Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
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The iPod stemmed losses in the music industry. The Kindle gave beleaguered book publishers a reason for optimism.
Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens…
Read on, dear friends. Let’s see if newspaper publishers can be as uncomprehending and foolish as, say, the RIAA and MPAA?
Such e-reading devices are due in the next year from a range of companies, including the News Corporation, the magazine publisher Hearst and Plastic Logic, a well-financed start-up company that expects to start making digital newspaper readers by the end of the year at a plant in Dresden, Germany.
But it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.
An Amazon spokesman would not comment, but some news organizations, including The New York Times, are expected to be involved in the introduction of the device, according to people briefed on the plans…
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
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Perhaps most appealing about this new class of reading gadgets is the opportunity they offer publishers to rethink their strategy in a rapidly evolving digital world. The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions. And publishers have found that they were not prepared to deal with the recent rapid decline of print advertising revenue.
Publishers could possibly use these new mobile reading devices to hit the reset button and return in some form to their original business model: selling subscriptions, and supporting their articles with ads…
(One) hitch is that some makers of reading devices, like Amazon, want to set their own subscription prices for publications and control the relationship with the subscriber — something media companies like Condé Nast object to. Plastic Logic and Hearst have said publicly that they will take a more open approach and let media companies deal directly with readers and set their own prices.
OK. That’s a marketplace solution. And both may have their place.
Then there is the looming presence of Apple, which seems likely to introduce a multipurpose tablet computer later this year, according to rumor and speculation by Apple observers. Such a device, with a screen that is said to be about three or four times as large as the iPhone’s, would have an LCD screen capable of showing rich color and video, and people could use it to browse the Web…
Then there is the possibility that all these devices from Amazon, Apple and the rest have simply not appeared in time to save many players in the troubled realm of print media.
Should be an interesting week, month and summer – for news junkies.
i think this is a good way for newspapers to stay alive. i also think the kindle would be a good thing for schools, especially elementary schools, to use for textbooks. parents have been complaining for years about lil johnny coming home with a TON of textbooks for just a few homework questions. would also be good for librarys. instead of having all the books to maintain, just check out the book online. i dont have a kindle myself but i do see its potential. price needs to come down a bit, but if we get a big school corporation around the country start this program, could lower prices then.
#1 I agree with you. This capability provides a compelling convenience and efficiency that could preserve the newspaper industry – and perhaps soon the magazine industry.
I certainly am a huge fan of reading content on the go, in bed, on the toilet, on the couch with my iPod Touch. I really want something with a larger screen to read print. Something like the above may be the ticket.
I think if newspapers are counting on this in the short term they’re screwed. I just purchased a Sony PRS-700 on eBay a few weeks ago. I love it. But it’s not that big, and it was almost prohibatively expensive. Epaper screens are great for reading and if it’s a backlit touch screen all the better. This will have a much bigger impact on schools and universities, where the enormous cost and weight of books could easily offset the high cost of eReaders. Imagine needing only one book instead of dozens, a book where you can write notes and drawings or highlight text, store images, get your email, download new books etc.
eReaders have a bright future but they won’t come down in price until there’s a big demand and that won’t happen till the schools integrate them.
I too like my digital reading devices, using a Palm TX (easier writing) and more recently an iPod touch (better graphics). Turns on or off instantly,
Palm has an app for Avantgo (faster) and while on the iPod I go to Avantgo.com (slooooower)
I hope this stuff catches on, it’s the way to go. But I’ve been saying this was gonna happen for a while, if there’s one thing the decline of the newspapers and the lack of preparedness on the part of the management of the papers shows. It’s that it’s really unlikely the papers themselves will be the ones to make the transition. They’ve been too busy trying to hang on to the old business models.
The likes of Google, Microsoft or maybe Amazon will most likely implement the ad revenue model completely take over and give the things out for free eventually.
OK, all of you have some valid points, but I don’t understand why do we need some new proprietary device for this?
I have pretty good screen on my PCs, laptops, netbooks, I even read pcmag or this blog on my PocketPC’s 3” screen fine.
WHY DO I NEED SPECIALIZED NEW SCREEN TO READ NEWSPAPERS?
Its bullshit.
Ask local taxpayers to chip-in for your local newspaper (if they want it) and simply publish it on the web. Problem solved.
As for “big” papers like IHT or NYT etc – its their problem to find a way to make money. Certainly dead-tree editions won’t last any longer (I’d give it at most 5 more years for all newspapers to stop “printed editions”).
Yes, with some conditions.
1. Screen without frame (atleast flush with the screen and narrow)
2. Touch screen with raized buttons on the screen itself (These change icons and function as to what you are doing)
3. 12 hour battery life with wi-fi/3G enabled (Will you make some good software that can manage this! “Wake-on-call” should be painless by now.)
4. costs less than 100$
So… It’ll take some time for this to come around. But it’ll probably take even longer for newspapers to succumb to their fall and start making quality articles again. The future is NOT “user generated”!
The Kindle sux, as do all eReaders. You can only get airport fiction and public domain. About 3/4 of my bookshelf is not available for the Kindle and never will be.
#1,
Schools?? and pay WHOM for the privilege of copyright?? the book companies make to much money..
#4,
and you are on the assumption that the Tablet is EDITABLE?? which would provide NO copyright protection..
#6,
Good points..the problem is HOW TO MAKE MONEY doing it..insted of reading it free..
The internet has proven FREE IS CHEAP..
#7,
YEP..
Its the idea of HOW TO MAKE PROFIT on perpetual merchandise.
HOW long is a copyright SUPPOSED TO LAST??
and it SHOULD NOT last forever..
ALL of H.P. Lovecraft should be FREE, as it was written before the 40’s and he is DEAD…NOT.
1/2 the authors in the library are DEAD and ,ost GOOD stuff was before 1950’s.. Pay for MAKING the book?? OK..PAY for Shakespeare?? If you can load up all his books, it should be free..
BUT, if its all free WHERE and WHO, is going to SAVE IT?? If they ARENT going to make money from it, THEY AINT going to save it..
THAT is our economy/philosophy/money grubbing society..
About 3/4 of my bookshelf is not available for the Kindle and never will be.
Until then enter the public domain, of course…
If someone can manufacture an ebook reader in this screen size that supports PDF for under $200 I would buy it today.
also,
WHAT happened to that FLEXIBLE, PULLOUT design?? THAT was cool, portable, QUICK and easy..
http://ohgizmo.com/2006/03/21/polymer-vision-concept/
Marc Cuban has solved the newspaper problem. Have them sign up with cable companies and ISPs where their subscribers will get free access to the newspaper, for about 25c a month. Kind of like AOL.
@MikeN
I always thought that AOL was a two bit company.
(rim shot)
The electronic ink in ebooks is MUCH more readable and easier on the eyes than LCD screens. That’s one reason they’re so popular.
The following is a summary of why I believe newspapers cannot survive in their current obsolete business model of selling dead trees with ink smeared on them (or possibly even online editions.
It’s the economy, Stupid! It’s not the gadgets!
1)The production of a newspaper requires massive amounts of capital to support its production. This capital is only partly to pay the writers and editorial staff. This money goes to support both vast timber resources in Canada and the United States and the (relatively) high wages of unionized printers. This is why only the rich (or rich corporations) own them. The new e-paper type readers attempt to significantly reduce these two largely fixed costs. But, I say this technology came too late, and will only slow the industry’s decline.
2)The price of a newspaper has never come near to covering its cost of production. Advertising revenues made up the difference. Before large numbers of retail businesses began advertising in newspapers (generating large newspaper profits), newspapers remained small publications with few pages generated by fewer staffers to write articles.
3)Now that retail business prefers to advertise on declining television networks or on the Internet (where we all watch our TV and naughty videos), newspapers lack of revenue will require them to return to a smaller, pre-advertising business model.
Perhaps including:
a) A very rich businessman financing the newspaper’s losses for the love of the business or local political influence. (Don’t expect to see much of this.)
b) Government subsidies of newspapers as is done in France. (quite unlikely in this political climate and who could trust the final government-approved product?)
c) Small, but influential newspapers printed by non-profit organizations run and edited by schools of Journalism in colleges (a Nation Public Radio-like nightmare with pledge breaks).
We have to face the facts that the Good-Old-Days that created the environment allowing newspapers to flourish are gone and aren’t coming back. Online newspapers can appear a lot like a paper newspaper, but the so-called newspaper read on a video screen is an entirely different business creature. Zebras are a lot like horses, but you can’t saddle and ride a Zebra. The old newspapers are all dinosaurs.
It’s said that in the next generation of computers speech recognition and synthesis will be greatly improved. In a few centuries will the average citizen even know how to read or need to because of high-tech gadgetry? Sadly, I tend to doubt it.
In the end, all you can say is:
Old King Newspaper is dead! Long-live the New Digital Media.
No.
1) it’s all locked down, DRM’d to death, and you can’t save anything for good. It would take making it free, and including access to online archives with a subscription.
2) Newspaper execs are second only to the RIAA in stupidity. They are not capable of making this sort of change in the way they’ve done business. They all still think they are Lou Grant and will go down with the ship rather than change.
Speaking as an admitted creature of habit…i.e. cup of coffee and roll and cracking the paper every morning to skim some articles (marginally interesting, mostly) before heading to the comics/crossword/jumble, I occasionally look up and speculate for a brief moment on what would it take for me to ditch the paper part of this addiction and go over to a portable screen environment. Not a whole lot actually…as long as it doesn’t cost much and/or have stupid ‘baggage’ and steep learning curves etc. hung on it. It would indeed save the trouble of recycling all that paper, too.
Advertising? The more eyes that see it, the more money will come to roost there. Yeah it’s dumb but if it gets results, who cares? We live in a commercial culture, so get used to it.
If you don’t like ads, don’t look at them.
(when unavoidable commercials appear, I get up and go do household chores…so presto! they are now actually useful in an ironic sort of way)
Who is going to pay to get a newspaper on a Kindle when they can fire up their wireless laptop and get it for free?
Newspapers should NEVER have started giving their content away for free. (Or PC Magazine, for that matter!)
It’s a very hard position to get out-of.
I think that pay-for newspapers are dead. When I was over on London they give out a daily newspaper for free on the subway. Most US cities have a free weekly paper that sometimes does a better job of covering local issues than the pay-daily. They also seem to do a pretty good job of selling ad space from my experience reading them.
Between the Internet for hard news and Int’l news, Craigslist for classifieds, and free weekly rags for local entertainment and news, there is no room for an expensive daily paper.
I also think it is a serious mistake for these papers to assume that they will be able to charge online. They won’t. Like magazines, the subscription fee mostly goes towards paying for paper, printing, and delivery. The content collection and writing runs on ad revenue.
The NY Times, LA Times. Washington Post, and other major newspapers have done a pretty decent job with their websites. I see plenty of ads from high profile companies. I’ve read where they now have more readers online that in print. So what’s the problem? Perhaps they need to shut down the printers and go online 100%.
Here is an idea. Let all the major papers spin off their printing and delivery systems and combine them into 1 company that they all own a share of. Each city can have a printer/distributer. Subscribers and merchants can pay for a print version of any paper they want. They are printed locally from content delivered via network. The subscription fee must pay for the hard copy delivery expenses.
This is looks like a desperate attempt to re-tweak the old media business models hoping to make them function again.
The answer will not be found trying to salvage the old business models through clever gadgets, new forms of paper, new laws, lawsuits or pay-walls.
A lesson worth remembering is that at the turn of the 20th century, people had a transportation problem…and the solution turned out not to be a faster horse…but a Ford. And one should note that the Ford didn’t arise out of the “horse industry’s” R&D efforts, nor the “Horse Industry Stabilization Act” nor the horse industry’s attempts to experiment with new Business Models. I think the future of the media business will look as different as Ford and GM’s operations look from horse traders and blacksmiths.
———————–
What’s historically given value to editorial content is the relative scarcity of distribution versus readers (not the Kindle kind). Newspapers have historically had natural localized economic monopolies coupled with a finite number of column inches with which to distribute news and ads. That natural monopoly meant that each paper had total control over the amount of content they allowed into their local marketplace.
Monopoly constraint of distribution and supply will always lead to prices (and profits) significantly above open market rates. These newspapers then built costly organizations commensurate with this stream of monopoly profits (think AT&T in the 1970’s).
The dynamics of content replication and distribution on the Internet destroys this artificial constraint of distribution and re-aligns ad (and subscription) prices back down to competitive open market rates. The often heard complaint of Internet ad revenue being “too low” is inverted…the real issue is that traditional ad rates have been artificially boosted for enough decades for participants to assume this represents the long-term norm.
Unfortunately the Internet came along and changed all the rules!
Any individual reader now has access to what is essentially an infinite amount of content on any given topic or story. All those silos of isolated editorial content have been dumped into the giant Internet bucket. Once there, any given piece of content can be infinitely replicated and re-distributed to thousands of sites at zero marginal costs. This breaks the back of old media’s monopoly control of distribution and supply.
The core problem for the newspapers is that in a world of infinite supply, the ability to monetize the value in any piece of editorial content, will be driven to zero…infinite supply pushes price levels to zero
This isn’t to imply that editorial content doesn’t have real value to most of its readers…it just means that no one source can marshal enough market power to effectively monetize the value of their content in the face of infinite supply and massively fragmented distribution.
There absolutely are answers to the question of how to create value with online news and to be able to monetize it…but I doubt that new kinds of paper will be any more successful than faster horses…
dale.harrison@inforda.com
Design of the OLD newspaper, was simple.
PRINT the news and the adverts pay for the paper and wages..the $0.25 pays the carrier.
Its the same IDEA..
set up sites..the adverts PAY for the news..
But WHO wants to pay for ADVERTS that dont reference your area? National adverts are almost STUPID..
I still like the Fold out or roll up screens..
yOU COULD MAKE SOMETHING THAT FITS IN A pOCKET OR BAG vERY EASILY..
Hmmmm, let’s see, if they manufacture enough eReaders for all their subscribers. They could make the readers cheap enough in China, then offering those at a special low price for subscribers only, they could even increase their subscriber base. Therefore making the publicity more valuable. Too bad they didn’t decide to do this before the crisis, I doubt any of them have the capital now to make the change.
I have a KIndle, and find it an overpriced imperfect device. It allows me to do one thing a book can’t. I can increase the text size and read in bed without my glasses. If you read a newspaper at home, this bigger device may be nice. I can’t see you tucking it under your arm and heading for work in the morning.
1. Once the content is downloaded, it needs to be available forever.
2. PDF capable.
3. All books available
4. $49.99
Then I’d love one.
“Can a big-screen Kindle save your daily newspaper?”
What a strange question. If the papers can’t get people to pay for online subscriptions (I think many people are online these days) why would a device that has almost no users be able to “save” a company selling crap people won’t buy?
ECA
>> WHAT happened to that FLEXIBLE, PULLOUT design?? THAT was cool, portable, QUICK and easy..
You’re right. That was cool but I don’t mind a rigid reader.
Here’s what I want in an eReader, roughly in order:
1) a pleasure for the eyes
2) instant on
3) simple, totally intuitive
4) under $100
5) steeply discounted content
6) long battery life
7) light weight
… Oh, and
8) open format
(so I can also keep my own documents on there.)
Greg,
NOT just OPEN format…
ALL THE FORMATS..
RTF,TXT,PDF,WORD,Excel, …
adding MP3, voice,.. are EXTRA.
And a selector for FONT SIZE..
this is a display device ONLY..no editing, no computer input..