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.'"

Comments

I _want_ a larger reader

[langelgjm]

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.

Of course not. Here's why:

[drinkypoo]

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 :(