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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.'"
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.
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.'"
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
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.
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.
We are talking about the traditional newspaper approach. Ads pay the bills, subscribers just defray some costs. Although people around here seem to think print media is dead, I think it's more accurate to say that huge print conglomerates are dying. Small town local newspapers are still making money. Heck, even some of the large city papers like the Houston Chronicle would be profitable if they weren't hitched to the millstone called Hearst Newspapers. Consolidation is a bad idea in these markets. Simply printing wire stories isn't enough anymore. The focus has to be local...and it still works. And it will continue to work, if people are still willing to try it.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium
No, their biggest mistake was not focusing on what their ink on paper product can do that new mediums like the internet can not do. Cars do not have "car-type buggy whips". The whip manufacturers have moved on to entirely new fields of endeavor mostly not involving transportation. Ink on paper newspapers have to do the same.
They have lost the "textual news/agitprop" business by being obsolete. OK fine. Now what can you do with ink on paper that a computer cannot do.
The average inet user supposedly has a 14 inch monitor running 800x600 or whatever. On the other hand a newspaper can print out freaking huge graphics if they want. Take advantage of that.
1) Show the news in graphical form on a map. I'd like a map of all "major" road construction projects each day. Oh, and gimme a big ole map with all police/fire/ambulance activity marked and maybe a short comment. And I'd like maps for activities going on over the next couple days, you know, like festival here, museum thing here, etc. Maybe mix and match so you get a couple pages of maps, one for each day yesterday, today, and one for each day going a couple days in the future.
2) Do some news in big ole timelines. Not a simplistic lame graph, but something big and cool.
3) Giant pages of tabular data. Gimme a TV-guide grid style listing of all local movie theaters and what they're showing at each time. Take advantage of those huge pages!
4) Whatever you do, don't screw up the giant comics pages and giant TV schedule grids. Err, thats exactly what they're doing, so cut it out.
5) A page needs to be devoted to kids coloring projects, etc.
6) Stop distributing text products and go graphical. Any website can provide a textual astrology report. But only a newspaper can provide a daily giant 1 foot on a side astrological reading thingy. Yes I know astrology is for fools, but the point remains that some data needs to go graphical. Years ago, last time I read a paper, I recall seeing a regular column of bridge tournament puzzle things that was done entirely in text... Geeze guys go graphical.
7) Focus on stuff that can't be done online very conveniently, like crosswords, wordsearchs, etc. Anything that involves scribbling on the paper (as opposed to scribbling on the monitor)
8) get some "only in physical paper" features. Don't care what it is, pictures of attractive people, dilbert cartoons, oragami patterns, paper airplane patterns, silly picture frames, funny flowcharts, or whatever, but you gotta orient it around encouraging the readers to cut it out of the paper, then stick it on the cube wall or do something with the cutout. Can't do that online (well, yeah you can print out, but this thing is already printed out...) You may need better paper and printing than cruddy old newsprint.
Another thing they could do is find bloggy info and push the limits of fair use by quoting them. The only useful information is on blogs now... the problem is its buried under junk. Find the good stuff and highlight it in the paper.
Finally, if there is one special industrial connection that newspapers have, its the book publishing industry. So, in each daily paper, publish 5 minutes worth of reading of some hot new novel. Your options are subscribe to the paper to read the whole thing 5 minutes at a time, or cough up the bucks at Amazon to read it all today. I think this will burn up alot of paper space, but if it brings in the readers... Do fiction and nonfiction. I'd think an appropriate nonfiction would be Galbraith's 1929 Great Depression, or for a paper with real guts, how about "the creature from jekyll island"
Instead of doing something special or unique with their media, they are trying to do the same old thing but cheaper... that isn't going to work in the long run.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I mean, yes, for a living, I stare at a computer all day. I read on it all day, BUT, I often take things that are important, that I want to remember and quickly refer to and print them off. I wouldn't be interested in a kindle, I like to read real books, ones that I can dogear and whatever. I find that when I have things I"ve printed off, I often doodle on the pages and mark or highlight things. I find that like when I was taking notes in school, I can picture in my head the exact page with doodles and all on what I'm trying to look up or remember.
I can't seem to do the same thing with a computer screen.
That and for a newspaper, and granted these days I only get the Sunday paper, but, I like it for the coupons I can clip. I like to take out the store ads for BB and other places, take them with me when I go shopping.
And frankly, how the hell are you supposed to start the charcoal in the 'chimney' starter without newspaper? Not to mention, I'd not like to spread out a bunch of e-newspapers on a table during crawfish season to eat off of....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I used to prefer dead-tree books until I got an iPod Touch last December. Since then my reading habits have been revolutionized. I've read almost 2 dozen books since then, and all but 3 were on my iPod. It is not the *same* as reading a paper book, but the benefits balance the cons quite nicely.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.