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Can the New Digital Readers Save the Newspapers?
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that several companies plan to introduce digital newspaper readers by the end of the year with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper to present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. Publishers hope the new readers may be a way to get consumers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web — while allowing publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications, at precisely a time when their businesses are under historic levels of pressure from the loss of readers and advertising. 'We are looking at this with a great deal of interest,' said John Ridding, the chief executive of the 121-year-old British newspaper The Financial Times. 'The severe double whammy of the recession and the structural shift to the Internet has created an urgency that has rightly focused attention on these devices.' The new tablets will start with some serious shortcomings: the screens, which are currently in the Kindle and Sony Reader, display no color or video and update images at a slower rate than traditional computer screens. But many think the E-ink readers are simply too little, too late and have not appeared in time to save the troubled realm of print media. 'If these devices had been ready for the general consumer market five years ago, we probably could have taken advantage of them quickly,' said Roger Fidler, the program director for digital publishing at the University of Missouri, Columbia. 'Now the earliest we might see large-scale consumer adoption is next year, and unlike the iPod it's going to be a slower process migrating people from print to the device.'"
No.
Next question?
Yes. Because nothing will boost readership like each newspaper requiring it's own custom $300 reader that doesn't work for any of the other newspapers or books.
Just make it work on the popular readers out there (at this point that's the Kindle and the Sony devices). Amazon is rumored to release a new Kindle with a bigger screen on Wednesday (they've got a press conference announced).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This is why recessions aren't always bad. Some of these old companies will only do something novel when they absolutely have to. Otherwise, it's business as usual.
Give me a reader for $80 and maybe. $300? Screw that.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Outside of those carrying briefcases or backpacks, who wants to carry around a papersized piece of equipment to read old-fashioned news. Shouldn't they be focusing on a cheaper kindle-like device, since that has shown some acceptance in the marketplace?
Theres a lot to be said for a newspaper which can be rolled up or folded to take with you. Size is important for this sort of media.
Overclockers
The newspapers are doomed. Their focus is to be able to get the same revenue for ads with a bigger device. They completely miss the point. They think that "giving away content" on the internet was their biggest mistake.
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium.
I used to have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which gave me both dead-tree and online information. While the content was ok at first, when NewsCorp destroyed the editorial content it was no longer worth the effort. Only about 10% of the dead-tree editions would be read because the format was unwieldy at the desk.
They need to bring costs in-line and generate quality content at the same time. (No, I didn't say it was easy.) There isn't a top-line solution that will make them viable long-term. Look no farther than ad rates to understand the limited value that the papers can generate for most of their advertisers.
This may be more of a generation gap than anything else. My Godmother would always have a newspaper around and she'd be reading it but I was never inclined to do so. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure I'd have the attention span to go through a newspaper like she did. Some people can read a newspaper from beginning to end but I'm more of a target reader. I read only something that caught my eye and even then I may only skim it unless I'm genuinely interested in it.
Will the Kindle bring us back to reading news stories like our parents? I'm not sure. It's a new twist on old technology (print) but I'm not sure it'll be enough. The advantage to the newspaper is it was inexpensive and you could carry it around and read it on the train, bus, etc . when you had downtime. A kindle isn't $0.75 and can be broken. The worst that could happen to a newspaper is that one can rip it or leave it behind. Either of those would be tragic if it happened to a Kindle.
I think this would catch on better if it were a feature included in something people already use all the time like a cell phone. The Kindle is more of an at-home thing.
...until we get foldable, rollable e-displays.
I mean, if I can't just pull it out from under the birdcage and roll up the dirt inside it, the way I do with today's print newspapers, it's really not going to work out very well for me.
I think when the history books are finally written fifty to one-hundred years from now, that we'll see this is a modern revolution: the media revolution. These things happen every now and then throughout history. While they ultimately bring about major changes in how we do things, they certainly don't happen overnight. But this media revolution is changing the entire face of how we handle and use information, whether it be print, radio, television, internet, music, movies. We've already seen how the music industry, and to some extent, Hollywood, has reacted to this -- though that's only the tip of the iceberg. Mass media corporations and agencies that can adapt to the changes that we are and will be experiencing, will continue to be in business. Those that can't adapt, will fold. Charles Darwin came up with a few words for this: "Survival of the Fittest."
advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. Publishers hope the new readers may be a way to get readers to pay for those
I'm willing to pay for content OR to have it infested with ads. Not both.
They want to have my cake and eat it too. This is why I can't wait for these businesses to crash and burn.
You can't take the sky from me...
I would never get a newspaper. The only things of value to me in a newspaper are the comics, the crossword and sudoku, and possibly the movie listings. Other than that, it is a giant waste of paper. The news I get from the TV and radio, I don't care about sports scores, or stock quotes, or obituaries. Besides, the cost of a regular home delivery newspaper would be about the same as an internet hookup. So, what's the point of a newspaper, other than collecting special issues and lining bird cages?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'd be interested in this, provided it's on a device I can use for other things (like a Kindle, I don't want a newspaper only reader), and it can get the paper wirelessly every morning. If those two things are true, I'd likely transfer my dead tree subscription over to the digital one, which saves the newspaper the cost of printing and delivering a paper to me every day (which are substantial costs).
Of course, right now the Kindle doesn't really work in Canada at all, so that's a pipe dream for me at the moment.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I would say the reason smaller devices have been accepted in the marketplace is because there are almost no larger devices.
As a grad student who's just finished a master's degree, and is about to start down the long path to a PhD, I know I'm going to have to read a zillion PDFs - journal articles, scanned chapters of books, working papers from repositories, etc. I really want an ebook/digital reader, but I'm reluctant.
The only large-screen device I can find is the iRex DR-1000. It's got a 1024x1280 10" display, so much larger than the standard 600x800 of most readers. That would be great for PDFs. There's also a version with a stylus that allows for direct annotation on the screen. Fantastic.
Downside? It's about $900, has been reported to have battery life problems, and people give very mixed reviews to the firmware. Aside from the iRex, there's nothing else in this category (or if there is, please let me know!).
If someone made a larger, hi-res competitor to the DR-1000, and it cost maybe $500-$700, you might see more interest in larger readers. But right now, iRex has no competition.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Newspapers used to add value. Once upon a time, people who worked for newspapers actually wrote articles. In fact, papers had writers on staff who could be counted on to keep delivering articles that someone might want to read. Now, all the articles come from wire services. So while you might think the situation is bad because one company owns all the papers in your hometown, the situation is actually completely and totally fucked because every significant article in your paper comes from one of a small handful of news agencies.
It is true that major, important articles still come from newspapers, even corporate ones like the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times. We will all be the less when newspapers are gone, and we have less news sources. But on a day to day basis, the average consumer could do without them. They can get the news from the wire sources directly, and at the point where they are using a computer to read the news, their news-reading device can do content aggregation and filtering for them. I wouldn't recommend it to any average person, but for the technically literate it is possible today to fairly trivially create your own Slashdot-like news site with automatically aggregated content, comments and/or forums, spam filtering, OpenID et cetera using LAMP with Drupal... using only published modules. And if you just bought a tablet, you could run it on the device. The only things missing from this plan are the e-Ink display and the ease of use (including the pretty interface... but you could probably do that in the browser too, with some jQuery effects.)
There are probably even easier recipes for doing the same thing. The simplest (from the actual implementation standpoint) is to just use the RSS functionality in Firefox or similar. But firefox isn't exactly optimized for use on that kind of display... My current goal is getting Angstrom Linux working on my WebDT 366. I got it to build but then the kernel was apparently built for i686 somehow, even though I specified Geode LX. So far OpenEmbedded is kicking my ass :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"...unlike the iPod it's going to be a slower process migrating people from print to the device."
What? Why in Heaven's name would Roger say that? If these come out at $50, come with a library of great books (all free from Gutenberg et al.), and allow you to put whatever you like on them in some open format which the FOSS community can create converters for, why wouldn't it blow the iPOD sales records out of the water?
And there's no reason for them to charge more than $50. They spend the price of a Kindle printing newspapers on every subscriber every year. They can sell it for $50 with a one-year subscription to two newspapers, or give it to anyone who has been a subscriber (showing a pattern of reading) for more than two years.
The difference between this sort of thing and the Kindle or the iPod is striking. Those were both created to sell downloads, and thus try to cripple you from doing anything other than buy from Amazon or iTunes. This proposed reader is a desperate attempt to move off of an expensive process (printing papers) and onto a cheap one.
The Kindle and the iPod are designed to wring more and more money out of the consumer. These are designed to preserve a revenue stream from an advertiser. One is designed to entrance and restrict, the other to entrance and keep entranced, whatever small cost is needed to accomplish that.
If the newspapers don't make this thing explode such that EVERYBODY has one by the end of the first year, it'll be because of gross incompetence (which I'm still betting on, unfortunately) or lack of ability to produce enough of them.
while allowing publishers to save millions on the cost of printing and distributing their publications
How much you wanna bet that those savings are NOT passed on to the reader?
I mean real paper is something we are actually ok-with to pay for. You can reuse that paper later on, it is perfectly readable, even colorful, bendable, stretchable, you can wrap your snack in it, feels good to tough, smells good, u know..
The current generation of newspapers is carrying an infrastructure designed to deal with distribution issues from 100 years ago. We have literally hundreds of newspapers in the U.S., with dozens that are considered "newspapers of record" or major players. In an age when information is instant, and you don't have to wait for dead trees to get delivered to your doorstep to get it, there's just too many news sources.
Does anyone else think it odd that the white house press room is filled with reporters? 3 or 4 reporters could do the same job as the 20 or 30 that pack that news room. I also find it funny that most of the major newspapers carry substantially the same stories. It's all very redundant, because it's designed to be distributed locally in an age when that delivery process took an entire day, and delivering over longer distances was not feasible for a daily paper.
The major newspapers will mostly die or consolidate. Technology has made redundant having a major newspaper with all its attendant printing machinery, reporters, staff, etc. in every major city. Certainly there will be a market for a few major newspapers, but not the sheer number we have today.
I don't think it's the end of the world scenario that people are painting it to be, either. We'll still have multiple sources of info (I suspect the NY Times and Wall Street journal for instance will survive, along with a multitude of local news outlets and other media outlets like cable news networks and bloggers), there just won't be the increadible multiplicity we have today.
Amazons Reader won't even read all of Amazons own formats. Remember Amazon bought Mobipocket yet Kindle won't read Mobipocket DRM protected files.
And then you expect them to read other companies formats? You must be kidding.
Martin
No
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Personally I wouldn't carry both a smartphone and one of these new digital readers just for a bit of news. If I want to do some real reading the give me a book.
Newspapers should offer wireless enabled ebooks with 1 or 2 year subscriptions.
The newspaper will save on print and distribution costs.
People will still be able to read the news with breakfast.
Can you imagine your paper boy throwing an e-reader at your front door every morning?! Especially if this thing is mean to be newspaper sized... I don't think the newspaper companies have thought this through clearly!
Would the classic newspaper model really work on a subscription digital newspaper, considering that half the newspaper's pages (sometimes more) is wall to wall ads? And that's not even counting the classifieds, ads paid for by the subscribers themselves!
I already read my news on the BeBook, for free, with no subscription. It's easy: I have created a program that downloads all the current news from Wikipedia and the daily news from Wikinews, put them all in a smallscreen bigfont PDF, and voila, I read my news on the BeBook. With the same program, with a different config file, I also get Wikipedia on my BeBook. I cannot understand the hype about $300 readers, subscriptions, and Kindle since the BeBook is already available, cheap, and reads everything for free with no subscriptions.
I got a Kindle and an iPod Touch for Christmas from my wife. I loved the kindle but it is just a little big to carry around. When Amazon came out with the Kindle reader for the the iPhone/iPod Touch I tried it out. Guess what it is wonderful. I always have my iPod Touch in my pocket. I use it it to read a lot more than I do my Kindle. At home I may use my Kindle but the Touch is just too handy.
It is the next gen of smart phones that you need to put news papers on. AT&T no has the Nokia E71x smart phone for only $99. Even "feature" phones are getting pretty dang smart these days. Soon everybody will have a Palm WebOS, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, S60, or for those poor souls Windows Mobile device. The question still will be how will they make money? Will people be willing to pay or will ads work?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. We always had a subscription and I used to read it in the morning before going to school. Well, skimmed major articles, and looked at the comics and sports pages mostly, but the daily newspaper was fairly thick and had a decent metro section.
Well, year after year it kept getting thinner and thinner with more generic articles purchased from Ruters or the AP. In the past 5 years my Dad and I can think of a single major multi-part story they did on the corruption going on in local fire protection districts. It was a damn interesting read and something people needed to know about (like how many wives were on fire boards voting for pay increases, etc..) But that was one investigation in 5 years. Meanwhile the business section was cut down to the top local stocks and that was the death nail. Why pay $0.35 a day for the same wire stories you had already read online and he can go to the website and get the local sports stories.
If they brought back more local investigations and reported more about what was going on around town, you know have content that was interesting and worth reading, he'd get a subscription.
I think news magazines are in the same boat. Time, Newsweek, etc. all seem to be thinner than I remember once upon a time. It's gotten to the point where the only ones I read on a regular basis are The Economist and Der Speigel when I can find a copy.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
It's a paradigm shift -- people won't pay for news because news are available wrapped up in ads everywhere on the Net and on cable TV, so why pay for access to a (e-)newspaper, which is also supported by lots of ads anyway.
so the specs are like this: it must be like a computer, but not as functional, and roughly as expensive as say a Netbook. It just seems like newspapers are dying of natural selection.
No, but they might save O'Rielly & Associates which should be making money hand-over-fist with Bookshelf subscriptions and saving it so they can last longer as their market share is eroded by Packt and others.
I remember in my childhood around 20 years ago wondering if and when this will happen. My estimates at the time were just about right (I estimated this to be happening big in about 5 or 6 years' time). Yes, it works, up until people start adding new features to it and it becomes bloated.
Exercise: buy a newspaper and throw out all the sections that are 100% marketing. Entire sections, like Autos, Real Estate, and Wine (Wine?) go into the dumpster. The classified sections can go; that's all on-line, and on line it's searchable.
Of what's left, over half will still be pages that are all advertising. Throw out those pages. About 15-20% of the original pages will be left.
Then throw out the pages than only have stories you already saw on Google News. Throw out the stories that came from PR Newswire. Maybe 2 to 3% of the pages will be left. That's the "content". The whole paper could probably be condensed down to about six pages. In many cities, less.
Today's newspapers make spam look like an efficient data transmission medium.
For newspapers to survive they need to quit catering to senior citizens. According to a study from the Pew Research Center the only group of people that had a majority of respondents say they would personally care if their local newspaper disappeared were people over the age of 65
Newspapers need to eliminate the things that other mass media do better. Why do newspapers have sports sections? I can see reporting high school sports for some local papers but why do they cover the professional sports? If someone really cares about yesterday's game wouldn't they either watch it, watch Sportscenter, or look up the results online? Why do they report yesterday's national news when you have 3 (4 if you count Headline News) 24 hour news channels and network news and local television news? Why are there horoscopes and comic strips that haven't been entertaining since the 70s? (of course in most cases horoscopes are little more than filler for the ads on the page)
Focus on things they do better: local news that isn't covered by local television.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Other than the cost of parts being around $200 per unit.
Best Slashdot Co
I picked up a foreign newspaper in one of my travels. Fully 50% of the articles were op-ed pieces written by experts on the subject. I left it in the coffee room at work and many weeks later people were still reading it with interest. Contrast this with your average daily, filled up with newswire reports, which no one wants to read the day after (as Mark Twain said "there is nothing older than yesterday's newspaper").
The "Dailies" are on the way out. Insightful, investigative journalism (a la NYT, Guardian, Le Monde) is here to stay.
While the idea of replacing traditional newspaper with an ereader is a good idea, the news conglomerates themselves will assure its failure. Scrips, Tribune, Gannet, etc will simply not let go of the desire for control long enough to agree on a universal reader. The result will be a half dozen readers, most likley not subsidized and all likely locked out from repurposing.
A large portion of print media's market are those that are still afraid of technology, convincing them to use "magic paper" is going to be an uphill battle without the cost of a reader, explaining that they are going to have to pay an upfront cost of several hundred dollars in addition to a subscription fee just isnt going to fly. For the rest of us, many dont feel the need to pay for yesterdays news anyway so there is little incentive beyond the cool gadget.
The days of the newspaper are numbered but after a century of empire building, I have my doubts that most will have the intestinal fortitude to let go of enough to control to work together and actually save each other.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Everyone here seems to focus on distribution as a huge cost. It isn't, in relative terms. Certainly for books the action of printing a book and shipping it is cheap - far, far cheaper than the authoring and editorial process. If the objective is to open the floodgates to bring in crap, that is simple. Producing quality books isn't cheap and the costs of quality far outweigh the costs of printing.
I don't have hard numbers, but however many millions it costs to print a newspaper, I am sure the salaries of the people involved in producing a quality newspaper far exceed that of merely printing it. Sure, it might save 10% of the costs in trying to deliver it digitally. But it isn't the most significant oost there is in the newspaper business.
Similarly, if all you want is recycled crap, it would be easy to distribute the output of bloggers bloviating. Cheap, too. But that's not the point.
This idea also ignores the relatively huge problems with digital distribution. Let's say you used the Kindle platform with wireless connectivity. Great - people would not have to "dock" it somehow to pick up the latest edition. But, if you provided a Kindle to every subscriber to a newspaper in New York or Chicago could the cellular infrstructure handle rolling out the morning paper? I have my doubts. And if it took all morning to do this distribution, you have pretty much lost the point of the "morning paper".
No, I don't think digital delivery is any real solution at all.
Information wants to be free. Sure, you may think it's a silly cliche, but the message holds true.
So why would I pay for something that is readily available for free? The internet already provides me with an insurmountable amount of information on a daily basis... more information than I can ever recall reading in a week's worth of newspapers!
Digital readers will neither save or condemn the newspapers; it's up to the newspapers to save themselves. Learn a lesson from the RIAA. Your business model has changed. Adapt or die.
There is already a standard for reading online publications. It is called HTML/HTTP. Anyone pushing an alternative 'standard' will obviously face an impossible task, particularly if they are selling custom hardware to read content. It would be even more impossible, if the hardware were not free to the end user (like cable TV boxes). Hardware suitable for reading printed content will have to be portable, have a good screen with over 1000 vertical pixels, and several days of battery life. Media companies are going to need some serious funding to get this kind of scheme going.
In my opinion, content shall remain free.
Attempts to monetise existing online content will only backfire spectacularly.
1. Give electronic reading devices to all your subscribers.
2. Other content producers figure out how to feed the device.
3. Subscribers start to read news on reader from alternate, free sources.
4. Subscribers cancel subscriptions.
5. What, no profit?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If these come out at $50, come with a library of great books (all free from Gutenberg et al.), and allow you to put whatever you like on them in some open format which the FOSS community can create converters for, why wouldn't it blow the iPOD sales records out of the water?
Just about fell out of my chair when I read that one. Very witty, subtle sense of humour you have there, so much so you've been modded "informative".
I'll laugh almost as hard when newspapers start going into receivership after sinking millions in borrowed funds into the development of an overpriced, single-purpose reader to serve DRM-encumbered, proprietary-formatted content to its readers, followed by more millions on RIAA-style litigation to suppress hacker communities who try to jailbreak the devices.
Despite the fact you've put out a credible way to implement such a solution successfully, you can count on newspaper chains will cock it up so badly that their newspaper readers will make the cue:cat look like a raging success.
News articles are mostly text and most of us have our mobiles with us most of the time. It only makes sense to read the news in our mobile phones.
No.
(long story short: Internet killed newspapers like Gutenberg's press killed Bible monopoly by the Church, newspapers just don't know it yet)
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
1) lightweight
2) flexible - as flexible as paper
3) cheap
4) no vendor lockin
I'd be happy to go to an office supply store and buy a foldable broadsheet-size e-paper reader then download the same newspaper I get at home. I wouldn't pay twice for the same subscription, but I might pay for a subscription I wouldn't otherwise pay for if the content was specialized enough.
For newspapers, specialized content includes local content not covered by other media including other local media, editorials and opinions, and in certain cases, advertisements, such as those in the Sunday supplement. Many of the latter are now online though.
Newspapers need to get it through their head that they are in the news- and opinion-delivery business, and that print is just one of many methods of delivering content.
They also need to get it through their head that if another vendor provides essentially the same information, or even a large subset of it, with no cost and no annoyance, he will be strongly favored over a provider that charges money or uses annoyances. Different readers consider different things annoying, but some annoyances include being on paper, not being on paper, being on paper of the "wrong" size, requiring a screen or window of the "wrong" size, browser incompatibilities, having ads, having animated ads, using active content on a web page, using tracking cookies, requiring a login, not allowing comments, etc. etc.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We have plenty of existing devices already, why do we need another one to do something like this?
How does giving an expensive device a single purpose 'better' than reading it on a computer or existing portable devices of that nature? Wouldn't it be better to spend the money on infrastructure and standards which can be accessible to any compatible device?
Trying to use technology to solve a non-technical problem?
Hey, newspapers: Stop lying to your readers, stop trying to brainwash the public according to the tastes of the big corporations that own you. Get back to being journalists.
Examples from my country: Almost all the articles in newspapers show the EU Constitution as being the best thing since sliced bread, yet polls show that most people reject it vehemently. Other examples: the invasion of Iraq, the free market. If you come from another country, reading the opinions in the newspapers will give you the exact opposite impression about the public opinion on some subject.
In these situations, the attempt to manipulate the public is so blatant that I hate the idea of wasting my money in a newspaper. And TV is even worse.
What's the use of having so many (pseudo) different newspapers, TV and radio stations? It seems like behind all of them it's the same bunch of monkeys trying to feed you the exact same bullshit with slight variations.
from a news story I gave up. The last election made it even more pathetic. Too many of today's newspapers are nothing more than tabloids. They would have been laughed out of the industry thirty years ago.
So no, no reader is going to fix newspapers. Far too many of these papers are losing subscribers because the paper's political view is no where near in line with those who used to pay for them. Worse too many of these papers then call those people who don't subscribe over differences of opinion "ignorant" and wonder why that doesn't help.
Then again my experience is mostly with the AJC... though my buddy in LA says it is no different there.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Hearst newspapers will be holding back content from their papers' free websites, instead charging for some digital news and information. "We are fully confident that both readers and Google will come to the party and give us money," said Hearst president Steven Swartz, "and not just laugh and ignore us henceforth."
Newspapers plan to fight back against the avaricious parasitism of Google in telling people where to find content the newspapers had put up on the Web for free with a new e-book reader, a variant on the Amazon Kindle. "For only $300, readers can read DRM-locked down versions of our content that they're paying a subscription for on top. We can't see how this could possibly fail to work."
Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has been notably successful in selling valuable original financial reporting that cannot be obtained anywhere else. "So there's no reason people won't pay for recycled Associated Press feeds, corporate-backed op-eds, funny cat stories and pretence at holding the government's feet to the fire."
Hearst also advocates new advertising and revenue models. "The technical press on the Web shows the way forward: blatant and obvious gutter-slut crack-whoredom. Subtlety doesn't pay the bills any more — we must enthusiastically welcome the corporate cock into our throats. Also, I'd like to mention that everyone should use the Windows 7 beta. HLAGH HLAGH HLAGH," added Mr Swartz, wiping off his chin.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
At that price, they're competing directly with full tablet PCs.
(For example: an HP tx2z with 2GB of memory is $900 right now after rebate. It weighs under 5 lbs.)
Granted, the iRex probably has some size/weight and battery life advantages, but it's dramatically less versatile than a full-featured computer. Unless they can drop the price significantly, I don't forsee many ebook devices at that size.
I like my little library inprint edition. It nicely displays color and utility on my shelf.
But newspapers are a print disaster. Floppy, yucky layouts full of miscellanea on skip-pages, sorted by day instead of topic....Then you get to throw out a metric ton each month.
I'd seriously consider one of those readers if it kept all the dailies on tap so if you wanted to review your notes you could turn back to October 2004.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Books present a coherent argument.
Newspapers would be WAY faster if you clicked a link "to read more" rather than following from A3 to C7.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't know if having a kindle like device would help. I think Newspapers have undercut themselves by offering their content on the web. I know a big reason I don't have a subscription is that I get my news on the web. But alot of the time, it's from a newspaper's website. So it's not so much that the news is poorly written or covered, but that it is farm more convient and free to get it online. While they must have seen the web as a great way to get exposure, it is replacing their print medium and costing them sales. I mean, why buy a kindle like device, when I can get the same stuff on an iphone for free.
With people losing jobs left and right, maybe you wouldn't need as many permanent reporters if you offered to pay a cheap but reasonable sum for freelancer submissions. I mean heck, look how many people want to biog just because it is fun for them, something to do. Sweeten the pot a little with some cash, who knows... Identify what you want by subject and give some guidelines in advance, etc. I guess you'd have to wade through a lot of crap at first to see who did quality work or not and was reliable so you could count on them, but perhaps that might be a way to cut costs but still have good content. And like you said, that would be a way to reduce office space requirements as well if they just emailed the copy to you. I know every local community has folks who go to just about every local sporting event, other people are court junkies, just go there to watch, other folks love going to the county commission meetings, etc.
Just perhaps. I was just thinking about it, going back to the onions on belts days, how many of us wrote and gave it away free to the "alternative" press back then, just because we were passionate about the subject (usually politics and stuff, that's what I did, but I remember a lot of the artsy fartsy crowd did it as well, covering the local scene, the concerts and local theater and movie reviews and so on).
Unless the reader for the Financial Times is pink, without a color display, they would lose some of their uniqueness. On the upside at least they might be able to attract that new audience of teen girls they've been longing to acquire. In addition to some of the other problems mentioned, I like the paper format, as we don't read all the same sections in my house. I would hate to have to wait for the reader to be able to get my hands on the sports section, or any other section that she had already viewed.
Paper beats electronic readers for the simple reason that it's cheap. People can stick a paperback in their pocket, read in the tub (or if you're George Costanzo, on the toilet), or on the beach without worrying about frying a $300 appliance.
This whole idea begs the question of whether or not newspapers actually need "saving". The Kindle is not going to save large newspapers anymore than their websites will save them. What needs to change is not so much the delivery format but the way newspapers are run. Newspapers and news entities cannot effectively run as for-profit organizations or at the very least not as publicly traded for-profit organizations. The demand for stock price returns have led to newsroom cuts, consolidations, and expansions into markets newspapers shouldn't really be in. Newspapers either became or got swallowed up by "media companies" and now are part of television, radio, newspapers, magazine, and sometimes internet media conglomerates. We're all the worse for it because in order to drive a profit newspapers have increased column inches for advertising and reduced column inches for actual articles. They've also taken to filling space with wire articles instead of having a decent sized newsroom of their own. Wire services in and of themselves are useful entities, especially for smaller papers but we've moved into an age where people can log onto Google News and read wire service articles, newspapers don't need to waste ink printing them.
What will save newspapers the media conglomerates failing under their own weight and breaking back up. Newspapers will end up becoming more format neutral news organizations. They'll start providing news articles to specialized providers instead of running the whole stack themselves. A newsroom will write the stories and pass them off to Amazon to load on the Kindle, to Audible to make into an audiobook, to their website, and to a printer that will put the words to paper for people that still want (or need) a physical version of the news. The LA Times newspaper (for example) however will probably go away. It will end up being the "News and other work from the LA region" paper. A dedicated publishing group will pick up stories from the LA Times newsroom, advertisers, and possibly local blogs, and print and distribute them. The LA Times newsroom will no longer have to worry about the printer as long as their stories are submitted on time, advertisers can still get local ads out to people, and everyone will still be able to get the news that is important to them.
The main difference between that future and today will be the newsroom and the printer will not be owned and operated by the same company. More newsrooms will likely end up privatized or run as community owned entities similar to the St.Petersburg Times. News is a difficult thing to make profitable as it is a service in the public interest. If existing news organizations don't reorganize they will fail and other organizations with more streamlined processes and better management will eventually fill the void. A newspaper might fail but the journalists that love their work will keep doing it in one way or another.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
As someone who worked on the kindle project for Tribune I would like to add that one of the 'features' of the kindle, and something that the execs were spending a lot of time on, was to ability to spike a story if they were contacted by someones lawyer - so the story would disappear altogether for anyone downloading after the spike. So for the exec team the kindle represents a way to remove/censor a paper after publication, a first for the news paper industry.
Also the kindle I worked on ran linux, had a /jpg directory, gps, wifi and much more that were all in various states of implementation.
The execs don't how to integrate this technology into their business model quickly because at every turn there was some legal issue they would be stumbling over.
I think the kindle is a bit immature and color is needed along with an open format like epub otherwise the kindle will die.
This completes my 'book' report. The end.
Mass media corporations and agencies that can adapt to the changes that we are and will be experiencing, will continue to be in business.
More than likely none of them will exist in any form we recognise today. E-reader devices--even relatively successful ones like the Kindle--are stopgap measures that only serve to prolong an obsolete business model in the face of new technology. They are this generation's version of the electronic typewriter.
Personal computers became practical options for a large-enough market to achieve critical mass in the 1970s, yet typewriter companies soldiered on for near around two decades trying to prop up their obsolete concept of a typewriter by adding the technology of computers without actually admitting defeat and MAKING computers. Thus, the introduction of electronic typewriters, and soon after dedicated word processors, in the face of a rapidly expanding personal computer market.
Such devices were to be the savior of the industry. Word processing was the first "killer app" and these devices fit the bill nicely and were easier to use than general purpose computers. Though computers could be bought at comparable prices, you had to add an expensive letter-quality printer to get the same kind of hard copy. There was no concern about interoperability or open standards because the competing computers lacked much of that as well, and there was no publicly-accessible internet either.
Problem is, the typewriter companies didn't "get" computers, even while at the same time making microprocessor-based, single-purpose computers themselves. PC technology continued apace, and the PC industry consolidated around a small number of interoperable, standard platforms. Spreadsheets and databases became more important as "killer apps" and the internet made networking an essential.
Typewriter companies COULD have evolved their product offerings into open-architecture, general-purpose computers and not only survived, but thrived, but how many big typewriter manufacturers to YOU know of that actually DID that and DID survive? Very few come to my mind: IBM for one, and they only "got it" because they were already a computer company too with their mainframe offerings. Commodore got it as well--Tramiel was a visionary, perhaps too far ahead of his time, when he embraced the PET and pushed for low cost and friendliness with the VIC20 and C64.
However, even those who "got it" didn't fully "get it". Commodore didn't seem to figure out the value of interoperability even within their own product line! They couldn't come up with a proper successor to the C64 on their own and could only hang on by purchasing Amiga--which was again completely incompatible ans again acieved ALL its success because of its technical merits and despite the follies of its marketers. IBM saw massive success with their original 5150, 5160 and 5170 models (aka PC, XT and AT), and even saw fit to maintain compatibility. However like Commodore they lacked a proper successor after the 5170 and were stuck in the habit of proprietary offerings, thus the disastrous foray into the MCA bus architecture in an effort to lock-in customers like in the old mainframe days. As a result, Commodore went extinct completely and IBM doesn't make personal computers at all any more.
It'll be the same with media companies over the next 20 years. If the names survive they'll not be the same companies--News Corp. of 2030 will be no more related to News Corp. of today than Atari of today is related to the Atari of 1989. Same goes for television networks, movie studios, record companies and radio stations. True, they are often all divisions of the same big media conglomerate, but that's the point--they are DIVISIONS. They don't "get" that whether it be in newsprint, on TV, on the radio or in a web page, the content is ALL THE SAME--it all gets made into bits, stuffed into IP packets and pushed into wires or over the air at some point, or it easily can be.
The future means a s
Magazines and newspapers have a specific content-to-ad ratio set by the publisher. The amount of ads they sell determines how thick or thin the publication will be. Here's an example:
A newspaper publisher sets his content-to-ad ratio at 50% (exactly half ads / half content). If he sells twenty pages worth of ads, he will have twenty pages worth of content, for a total of forty pages. If he sells two more pages of ads, then he will add two pages of content.
The reason your paper keeps getting thinner is because fewer people are making ad buys. The fewer the ads, the fewer the articles.
That being said, there are a few content pages that are immune to a loss of advertising space -- things like the comics page, the sports scores, stock market reports, etc. Aside from those, however, everything else is getting cut.
My grandma can't even change her batteries when her caller id is broken. There is no way that she is going to be able to work a digital reader. Old people are the ones that are really hurting from papers going digital because they relied on the paper and often read it cover to cover with their surplus amount of free time.
Why is it that I pay more for a book on kindle than for a book on paper?
What do I get for the increased price of an ebook? A paper book, I can give to a friend or trade at a used book store. I can't do that with an e-book. I can throw a paper book; I've learned better than to do that with an ebook. I can buy paper books anonymously, from whomever, and change vendors when they piss me off or get nosey. Ebooks are tied to a specific vendor, who has not demonstrated trustworthiness.
It's as though I pay more to rent an ebook than I would to just outright buy a paper book. Ebooks cost less to produce and have less functionality. They expect me to fall for that?
My mod points ran out yesterday.
Newspapers operate on an outlived business model. Nothing can change this fact, and nothing short of government sponsorship (more unconstitutional than use of school vouchers at parochial schools) can keep the newspapers afloat.
Internet has made them obsolete — we now have means of delivering information directly from the reporter to reader. Yes, a quality editor used to add value, but that's not why their profession appeared — they were to decide, whose writings get printed in the limited space, that newspapers had. We, the readers, can now visit blogs of different people without them having to reside under the same roof (or even agree with each other).
With e-readers evolving, however, even the books may become obsolete soon — and we might stop felling as many trees as we currently do.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When Amazon came out with the Kindle reader for the the iPhone/iPod Touch I tried it out. Guess what it is wonderful.
...except that you can't subscribe to periodicals with it. I know that Amazon doesn't want to undercut their Kindle sales, but without those subscriptions their iPhone app is just another unexciting reader. I deleted it and installed Stanza with much success; it does a better job as an actual reader IMHO.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
That IMHO is a bad choice on Amazons part.
eReaders will come down in cost but SmartPhones really are every where. I do have the New York Times on my iPod Touch already. I still feel that newspapers are a better match to a smart phone than an eReader if for no other reason than cost. I might add Stanza to my iPod but getting my Kindle books on my Touch is useful for me.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So no, no reader is going to fix newspapers. Far too many of these papers are losing subscribers because the paper's political view is no where near in line with those who used to pay for them.
Actually, in the case of the Los Angeles Times, I know people who pretty much agree with the paper's editorial slant, but even they lost patience with that slant appearing in the front page as news.
People don't read newspapers for news anymore; they read them for old news -- stuff that happened yesterday.
For new news, there's radio, TV and the internet. That fact alone puts newspapers at a competitive disadvantage in doing what they purport to do: give people news.
Admittedly, people used to read (and buy) newspapers for other purposes too: to get coupons, read about retail sales offers, post classified ads to sell or buy items or real estate, read comics, play puzzles, follow sports teams, follow politics, read op-eds. But most of those other purposes are better served by the internet: coupons are freely available, Craigslist and eBay can sell your stuff (or let you buy someone else's stuff), sports teams and leagues have their own websites (in addition to ESPN or other specialty sites), political sites abound, etc.
And so long as the TV news outlets want viewers' eyes, they'll keep their own news available on the internet too, which includes local news for metropolitan areas.
The conclusion seems self-evident: newspapers are an obsolete species of information distribution and are being out-competed into extinction. You can think about and debate ways to price and deliver buggywhips better, but if your customers simply don't need buggywhips anymore, it's time to close up shop.
One of the highlights of the paper for my wife is the crossword which she tears out and carries around. How does she do that on an epaper device? I guess the display will be able to connect to our printer at home. Seems silly but there are a lot of people who would be frustrated by this simple extra step.
with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper to present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals
Most of the newspapers around where I live have mostly ads and for content, they have a lot of crap from the AP. I can read that online now for free. There is very little local news that is worth reading. Lots of fluff. I have a hard time believing that a change in the delivery mechanism will turn around their declining subscription rates. They need to make the content worth reading.
I've been reading the news from seven or eight newspapers using one or another form of software for my Palm device since 1995 (no joke), and now that I'm moving to a blackberry (soon) I'm looking for something similar to do this. I much prefer reading these editions, and it often means I can grab more recent news at work for my transit commute home.
The problem is: none of the major papers ever do any QA on their "mobile" editions. The BBC news site is now nearly completely unreadable. You get the headline, and a teaser, but the link leads either to a broken page or a page featuring only a single paragraph of most stories. The New York Times suffers from similar broken links. The CBC's mobile site no longer loads in anything but a cellphone browser.
If they can't get that right (and I agree: the "mobile" version of most sites is not likely to be a high traffic section) what makes them think anyone will trust them to get this setup out the door smoothly?
It would be trivial to properly QA their existing mobile / low fi versions and promote that as another convenient way to read the news. Instead they abandoned it.
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..my first thought is that I don't really want one (i.e. I wouldn't pay much) but at the same time I can appreciate that it's novel and kind of neat. (Just like Amazon's thing.)
But even if I were to warm to it enough that I'd pay a few hundred bucks: I don't want this as some kind of weirdo dedicated "reader." If I buy some cool new ultralight display thingie, I want that to be my new portable computer, and use it to see web pages and vim in addition to their PDFs.
Overspecialization is so inefficient that it just feels lame. That why a phone isn't just a phone anymore: it's a PDA and camera and music player too. Once you've got computing power and computer-like capabilities, it's a computer. A general-purpose personal computer. Force it to not be general-purpose, and it becomes so distastefully and conspicuously lame, that I just can't imagine buying it.
It's one of those crippled things that I might take for free like a Cuecat, but only because I want to subvert it.
As for the newspapers, that's a really easy question: a device like this won't help at all. It might be part of an overall solution that makes money, but then once you think up that solution, take away this weird dedicated-reader hardware and you'll have something that works even better, because this device (as is) is all cost with no benefit. It's only a way to lose.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Takes about ten seconds with a command line program to make them compatible though.
If you live in a country where this is allowed.
But you are pointing out some interestingt detail here: The same "command line" is used to hack Kindle and Mobipocket files. And once they are hacked they are identical.
There is no technical reason why Amazon created a new format for Kindle. There are almost the same. The Kindle format only exist to create a seperate closed market for Kindle.
And while this works in the States - International Users are rather pissed of by now. So are current Mobipocket user [1] - most of which see true Amazons masterplan.
But actualy this would be worth an own /. article.
Martin
[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1221441&cid=27826617