Park Avenue South — He Opened With Gutenberg and Closed With a $399 Device

The presentation that introduced the Kindle began with a rock.

On the morning of 19 November 2007, in this building across from Union Square, Jeff Bezos worked through slides of a carved tablet, papyrus, a codex and Johannes Gutenberg before showing the thing he had come to sell.

TechCrunch, liveblogging from the room, puts him on stage at 9:41.

Kindle went on sale that day at $399, with more than 90,000 titles in the Kindle Store. Amazon priced 101 of the 112 New York Times bestsellers and new releases then listed at $9.99, which is the number the publishing industry actually reacted to.

The hardware reads strangely now: a six-inch four-level greyscale screen, 250 MB of storage for roughly 200 books, a full keyboard, an SD slot and a wedge-shaped back.

It was not the first e-reader, and the qualifier is the interesting part. Sony's Reader had been on sale in the United States since 2006, and dedicated reading devices go back to the late 1990s.

What was new was delivery. Whispernet pulled a book over Sprint's cellular network onto the device in under a minute, with no computer, no cable and no data bill.

Amazon sold its entire stock in five and a half hours and could not ship another Kindle until late April 2008.

The venue was not incidental to the theatre of it. The building went up in 1911 for the Germania Life Insurance Company, took the Guardian Life name in 1917, and kept it until the insurer moved out in 1999.

Albert D'Oench and Joseph Yost designed it in Beaux-Arts style, 21 storeys under a steep mansard roof; the city made it a landmark in 1988, and it reopened as a hotel after a renovation in 2000.

So a company that sold printed books used a 96-year-old insurance headquarters to announce the machine meant to replace them.

Stand at the corner of Park Avenue South and 17th Street and the roofline still carries the hotel's name in white letters, above the red-tiled mansard that was there long before any of this.

Photo: Epicgenius, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons