Slashdot Mirror
Hearst To Launch E-Reader For Newspapers
thefickler writes "The credit crisis couldn't have come at a worse time for newspapers, which were already suffering at the hands of the Internet. Now it seems that the Hearst Corporation is planning to launch an e-reader later this year to try to save its dwindling newspaper readerships. Apparently the e-reader will have a bigger screen than the Kindle, helping it to accommodate ads. It's not clear whether Hearst will go it alone, or try to gather wider industry support for its venture. As one pundit observed, 'it seems a slender thread on which to hang the entire American newspaper industry.'"
Yeah, but will it have free Wikipedia Access?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
After borrowing a Kindle I for a weekend, I'm almost sold on the device, but not quite. The screen quality was simply amazing. The only thing I can't quite get over is that the sensory experience is very, very bland. I don't know if all the cool technology can win me over with the lack of a more sensory-rich experience.
I was simply amazed at how clear the epaper screen was and how easy it was to read in almost any light. If the light was adequate for reading a book, the kindle did great. The button layout was weak and I kept changing the page when I didn't want to. At least the update was speedy. I just can't quite get into a book on the Kindle the way I get into a real book. The rough feel of the pages, the smell of old binding glue, or the waft of a woman's perfume in a library book are great. Even the sound of turning a page, or the satisfying crackle of the fabric binding on a brand new hard cover are fantastic.
Similarly, the smell of newsprint and the act of folding and unfolding each section is very much tied up in my overall experience of reading the paper. I don't think that any e-reader, no matter the spiffy features, could replace all that.
On the other hand, I could probably learn to love an e-reader for other reasons. For example, the mass of paper waiting to be recycled in the corner of my kitchen would not be missed. I love the idea that distributing news paper electronically would save thousands of tons of trees, CO2 emissions and eventual landfill space.
If the Hurst e-reader is easy to use, inexpensive and isn't as locked down as the Kindle, I would give it a chance. I would even consider switching my subscriptions to full-week instead of Sunday only if they were cheaper and I didn't have to haul off 3 tons of newsprint each week. I hope it actually makes it to the market at a price well under $300.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
It is to late the public has now become the reporters and journalists need to adapt to them not being the only one who controls what people hear. its the downside to technology world that we live in.
Unless they make the e-reader coffee and juice proof I rather have paper newspaper. I can't even count how many times i have spilled something over a newspaper while reading it at breakfast table.
Newspapers are a dying business. Once the classifieds went online this time sensitive manufacturing business became unsustainable.
Rather than move to a virtual product that connects to everyone via their favorite device, this plan is to simply begin manufacturing something else.
I think the better move is to drop the physical additions and center the expenses on what the newspapers do really well: original content.
Users connecting via a browser makes much more sense in the newspaper business model than development/distribution of consumer electronics.
That's what was missing!
Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?
The proposition is "we've come up with this great new wizz-bang technology to deliver "e-book/e-newspaper" to your living room. But then you lock it down into a single device->provider->Customer model. The entry costs are relatively high, so a few early adopters buy the thing. Most people don't because they're very cautious (rightly so) about the new wizz-bang technology.
I guess my quandry is, how can the device->provider->customer model compete with the open model of the internet? What happens when someone comes up with the equivalent wizz-bang device that uses your existing wireless internet connection, and can buy from anyone directly instead of a single provider, is an open platform, and winds up being cheaper?
AccountKiller
"Rosebud"
(it'll be interesting to see how this gets modded)
These papers are returning a 15% profit. This would be plenty to sustain the papers, if it weren't for the debt their owners took on from these recent acquisitions.
The problem is that these papers were acquired by folks who borrowed heavily in order to make the purchases. 15% revenues isn't enough with all the outstanding debt.
The crisis with papers is the same as the rest. Greedy corps over-leveraging, and now that reality has kicked in, they find themselves in trouble.
A lawsuit?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Never really saw the great benefit of an e-reader for books. Last year the author Nick Hornby wrote an excellent piece in the times on the key problems [[http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4321701.ece]]. Essentially pointing out that, except for manuals, you don't use book material in the same way you do music. However, I think a newspaper is a completely different proposition.
. . . isn't the technology but the people in suits. They really need two things to make e-readers work. 1) Open standards. Investing in a given proprietary format is risky to the consumer. What if future devices won't support current formats? When my reader breaks and I want to buy a new one from a different manufacturer, how can I move my library? Self-publishing? Open standards addresses all this. I will not buy one until I can really own my e-books. 2) Aggregation with value added service. A virtual news stand where you can pick out magazines and newspapers cafeteria style with different levels of subscription. For example, the basic would be two monthly magazine and one daily paper. The next level would be three magazines, two daily papers and an annual. I could pick out a variety of publications but only have to pay one bill. For an example of a value added service, consider a magazine like Time or a newspaper such as the New York Times making their archives available online to subscribers. Under this model there are definite advantages to subscription. I'd have the entire "paper" and the archives (or other value added service) rather than an abbreviated online version. I'd have it all on a device that I can take into my living room and stretch out on the couch and enjoy my coffee. Just my two cents.
Will there be titty?
As an academic, an author, and an editor, I basically spend most of my life reading. I'm probably as close as you can get to a professional reader.
And I have fallen in love with the ugly, locked-down device that is the Kindle. I know this empirically because I am reading much more on my Kindle than I off of it. The experience of reading in modern society overflows the mere pages of a book and includes things like transportability, capacity, and cost.
Kindle wins hands-down on all three. Kindle books are damned cheap in comparison to print and even to other e-book formats and Kindle's capacity is more than enough to carry an unwieldy library with you at all times. It's also very thin and very light, much moreso than most serious books of any heft.
In comparison to other devices, Kindle offers unique benefits. I am amongst those that have read serious works on my smartphone, anything from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to the Journal of Housing Economics.
Reading on a smartphone always feels as though it is a matter of necessity. "I am reading this here because at the moment my mobility needs ensure that there are no other options." The moment it is possible to put down the phone and "switch" to the print copy, you do; you don't stare at that tiny screen any longer than is necessary.
Laptops require more physical interaction than you want to engage in when you're reading a 1,000 page tome. To read on a laptop you have to sit up, stare in one direction, operate a scroll wheel each time you want to see the next page (or click, or drag, or reach out and press a key). You can't "lounge about" on large pieces of soft furniture, adjusting your position as bits of you become overcompressed or uncomfortable. Laptops are fine for a little light reading, but they fail miserably for long stretches.
Finally, the problem of the book. Yes, books are substantively different from e-readers. At the same time, I think that the advantages of the book address a need beyond mere reading. There are certain books that one wants on one's shelf, as a presence, a kind of authority that descends from materiality. A book is not virtual, not ephemeral; it doesn't feel as though it can be deleted. Books that are thus very important to one's identity or to one's very life practices are likely always to be bought and kept as books, so that they're present, visible, can be experienced bodily, with a kind of tactility that encompasses all of the senses, that makes the book more a part of you.
Not all kinds of reading imply this level of commitment, though. In fact, I'd suggest that for most professional readers like myself, most don't. You don't particularly care whether you ever see a given nonfiction paperback again in your life; your goal is merely to read it, ingest what you can, and move on. If it turns out to revolutionize your life by the time you've arrived at the last page, you'll buy it in hardcover, I suspect.
But in the meantime, for the rest, you get them for a fraction of the cost on Kindle and read them on the move in a way and at a level of comfort and convenience that's otherwise impossible.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The problem with newspapers is that the content sucks. Putting together a few writers and photographers doesn't do anything more. Any idiot with a blog can do that. If you want to sell a newspaper, you need to have something that is useful and has the capital costs sufficient to throw off enough competition and allow you some rent taking. The business is about content, and the internet is just a delivery mechanism for it. Even Slashdot succeeds partially because half of us look at it, and could envision something better, but its good and big and risky enough to keep us from doing so, at least for now.
This is my sig.
There is already some movement from an "Anybody can provide" model, to an "Only we provide, but we do it very well" model. Case in point, iTunes music store, and the iPod.
I wonder if an iTunes model would work. Get any magazine for $1. Maybe back issues older than a year for $0.50. Blend it with the mobile phone market's ideas, and subsidize the device with a two-year subscription on (a group of) magazines. Get the major magazine publishers and papers on board and split the proceeds honestly.
Of course, if they could actually do the right thing wrt technology and consumers, their industry wouldn't be dying right now.
Three problems. The first is that there is no mention of price in the article. In simple terms, the readers that have come out have been rather expensive; please, none of this, "well if you spread the price out over several years..." First, I am not convinced that these things will last several years, certainly not as long as physical books. For the amortization argument to work I would have to expect the device to last fifty to a hundred years, or more, just like a real book.
So, here we have one (possibly two, but they are both the same in economic terms), price and longevity.
The next is the price of the books themselves. Ebooks are not reasonable in price. I have read the writings of the past Jim Baen on the economics of publishing. Most of the cost is in production, transportation, and returns. Ebooks do not face these costs to nearly the same degree but do not reflect the reduced price. Very simply, there is no reason for it beyond markup. Now, there is noting wrong with markup, However, for the market to work, some have to refuse to pay for it at a certain price, and I refuse to pay for it at the price being charged.
The third is the problem, much lamented here in Slashdot, that the purchaser never owns the books that they have purchased, unlike real books. I can resell a real book. I can not resell an ebook; thus, I do not own it.
It is not simply that there is no current marketplace for used ebooks, there are legal and technological barriers to the resale of ebooks. It is the existence of legal barriers that makes it clear that, non-public domain, ebooks are never owned.
All that being said, I read, frequently, on my PDA (it is really one of the only reasons that I continue to use a PDA). However, I limit my reading to Public domain, and otherwise free (such as Jim Baen's releases) ebooks. I would like to see ebooks succeed; However, I think I am not the only person who is uncomfortable with the issues that I have mentioned.
I was reading a blog article in the LA Times concerning the Internet's killing of the printed newspaper. He comes up with a solution similar to the one I'd use: Make a "news" subscription fee that would include big newspapers that are interested in charging and meet certain criteria.
This could work either through a central site (which would be great as it could provide comparison stories between Fox, CNN, and BBC for example) or simply have it as an add-on to your ISP bill (which would give you a login and password).
A service like this could certainly provide E-book downloads, etc. Information does want to be free as in freedom, but collecting and organizing it takes people who still need to eat. I'd be for paying a fee for news sites, personally, as long as (just like the blog says), it's as simple as iTunes.
I remember back before the dot.com thing, back when web was only at version 0.4, you used to go visit some place like ikea.com and instead of presenting you with an HTML, "web" catalog, they'd fire up some java-based gizmo that displayed a bitmap of the printed catalog. I think even a couple newspapers and magazines did something similar--display a bitmap ensconced in a java applet. Kind of like a poor mans PDF reader. Why did this pop into my head when I read this?
Either way, none of these will succeed unless there is a standard way to present content across all these e-reader things. Some kind of bastardized version of PDF or something.
Disclaimer : I don't work for Sony but I have a PRS-505. Been reading almost exclusively on it for almost two years now.
1/ You can buy ebooks from Sony. Or get the from Gutemberg. Or Baen. Or anywhere else you want.
2/ No GSM in it. But it means they cannot revoke any licenced/copyrighted material remotely. And hell, who really needs a gsm in their book ? Remotely downloading a newspaper ? I'm too cheap to pay both for the news AND the data download. I got a computer doing that for me already...
3/ Converting books/manga/newspaper tools available for Windows/linux/Mac. I even got a linux script to mass tranform mangas in a pdf to read on the PRS-505 (using Gimp scripts to sharpen/resize...)
4/ nice, well placed buttons.
5/ Nice and pretty body
6/ Customised firmwares exist ...
7 / takes SDHC and Sony memory sticks
8/ recharge using USB or a wall wart (the dedicated one or a psp charger works)I read everyday 1-2 hours on it and recharge once a week.
Only problem I have is I cannot "shuffle" the book, flipping pages to find a chapter I want to re-read as easily I Ican with a paper book.
Compare both, make your choice. I hade both the kindle 1 and the Sony to choose from, and the PRS-505 won, not even a real match. Seen the kindle 2...well : let's just say I'm still very happy with the Sony.
I took it to extended trips in on 4 continents, and nothing beats having 400 books on a card and 800 mangas when the place you go to has neither tv nor radio...the music player isn't very good, but you have the option.
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you have enough experience watching the world, then it shouldn't be too strange to see old ideas come back after seeming to be "killed off". If anything, that's the default state of things. Ideas don't disappear; they just recycled.
I think we're in a very strange place right now, because it's clear that there has to be some kind of business model that makes money from intellectual property, but selling "copies" doesn't make sense now that an unlimited number of digital copies can be made for free (or at least virtually "free"). So what's the business model going to be?
I think the best possible thing to happen right now is for businesses to be experimenting to find something that works. I would find it strange if they weren't trying to make money from facilitating distribution, storage, and use of intellectual property rather than "copies". Copies are easy and free. Distribution, storage, backups-- and generally ensuring that you have what you want, when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it-- that stuff is still challenging. There's money to be made there, still.
Will the e-reader be cheap enough that a doctors office can leave them on the table in the waiting room and not have them stolen? Or will I have to read golf magazines from 2009 when I visit a doctor in 2012 because I forgot my e-reader at home?
...in my briefcase for the Hearst eReader, my Kindle, Sony Reader, p0rn viewer, and the inevitable iSlashdot device.
Have gnu, will travel.
I don't think you and I are reading the same newspapers. My local paper, The Raleigh (NC) News & Observer (http://www.newsobserver.com/), has in the just past few years, put 5 elected state officials (including the Speaker of the House) in prison for corruption, uncovered systemic failures in our state mental health system and probation system, and put pressure on our state's judges to stop freeing speeding motorists with a slap on the wrist. Just this past week they told the story of a local company that sold filthy medical supplies and investigated where the FDA was when hundreds of people were getting sick and 5 people were dying from those supplies. They also find the time and money to sue the government for access to information that the government would rather we - that is, the citizens - not have access to.
That kind of journalism can't be done by any number of bloggers. It takes large staffs of trained and experienced journalists backed by an organization willing to fund multi-month investigations. It takes principled and idealistic owners to be able to stand up to the established interests when the truth comes out.
Nevertheless, with their advertising revenue gone to Craigslist the N&O has had round after round of staffing cuts. To save printing costs they've cut the paper to half its old size, and just today reduced the Sunday color comics section to 4 pages. (Bill Watterson would be ashamed.) I doubt the N&O will survive as a printed newspaper. As much as I love reading my news off of newsprint over breakfast, I'd take it in e-newspaper format in a heartbeat, if that's what it takes for them to stay in business.
Right now, I use a PDA (HTC Universal, 3.8", 640x480, 300g), and a TabletPC (HP 2710p, 12.1" widescreen, 1.6Kg) as my e-book readers. It's not exactly a comfortable experience, but I need to use digital books, because where I currently live, I might have to run away in a very short notice, and I can't think about sending by post paper books to my next residence address...
I can't have a 3rd e-paper based device, because a PDA and a TabletPC are already too heavy to bring them with me on my run...
Better to buy a gun (for self-defense, of course), than an e-book reader...
Seems that might be a rare feature in future readers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Copies are easy and free. Distribution, storage, backups-- and generally ensuring that you have what you want, when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it-- that stuff is still challenging. There's money to be made there, still.
Don't forget the generation of content, still a challenge to make it compelling and worth distributing, storing, and making backups of.
The biggest concern is making sure that people can make a living from generating content. Without the goose, there won't be any more golden eggs.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
If you can purchase the confounded thing for less then the $200-$700 price point that exists now for the bloody gadgets.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get one, but it's hard to justify paying the same amount for a small embedded greyscale gadget that really only needs to read a pdf and text file as I would a cellphone, netbook or laptop.
I've been reading newspapers on the web since the beginning. I really hate the ones that insert two or three video ads.
Well yes, I had in mind that the actual goal in us, as a society, supporting a business model that supplies us with intellectual content is, in the end, to financially support those who create the content.
To backtrack and restate my post a little more thoroughly, our past and current attempt to do this has been focused on the creation of copies. The people printing the books and cutting the records, and that in itself was a valid business. In addition, those businesses had an exclusive right to create those copies, and in having such exclusivity, they were able to mark up the cost of those copies well above the production costs, thereby having enough enough money to subsidize the creative process. That was the mechanism by which artists and musicians got paid.
Now that we have computers and cheap storage and networks and the internet, we can make an unlimited number of copies without losing any quality and at virtually no cost. The result has been that the business of "copying" often provides no value anymore, and in itself is no longer a valid business.
So I'm saying that there are a lot of people trying to work out all the details of the new business model that will replace the businesses whose main value was in "copying". An obvious business model to explore is in distribution, and to some degree, that's the avenue that businesses are already headed down. Copyright has essentially been repurposed, through technicalities, from regulating the actual act of "copying" to the regulation of content distribution. Legal/technical technicalities aside, copyright holders effectively have no control over copies being made of their work anymore, but instead are giving control of any wide distribution channels of their work. Customers then pay the distributor for the ability to download the work, and copyright holders get a share of that fee.
This is already pretty much what's happening, and as far as I've seen, that's the direction things will continue to go. So the rest is just an issue of how you make it profitable and keep it profitable.
then I want the hardware for free!
Your device will fail unless you give up on what Hearst wants and figure out what the people want. That is all.
Thanks for the clarification and expansion of your comments.
I think the key to keeping the money flowing to content creators is for them to increasingly cut out the middle man. With the advent of things like the Kindle, it is making more and more sense for an author to self-publish an ebook version only. As we move closer to that, we'll see some of the problems with the music industry. I'm sure there is lots of music out there that I would enjoy, but it is hard to find a content filter to narrow the choices down that creates a subset that I actually like. There have been some attempts but as it stands now I still have to go out there and manually filter through tons of detrius to get at the brine.
Things like Valve's Steam and Slashdot both provide models where content filtering lets me find a little better what I want.
Right now, the filters in place end up sending a lot of perfectly good content that at least someone out there would have bought to the rubbish heap, because it costs too much ink and paper (or whatever) to take a chance on it. I guess in a perfect world, everything put up for publshing would be available, and people would have the option to filter for themselves. A small filtering fee per transaction, with most of the money going to the creators, and you could sell a lot fewer units at a lower price than currently and still keep the same amount of artists in work.
If I had a million dollars I'd hire a couple of coders and start a company to provide the software backend to publishers to do for ebooks what steam does for games. I think that is probably a good step in the right direction.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Why this obsession with making devices that imitate the technology they are replacing? They should be producing a version of the newspaper that's viewable on many devices or am I suppose to carry several devices to read different sized media?
There is a big difference between AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/MSN and Hearst style newspapers and magazines. The AOL's were glorified bulletin boards. In the 1980's, they created communities and on-line access when there was nothing else. As they evolved in the early 1990's, they provided access to limited amounts of content. Then, in the latter 1990's, the WWW opened up the Internet to the general public, giving consumers unedited access to content and social networking, making the AOL's stodgy, kludgy, and expensive with marginal value, in a word, irrelevant. It wasn't that the subscription based model failed, it's just that once you have tasted something sweeter, AOL kind of soured. The monthly fees you pay to your ISP ARE your subscription fees, its just that you are paying for much greater choice. Which just goes to show, that people ARE willing to pay for the content and quality they choose.
The biggest difference between the AOL's and Newspapers is that the AOL's just dish up someone else's reporting. Newspapers create content. Even busy blogs like Slashdot depend on bulletin board style posting of news content generated by real news organizations and reporters. If all newspapers dried up and went away, the rest of the Internet would be starved for real content. The world and society need the newspapers, or the function they serve - news professionals. The problem these days is finding a way to keep them in business when their primary revenue stream is drying up. Historically, newspapers, TV news, magazines, (Traditional News Organizations - TNA's) used to handle BOTH content reporting/creation and content delivery. Content creation is costly, eating cash without inherently generating revenue, making content delivery the money side of the business. Now, the public is spending money on alternative means of delivery, curtailing the revenues to TNAs that create content for the rest of us.
It is a time of flux for everyone, and TNAs are especially challenged to stay in business because of declining revenues. But we need them. Every problem like this is someone else's opportunity, and over the next 10-20-30 years, the dynamics of it all will change, but there will still be news content providers. Exactly who, how we pay for it, who splits the revenue stream, how we receive and read it all - that's the big experiment we are just entering. Kudos to venerable organizations like Hearst to not just sit idly by and sink into oblivion (like so many companies do), but at least try to adapt, to win or go down fighting.
What I foresee is a combination of models that seem to be emerging. There will be Kindle-like readers that are bigger, richer, more like a magazine in size and resolution. You will subscribe through your ISP to receive your newspapers. Perhaps there will be a "basic cable" type of service that gives you your local paper and USA Today. Then, there will be a premium service that gives you the NY Times, The Washington Post, and 3 premium newspapers of your choice. Then there will be similar plans for your magazines. You pay one fee to your ISP company, and they forward the revenues to the publishers, just like TV/cable, and HBO-Showtime- Cinemax, etc.
A moments thought after reading TFA suggest that you'd probably need to buy several readers (for hundreds of dollars each) because there'll be multiple competing devices and not every publisher will not be "allowed" on every device. There may also be an artificial separation by "format" (for example: Kindle for books, Hearst for magazines, Sony for ?)
Do they really believe that people will willingly own multiple e-readers? People will pick one reader and they will expect ALL content to be "readable" on it. E-reader manufacturers will need to set licensing fees low enough for publishers to distribute across multiple platforms (i.e. their reader and their competitors readers) or they will drive away attractive content... and nobody will want to buy a device without content.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
There's currently another post on the front of Slashdot today describing an 'Ark' where biologists are collecting amphibians in the rainforest to preserve them until a cure can be found for the fungus that is decimating their populations and threatening thousands of species with extinction.
In this scenario, Craigslist is the fungus, the newspapers are the amphibians, and this eBook reader is the 'ark'.
The death of the American newspaper is one of the unintended consequences of a benign technological development: free classified ads.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you have enough experience watching the world, then it shouldn't be too strange to see old ideas come back after seeming to be "killed off".
Old enough to know that people who bring back failed ideas are really just people that haven't learned.
but selling "copies" doesn't make sense now that an unlimited number of digital copies can be made for free (or at least virtually "free").So what's the business model going to be?
Making the copies may be free, but finding the copies is work. People are always willing to pay something to avoid work. It's the reason the Kindle is as successful as it is. It's convenient. Tying it into a proprietary format, with a single provider might work short term, but it's a poor business model to link yourself to long term. If Amazon/Hearst are really worried about piracy they've seriously got the wrong idea about how their business works.
AccountKiller
"Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?"
Yeah, but their business model isn't my problem.
Maybe it will result in a cool gadget for me to play with (for cheap when it ends up at the flea market) or maybe not.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I've not looked at Kindle or other e-reader, or ebooks in general as I assume they are encumbered with DRM... :)
Is my assumption wrong?
And if not, then how am I suppose to read a book on an ebook reader, when my desktop won't be able to crack the DRM before the Sun burns out?
Maybe all the new ebooks will help usher us into a new era. While I am very interested in Kindle, I am still waiting for these books to be DRM free. It's just so much easier and "thought-free" when I don't have to worry about DRM and how I use something. The higher the resolution, the better it is too. We are nowhere near true 300-dpi but that's a technical limitation at this point.
How other eBooks will handle copyright and DRM is unknown at this point. It's not clear to me how Hearst will handle it.
Speaking of DRM-free, Amazon does have an awesome MP3 store that is DRM-free with a large selection and often good prices. It would be nice if they had the same thing with books.
On the note about Amazon, I recently came across an interesting table that details the discounts on Amazon. Maybe someone will find it useful. It is at http://www.uberi.com
Anyway, several new ebook readers are being released and we will probably see faster advancements in this area in the near future as competition heats up. It will be a fun ride.
I already have an e reader, its called a computer and a portable called a paper. As an occasional reader I will not buy multiple devices to read proprietary content. That content will be relegated to obscurity, where it belongs. The papers don't seem to understand that they are NOT dealing with a scarce commodity. The news will become public with or without them. The news will follow the path of least resistance.
As another academic, the main stumbling block to me getting an e-reader has been that I'd mainly use it to read papers, and I've yet to find an e-reader that can comfortably handle 8 1/2" x 11, two-column text with small (usually 9-point) font, which is the standard for many CS publication venues. In particular, a combination of horizontal and vertical scrolling with slow refresh rate is a nightmare.
It seems like it'd be fine for books, but I rarely read books professionally, just papers. When I do read books, I usually want a physical copy that I can read through without distractions, the exact opposite of what I'd use the e-reader for.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You are lucky to have those kind of journalists in that newspapers. I have somewhat opposite story.
We have the local newspaper which in my free opinion has around >80% of market share. The they have somewhat good journalists, great commentators, but all in somewhat global scale, I mean news from all parts of the country and global world news. But for the local part (which is the most important thing) they have the most disgusting scumbags you can imagine.
Lets take a step back here. I would wager that majority of people consider news reports, editorials etc in large part truthful, unbiased and complete. That seems generally true, until one himself gets in the papers too.
So here is a very short background story. So this (unnamed) city (population of 300K) has couple of city-run organizations for say public transport, utilities, parking etc. My dad was the director of one of those "organization" (so I know facts first hand). So after a few years of him being the (an excellent, I'm truly trying to be unbiased here) director, the mentioned newspapers got hold of him. You wouldn't imagine how bad those journalists can be. One can always imagine journalists from movies, with the perpetual spin, outright lying, twisting and mixing the facts, fiction and opinions (extremely dangerous). Those journalists are just like that. And they never stop until the guy gets replaced, fired, disgraced or something else.
The biggest problem is that nobody can sue them. Sure, you can sue them, but all trials take few years to complete (by the time everything is irrelevant, and sadly forgotten) and judges are keen to clear the defendants (the journalists) of all charges because they don't want to look like they are against the freedom of the press (not speech, ie one kid got jailed for drawing our prime minister with swastika on his shoulder) which is one of the top most priorities to became a member of EU.
And you can probably imagine what happens when you write a rebuttal in the same newspapers. Its like trying to argue with forum trolls. It is just giving them more materials for spin.
Those journalists are pretty powerful then, even when the people don't realize it. Unfortunately, they don't use their energy for positive things like you mention, here they are just a force of destruction. But the most sad thing is that people still believe that they write the truth and are excellent journalists.
I have no issue with the kindle, but it is too much hard work. To have a decent size screen, you have to have a large body to the case and that makes it cumbersome.
In my future there is a device about 6" long, and 1/2" in diameter. It has bluetooth to talk to my ear phone/mike and it has status leds and caller id on the outside. It has the fastest net access possible. Connected to this device, in fact concealed within it, is a pullout screen, which is either epaper or video standard according to need. The screen locks into position and is about 7" to 9" size. Laser positioning detects your finger activating controls on the screen. ebooks, movies, video calls, the net - all available in a slim tube with a bigger screen when you need it.
And a pony.
Hearst has already figured out that if he GIVES it away, and sells SMALL subscriptions, he would make more money. I think that Hearst will cut a deal with e-ink and we will see a reader sold for 100-150. Singly. It will probably be able to read a number of drm, but will be locked to hearst media.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'd like to have an e-paper based e-book reader, because I can't have hard paper book, given the fact that, in my current situation where I currently live, I might have to run away in a very short notice, and I wouldn't have the time to send paper books by post to my new residence address (without mentioning that I might not know my new residence address). But it's too expensive, and I already have - A PDA (HTC Universal, 300g, 640x480, 3.8") - A TabletPC (HP 2710p, 1.6 Kg, 12.1") and I use them for my reading need, albeith it's not exactly a comfortable experience...
I agree, and that was more or less what I was expressing, I think. By saying that I believe the business model will shift from being copy-based to distribution-based, I'm saying that businesses that were build around "copying" (e.g. book publishers and record labels) will decrease in relevance because copying is becoming irrelevant. The business models that seem to be increasing in relevance are services like iTunes, Amazon (ebooks and MP3s), Netflix, and Steam. In other words: the distributors.
As wide distribution becomes the primary legal issue and the primary mechanism by which creators are compensated, excess middlemen can be cut out, but these distributors can still provide some important services for the creator. They can provide search features and recommendation engines, take care of all the technical issues of distribution, set up the groundwork for receiving payments, and probably some other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment. Oh, right, and they can also device a business model and marketing plan for how this content can be viewed/used-- in the sense that Netflix can market a set-top box, Amazon can market the Kindle, and Apple can market the iPod/iPhone/AppleTV.
The way ahead isn't simple, but I think we're agreeing that distributors are in line to take over the role of compensating content creators in the way that labels/publishers have traditionally done.
Yep. Now the question is, how much damage will the death throes of the old labels/publishers do, and how many of them will manage the transition to the new era. :)
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Yesterday's news ain't worth a plugged nickel. I don't even want a pdf file (x 365) clogging up my laptop. All I really want is TODAY's Doonesbury, plus Pat Oliphant's politicals and Dilbert. Anything more acerbic than that, I can turn on MSNBC's Keith & Rachel show. No commercials, please. Don't make me buy this stuff. Instead, issue a content derivative and trade it on NASDAQ, where nobody gets hurt.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
The Seattle P-I and SF Chronicle are on the chopping block...maybe the rest of the industry, too? What other Hearst properties have closed in the past few years?
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
"2/ No GSM in it. But it means they cannot revoke any licenced/copyrighted material remotely. And hell, who really needs a gsm in their book ? Remotely downloading a newspaper ? I'm too cheap to pay both for the news AND the data download. I got a computer doing that for me already..."
Sounds like E-readers should come with either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth since a lot of cell-phones (even the cheap ones) come with not only the latter, but browsers as well.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
"I agree, and that was more or less what I was expressing, I think. By saying that I believe the business model will shift from being copy-based to distribution-based, I'm saying that businesses that were build around "copying" (e.g. book publishers and record labels) will decrease in relevance because copying is becoming irrelevant."
The problem with your argument is the same one slashdot makes on a regular basis because they don't know any better. Book publishers and record labels regardless of ones personal feelings about them do more than just create copies. Until this "new and improved" business model that everyone thinks should be adopted addresses that issue, then they will at best be a niche.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
From the article: "Insiders familiar with the Hearst device say it has been designed with the needs of publishers in mind." Reminding us again that to a publisher, readers are not the customer, readers are the product. Their actual customers are the ad agencies.
I am not a product, I am a free man!
Taxation without representation is tyranny! Statehood for DC, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands & Pacific Territories!
Your device will fail unless you give up on what Hearst wants and figure out what the people want.
That is all.
And if all the people want is free content and newspapers go out of business, who's really the winner there? Sometimes to have something viable that everyone can enjoy people have to let go just a little of their selfish tendencies. The "me" generation has already messed up the world enough. e.g Worldcom, Lehman Brothers, etc. Now it's time for the "we" generation to take charge.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
As an avid reader of Seattle's soon to be discontinued Post-Intelligencer newspaper (another Hearst venture) I'd be thrilled to see an internet version continue on and one day appear on their large format e-reader. As much as I like to read the paper I've never been into the sheer volume of raw materials needed to produce them, yet the online format is restricted by the frame and controls on my web browser and the size of my laptop screen. One thing is for sure - any newspaper that goes Internet only before this depression kicks in will be reaping the rewards when papers who currently rely on print as their main source of distribution fall by the wayside, which they surely will.
The same NDS who does the CA for bskyb, directv, and many others.
The device may be hackable (depends on how well it's secured), but the content will probably be securely "protected"
This is one case where I think the technology could very well be a perfect match for the product.
Here's the thing - one of the key reasons that e-books didn't even stand a chance of taking over the regular book market is in the way that people consume books - it's long and involved. Having a huge library on disk isn't as much of a selling point when only three or four books will be relevant at once. A regular book tends to be better suited for that sort of consumption.
A newspaper, on the other hand, is consumed in short bursts. It is also consumed far more actively - people discuss news on forums, and being able to comment immediately is a draw. So, some e-reader would be perfectly suited for this.
So, I think this one actually has a better chance of catching on than the Kindle or Sony Reader.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Only my socks smell like a unit.
Hey, have we forgottent the Sony Rootkit debacle? Where they deliberately infected millions of PCs with rootkits from their "CD"s and then repeatedly lied about it? Sony: 1) I'd rather teabag a mime than give Sony another m'fricking dime
2) Memory stick, MS Duo, Magicgate, UMD, minidisk: stoppit with the formats, OK? 3) Also, fuck you
Plastic Logic
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
[http://www.plasticlogic.com/]
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
I already have excellent software for looking at somefile.txt. I already have software for looking at HTML. Why would I want to buy any dedicated "something-reader" device?
If the screens on these things are so much better than notebook screens, then to repeat a tired cliche: "Does it run Linux?" If it's good enough to be a prefereable way of presenting an "e-book" (fuck I hate that term) or an "e-paper," then it should also be great at reading e-slashdot and running e-vim.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The hogshead is missing too.
That would be because the hogshead is a US customary unit rather than a "strange unit"