Color is important. Keith says alternative colors typically make up just 15 to 20 percent of sales—the rest being classic options like black or white—but the matcha green model captured a surprising 55 percent. Amazon also chose that color because, at the time, it noticed a general increase in the popularity of matcha in drinks and sweets (it also noted that folks on #BookTok are reading in coffee shops). Hence the new ube color, which is based on the popular purple yam of the same name.
“We’ve been tracking food trends, and two years ago, ube just exploded—ube was growing 200 percent year over year,” says Chris Green, Amazon’s vice president of design. “We expect it to do far better than the matcha.”
For the aluminum housing, instead of milling the device’s frame from a block of aluminum and using a lot of water in the process, Amazon stamps a flat sheet, which then goes into a forge that presses down to create the backplate and sides. The process supposedly takes seconds compared to the hours it can take to machine a single aluminum device frame (like an iPhone or MacBook) saving material and energy. It helps lower the Kindle’s carbon footprint, which is now equivalent to 11 hardcover books.
Green says these improvements bring down the device’s density. The density of the average human body is around 1 gram per cubic centimeter; an iPhone is around 2.2 grams per cubic centimeter. The new Kindles are around 1.2 grams. Lowering that number can help make the hardware “disappear” during prolonged use.
“I truly want people to never think about the Kindle,” Green says. “I just want them to think about the magical world that the author has created inside of this device.”
For Green, who has designed nearly all of Amazon’s hardware in his 19-year tenure at the company (and yes, he says he’s embarrassed by the Fire Phone), chasing that 1.2-grams-per-cubic-centimeter target is all about getting the gadget out of the way so the Kindle can mimic the analog calm of physical print.