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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.'"
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
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.
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.
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
It's not that simple. If it wasn't for the fact that so many of them were acquired in heavily leveraged buyouts, or went into debt to branch into other businesses, they'd be in better shape, even with circulation down. A lot of "troubled" papers would be doing OK if it wasn't for the non-operational debt that they're buried under. A lot of that can be blamed on so-called "moguls" who bought up a ton of papers over the past decade or so.
Part of it is that they don't want to just hand more revenue over to Amazon. If this had industry-wide adoption, including other types of periodicals, I think it could do well with the bigger screen. And they can do something where if you commit to getting the newspaper for a year or two, you get the reader at a big discount. If it allows them to ditch a lot of the print circulation, it'll save them a bundle.
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.
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.
And it's free. And easy to get (well, at least on a real computer, on handhelds slashcode seems to be a bit, um, lacking.). Did I mention it was free.
Good newspapers, however, are hard to make. "A few writers and photographers" is an unfair cheap shot. There is a lot behind the scenes of any real publishing firm that don't necessarily show up on the page. Of course, those of us used to Slashdot have somehow stumbled along without "editors" or proofing copy or spell checking, but I'm not sure we should put this site up as an shining example of publication quality....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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