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Hearst To Launch E-Reader For Newspapers
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Mar 01, 2009 12:21 PM
from the years-too-late dept.
from the years-too-late dept.
thefickler writes "The credit crisis couldn't have come at a worse time for newspapers, which were already suffering at the hands of the Internet. Now it seems that the Hearst Corporation is planning to launch an e-reader later this year to try to save its dwindling newspaper readerships. Apparently the e-reader will have a bigger screen than the Kindle, helping it to accommodate ads. It's not clear whether Hearst will go it alone, or try to gather wider industry support for its venture. As one pundit observed, 'it seems a slender thread on which to hang the entire American newspaper industry.'"
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Reading the New York Times On a Kindle 2 193 comments
reifman links to his thorough and thoughtful review of the experience of reading a newspaper on the Kindle 2. "I've been eager to try The New York Times on the Kindle 2; here's my review with a basic video walk-through and screenshots. I give the Kindle 2 version of The Times a B. Software updates could bring it up to an A-. Kindle designers should have learned more from the iPhone 3G. Unfortunately, my Kindle display scratched less than 24 hours after it arrived. As I detail in the review, Amazon customer service was not very accommodating. Is it my fault — or will Kindle 2 evolve into an Apple 1G Nano-like $22.5M settlement? You can read about Hearst's e-reader for newspapers from earlier today on Slashdot."
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Free Wikipedia Access? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but will it have free Wikipedia Access [xkcd.com]?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I was wondering, could a newspaper sell ther editions on Amazon? If so, they could still charge their normal rate but by bypassing all the messy printing delivering and recycling, wouldn't they need fewer or no ads? Also as all of your Amazon books are still available for you to download even after you have deleted them from the Kindle, you could still go back and read stuff that is older, and not have to worry about all that paper left lying around the house 8)
Mybe there should be another class of download
The joy of flipping pages? (Score:5, Informative)
After borrowing a Kindle I for a weekend, I'm almost sold on the device, but not quite. The screen quality was simply amazing. The only thing I can't quite get over is that the sensory experience is very, very bland. I don't know if all the cool technology can win me over with the lack of a more sensory-rich experience.
I was simply amazed at how clear the epaper screen was and how easy it was to read in almost any light. If the light was adequate for reading a book, the kindle did great. The button layout was weak and I kept changing the page when I didn't want to. At least the update was speedy. I just can't quite get into a book on the Kindle the way I get into a real book. The rough feel of the pages, the smell of old binding glue, or the waft of a woman's perfume in a library book are great. Even the sound of turning a page, or the satisfying crackle of the fabric binding on a brand new hard cover are fantastic.
Similarly, the smell of newsprint and the act of folding and unfolding each section is very much tied up in my overall experience of reading the paper. I don't think that any e-reader, no matter the spiffy features, could replace all that.
On the other hand, I could probably learn to love an e-reader for other reasons. For example, the mass of paper waiting to be recycled in the corner of my kitchen would not be missed. I love the idea that distributing news paper electronically would save thousands of tons of trees, CO2 emissions and eventual landfill space.
If the Hurst e-reader is easy to use, inexpensive and isn't as locked down as the Kindle, I would give it a chance. I would even consider switching my subscriptions to full-week instead of Sunday only if they were cheaper and I didn't have to haul off 3 tons of newsprint each week. I hope it actually makes it to the market at a price well under $300.
Re:The joy of flipping pages? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's certainly a big break in the very practice reading with the advent of digital media. People growing up today perhaps less concerned about the smell of the paper, the feel of the binding and so forth as you mention. But it's not just that. Traditions of typography have been eroded now that a lot of publishers are allowing layout to be done with word processors like Microsoft Word instead of a real typesetting engine, with IMO a severe loss of readability and aesthetic craft.
Nonetheless, I myself travel most of the year, so carting around a lot of books isn't possible, but reading off my notebook screen isn't so pleasant (and I'm always chasing AC power sources). Now that the Kindle 2 [amazon.com] has been released, I may get one. But it sucks to be a member of a generation torn between older traditions and these newfangled devices.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Most content is written in a language that only lets you suggest which font to be used, let alone manage fancier things like kerning. You blame Word for the erosion of typography, I'll blame HTML. At least Word has a notion of "columns" and content flow. HTML doesn't even do columns, at least by name.
Two factors are
Re: (Score:2)
On modern displays with a modern OS (not XP), reading text is an easy, pleasant experience. I do it all day (sigh). Even the eInk readers are only 160 DPI (the Iliad, IIRC). The higher contrast is nice. The lack of a backlight on most of the readers isn't nice though.
Every time one of these threads shows up, I go over to the Iliad site and stare a little lon
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
E-reader, hmm, ever sat on a paperback you where looking, or the TV remote, or even a cell phone. At $359 an e-reader is just way to expensive, it has to achieve disposable prices to survive let alone get past the issue of just way too many devices. The closest in reality that most people will get to an e-reader is a netbook with a rotating touch screen display along the lines of http://www.cnet.com.au/laptops/laptops/0,239035649,339294108,00.htm [cnet.com.au].
In a depression a mass market product like a newspaper has
E-Readers have a definite niche. (Score:5, Insightful)
As an academic, an author, and an editor, I basically spend most of my life reading. I'm probably as close as you can get to a professional reader.
And I have fallen in love with the ugly, locked-down device that is the Kindle. I know this empirically because I am reading much more on my Kindle than I off of it. The experience of reading in modern society overflows the mere pages of a book and includes things like transportability, capacity, and cost.
Kindle wins hands-down on all three. Kindle books are damned cheap in comparison to print and even to other e-book formats and Kindle's capacity is more than enough to carry an unwieldy library with you at all times. It's also very thin and very light, much moreso than most serious books of any heft.
In comparison to other devices, Kindle offers unique benefits. I am amongst those that have read serious works on my smartphone, anything from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to the Journal of Housing Economics.
Reading on a smartphone always feels as though it is a matter of necessity. "I am reading this here because at the moment my mobility needs ensure that there are no other options." The moment it is possible to put down the phone and "switch" to the print copy, you do; you don't stare at that tiny screen any longer than is necessary.
Laptops require more physical interaction than you want to engage in when you're reading a 1,000 page tome. To read on a laptop you have to sit up, stare in one direction, operate a scroll wheel each time you want to see the next page (or click, or drag, or reach out and press a key). You can't "lounge about" on large pieces of soft furniture, adjusting your position as bits of you become overcompressed or uncomfortable. Laptops are fine for a little light reading, but they fail miserably for long stretches.
Finally, the problem of the book. Yes, books are substantively different from e-readers. At the same time, I think that the advantages of the book address a need beyond mere reading. There are certain books that one wants on one's shelf, as a presence, a kind of authority that descends from materiality. A book is not virtual, not ephemeral; it doesn't feel as though it can be deleted. Books that are thus very important to one's identity or to one's very life practices are likely always to be bought and kept as books, so that they're present, visible, can be experienced bodily, with a kind of tactility that encompasses all of the senses, that makes the book more a part of you.
Not all kinds of reading imply this level of commitment, though. In fact, I'd suggest that for most professional readers like myself, most don't. You don't particularly care whether you ever see a given nonfiction paperback again in your life; your goal is merely to read it, ingest what you can, and move on. If it turns out to revolutionize your life by the time you've arrived at the last page, you'll buy it in hardcover, I suspect.
But in the meantime, for the rest, you get them for a fraction of the cost on Kindle and read them on the move in a way and at a level of comfort and convenience that's otherwise impossible.
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My library spans over 20,000 volumes of public, pirated and paid for e-books and the Amazon Kindle 2 is simple inadequate for anything beyond a few hundred books, imho.
I usually have a laptop with me. I view it as the library and the few hundred books on my e-book reader as the subset of current interest.
Try the Sony... (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer : I don't work for Sony but I have a PRS-505. Been reading almost exclusively on it for almost two years now.
1/ You can buy ebooks from Sony. Or get the from Gutemberg. Or Baen. Or anywhere else you want.
2/ No GSM in it. But it means they cannot revoke any licenced/copyrighted material remotely. And hell, who really needs a gsm in their book ? Remotely downloading a newspaper ? I'm too cheap to pay both for the news AND the data download. I got a computer doing that for me already...
3/ Converting books/manga/newspaper tools available for Windows/linux/Mac. I even got a linux script to mass tranform mangas in a pdf to read on the PRS-505 (using Gimp scripts to sharpen/resize...)
4/ nice, well placed buttons.
5/ Nice and pretty body
6/ Customised firmwares exist ...
7 / takes SDHC and Sony memory sticks
8/ recharge using USB or a wall wart (the dedicated one or a psp charger works)I read everyday 1-2 hours on it and recharge once a week.
Only problem I have is I cannot "shuffle" the book, flipping pages to find a chapter I want to re-read as easily I Ican with a paper book.
Compare both, make your choice. I hade both the kindle 1 and the Sony to choose from, and the PRS-505 won, not even a real match. Seen the kindle 2...well : let's just say I'm still very happy with the Sony.
I took it to extended trips in on 4 continents, and nothing beats having 400 books on a card and 800 mangas when the place you go to has neither tv nor radio...the music player isn't very good, but you have the option.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
On the PRS-505, there's an excellent open source management tool for the Sony readers called Calibre [kovidgoyal.net].
FD. I do work for Sony, but not in Consumer Electronics.
Re: (Score:2)
As Amazon have all of your marketing data, they could even offer discounts on the hardcovers to those who have bought the ebook. If the demand is low, even doing print on demand runs at the regular cost. Surely this must be cheaper than storing tons of pulped trees hoping someone will buy a certain number of them before returning them to a publisher to be re-pulped.
Re: (Score:2)
"Laptops require more physical interaction than you want to engage in when you're reading a 1,000 page tome. To read on a laptop you have to sit up, stare in one direction, operate a scroll wheel each time you want to see the next page (or click, or drag, or reach out and press a key). You can't "lounge about" on large pieces of soft furniture, adjusting your position as bits of you become overcompressed or uncomfortable. Laptops are fine for a little light reading, but they fail miserably for long stretche
can you actually read papers on it? (Score:3, Insightful)
As another academic, the main stumbling block to me getting an e-reader has been that I'd mainly use it to read papers, and I've yet to find an e-reader that can comfortably handle 8 1/2" x 11, two-column text with small (usually 9-point) font, which is the standard for many CS publication venues. In particular, a combination of horizontal and vertical scrolling with slow refresh rate is a nightmare.
It seems like it'd be fine for books, but I rarely read books professionally, just papers. When I do read boo
Re:E-Readers have a definite niche. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget that when you buy a Kindle book you cannot lend, sell, or give it away. If you purchase an interesting book for your Kindle and your wife wants to read it, she'll have to buy her own copy or borrow your entire Kindle.
Seems to me that this severely reduces the value of eBooks, so they should really cost about 1/3 - 1/2 of the paperback price to make up for it.
Parent
Re:The joy of flipping pages? (Score:5, Funny)
Some women may do this deliberatly, and could be from a practice from the World Wars when female volunteers would write to single soldiers, and would often dab some perfume on the letter.
I take a combination of this old practice and the one of the males of an African Tribe that smear a dab of semen behind their ears.
So next time that waft is a little musty, perhaps salty, then congratulations on reading that book after me.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I just can't quite get into a book on the Kindle the way I get into a real book. The rough feel of the pages, the smell of old binding glue, or the waft of a woman's perfume in a library book are great. Even the sound of turning a page, or the satisfying crackle of the fabric binding on a brand new hard cover are fantastic.
Here's a contrasting perspective.
I got a Rocket e-Book a few years ago (for free; I'd never have paid money for it). I've gone through a couple of others since then, and I'm now to the point where my reading choices are hugely influenced by what I can get electronically. I actively DISLIKE reading paper books. I find them inconvenient and limited. You need two hands to hold them, you can't read in the dark (nor can you with a Kindle, unfortunately), you can't adjust the font size, you can't carry a do
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can't match." True! Cars just can't match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.
I daresay the smells are one of the many advantages of using a car over using a horse.
Re: (Score:2)
I smell a new volume unit: The gym bag.
So how many gym bags fit in a olympic-sized swimming pool?
And how many of those fit in a SydHarb (Sydney Harbour)?
Who updates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_strange_units_of_measurement [wikipedia.org] ?
The hogshead is missing too.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I smell a new volume unit: The gym bag.
No, that's just your sneakers in there.
Newspaper Hazard (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus (Score:2)
Will the e-reader be cheap enough that a doctors office can leave them on the table in the waiting room and not have them stolen? Or will I have to read golf magazines from 2009 when I visit a doctor in 2012 because I forgot my e-reader at home?
The kindle needed ads (Score:5, Funny)
That's what was missing!
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Re-creating the gated electronic world. (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?
The proposition is "we've come up with this great new wizz-bang technology to deliver "e-book/e-newspaper" to your living room. But then you lock it down into a single device->provider->Customer model. The entry costs are relatively high, so a few early adopters buy the thing. Most people don't because they're very cautious (rightly so) about the new wizz-bang technology.
I guess my quandry is, how can the device->provider->customer model compete with the open model of the internet? What happens when someone comes up with the equivalent wizz-bang device that uses your existing wireless internet connection, and can buy from anyone directly instead of a single provider, is an open platform, and winds up being cheaper?
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A lawsuit?
Already happening (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if an iTunes model would work. Get any magazine for $1. Maybe back issues older than a year for $0.50. Blend it with the mobile phone market's ideas, and subsidize the device with a two-year subscription on (a group of) magazines. Get the major magazine publishers and papers on board and split the proceeds honestly.
Of course, if t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone else think this idea of trying to re-create the subscription based model of AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc that the Internet successfully killed off 10 years ago is a bit strange?
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you have enough experience watching the world, then it shouldn't be too strange to see old ideas come back after seeming to be "killed off". If anything, that's the default state of things. Ideas don't disappear; they just recycled.
I think we're in a very strange place right now, because it's clear that there has to be some kind of business model that makes money from intellectual property, but selling "copies" doesn't make sense now that an unlimited number of digita
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Copies are easy and free. Distribution, storage, backups-- and generally ensuring that you have what you want, when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it-- that stuff is still challenging. There's money to be made there, still.
Don't forget the generation of content, still a challenge to make it compelling and worth distributing, storing, and making backups of.
The biggest concern is making sure that people can make a living from generating content. Without the goose, there won't be any more golden eggs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well yes, I had in mind that the actual goal in us, as a society, supporting a business model that supplies us with intellectual content is, in the end, to financially support those who create the content.
To backtrack and restate my post a little more thoroughly, our past and current attempt to do this has been focused on the creation of copies. The people printing the books and cutting the records, and that in itself was a valid business. In addition, those businesses had an exclusive right to create th
I hope they call it... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Rosebud"
(it'll be interesting to see how this gets modded)
The newspapers are profitable (Score:5, Insightful)
These papers are returning a 15% profit. This would be plenty to sustain the papers, if it weren't for the debt their owners took on from these recent acquisitions.
The problem is that these papers were acquired by folks who borrowed heavily in order to make the purchases. 15% revenues isn't enough with all the outstanding debt.
The crisis with papers is the same as the rest. Greedy corps over-leveraging, and now that reality has kicked in, they find themselves in trouble.
Content Matters (Score:2)
The problem with newspapers is that the content sucks. Putting together a few writers and photographers doesn't do anything more. Any idiot with a blog can do that. If you want to sell a newspaper, you need to have something that is useful and has the capital costs sufficient to throw off enough competition and allow you some rent taking. The business is about content, and the internet is just a delivery mechanism for it. Even Slashdot succeeds partially because half of us look at it, and could envisi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's free. And easy to get (well, at least on a real computer, on handhelds slashcode seems to be a bit, um, lacking.). Did I mention it was free.
Good newspapers, however, are hard to make. "A few writers and photographers" is an unfair cheap shot. There is a lot behind the scenes of any real publishing firm that don'
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot is not a newspaper. It links to newspapers and other outfits with paid journalists. The day "the newspaper" dies, what will all the slashdots, gizmodos, diggs, reddits, twitters and blogs link to? Who will do the reporting they all link to?
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Slashdot is not a newspaper. It links to newspapers and other outfits with paid journalists. The day "the newspaper" dies, what will all the slashdots, gizmodos, diggs, reddits, twitters and blogs link to? Who will do the reporting they all link to?
Some blogs do a lot of original reporting. Huffington Post [huffingtonpost.com] and Talking Points Memo [talkingpointsmemo.com] both immidiately come to mind.
Re: (Score:2)
Each other.
Then, one day, the Internet will implode in a giant race condition.
They don't call it "the Fourth Estate" for nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you and I are reading the same newspapers. My local paper, The Raleigh (NC) News & Observer (http://www.newsobserver.com/ [newsobserver.com]), has in the just past few years, put 5 elected state officials (including the Speaker of the House) in prison for corruption, uncovered systemic failures in our state mental health system and probation system, and put pressure on our state's judges to stop freeing speeding motorists with a slap on the wrist. Just this past week they told the story of a local company that sold filthy medical supplies and investigated where the FDA was when hundreds of people were getting sick and 5 people were dying from those supplies. They also find the time and money to sue the government for access to information that the government would rather we - that is, the citizens - not have access to.
That kind of journalism can't be done by any number of bloggers. It takes large staffs of trained and experienced journalists backed by an organization willing to fund multi-month investigations. It takes principled and idealistic owners to be able to stand up to the established interests when the truth comes out.
Nevertheless, with their advertising revenue gone to Craigslist the N&O has had round after round of staffing cuts. To save printing costs they've cut the paper to half its old size, and just today reduced the Sunday color comics section to 4 pages. (Bill Watterson would be ashamed.) I doubt the N&O will survive as a printed newspaper. As much as I love reading my news off of newsprint over breakfast, I'd take it in e-newspaper format in a heartbeat, if that's what it takes for them to stay in business.
Parent
Still waiting for ebooks to get it all sorted out (Score:2)
Three problems. The first is that there is no mention of price in the article. In simple terms, the readers that have come out have been rather expensive; please, none of this, "well if you spread the price out over several years..." First, I am not convinced that these things will last several years, certainly not as long as physical books. For the amortization argument to work I would have to expect the device to last fifty to a hundred years, or more, just like a real book.
So, here we have one (possibly
Online Newspaper Subscriptions (Score:3, Interesting)
I was reading a blog article in the LA Times [latimes.com] concerning the Internet's killing of the printed newspaper. He comes up with a solution similar to the one I'd use: Make a "news" subscription fee that would include big newspapers that are interested in charging and meet certain criteria.
This could work either through a central site (which would be great as it could provide comparison stories between Fox, CNN, and BBC for example) or simply have it as an add-on to your ISP bill (which would give you a login and password).
A service like this could certainly provide E-book downloads, etc. Information does want to be free as in freedom, but collecting and organizing it takes people who still need to eat. I'd be for paying a fee for news sites, personally, as long as (just like the blog says), it's as simple as iTunes.
Remember back in Web 0.4b... (Score:2)
I remember back before the dot.com thing, back when web was only at version 0.4, you used to go visit some place like ikea.com and instead of presenting you with an HTML, "web" catalog, they'd fire up some java-based gizmo that displayed a bitmap of the printed catalog. I think even a couple newspapers and magazines did something similar--display a bitmap ensconced in a java applet. Kind of like a poor mans PDF reader. Why did this pop into my head when I read this?
Either way, none of these will succeed
I hope it comes preloaded with one final headline (Score:2)
I hope there's room... (Score:2)
Yes, but will it have text to speech? (Score:2)
Seems that might be a rare feature in future readers.
WIll only work (Score:2)
If you can purchase the confounded thing for less then the $200-$700 price point that exists now for the bloody gadgets.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get one, but it's hard to justify paying the same amount for a small embedded greyscale gadget that really only needs to read a pdf and text file as I would a cellphone, netbook or laptop.
mine: Mosaic, NetScape, IE, Firefox (Score:2)
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Well you sure write like one!
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It's not that simple. If it wasn't for the fact that so many of them were acquired in heavily leveraged buyouts, or went into debt to branch into other businesses, they'd be in better shape, even with circulation down. A lot of "troubled" papers would be doing OK if it wasn't for the non-operational debt that they're buried under. A lot of that can be blamed on so-called "moguls" who bought up a ton of papers over the past decade or so.
Part of it is that they don't want to just hand more revenue over to Ama