Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
...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.
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'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.
WSJ gives free access to premium content if you are being redirected from google, facebook, digg etc. Here is a dirty little secret. The entire content on WSJ is available to you for free, if you can trick WSJ into believing that you have been directed to their webpage via digg.com!
Step1) Use firefox
Step2) Install refspoof http://refspoof.mozdev.org/
Step3) Install greasemonkey https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
Step4) Install this script in greasemonkey http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/42134
Step5) Profit!!
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.
I would rather be holding a book to reading stuff onscreen. I would rather be holding a reflective flexible reader (e-ink and the like) to holding a newspaper. Most noticeable reasons: a newspaper is disgusting to hold, and it kills lots of trees for mostly meaningless content that will be irrelevant by tomorrow. For durable content, go dead tree. Makes sense. For transitory content, don't waste valuable resources and energy converting trees into landfill bulk. Leave it in the for of transient electrical charges. We can always print a hardcopy for archiving purposes.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)