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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.'"
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.
There's certainly a big break in the very practice reading with the advent of digital media. People growing up today perhaps less concerned about the smell of the paper, the feel of the binding and so forth as you mention. But it's not just that. Traditions of typography have been eroded now that a lot of publishers are allowing layout to be done with word processors like Microsoft Word instead of a real typesetting engine, with IMO a severe loss of readability and aesthetic craft.
Nonetheless, I myself travel most of the year, so carting around a lot of books isn't possible, but reading off my notebook screen isn't so pleasant (and I'm always chasing AC power sources). Now that the Kindle 2 has been released, I may get one. But it sucks to be a member of a generation torn between older traditions and these newfangled devices.
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
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.
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
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.