Can the New Digital Readers Save the Newspapers? 289
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.'"
Why, are they idiots? (Score:5, Informative)
"...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.
Re:Standardization (Score:3, Informative)
if traditional printed newspapers want to survive the digital age, all they need to do is go 100% ad-sponsored and distribute it to the public for FREE.
At least here in London, the quality of the news in the free newspapers is much worse than if you buy one. Not everyone wants to read about who some celebrity slept with last night.
I've not bought a newspaper for years. The only time I read them is if I find a quality paper left on a train.
I do have a subscription to New Scientist though, and I read some stories from a quality newspaper's web site most days, but I miss out on things like editorial comment, letters, and local news.
Re:A kick in the groin with that subscription? (Score:3, Informative)
You have that wrong.
They not only want your cake, and Eat it as well.
They also want to sock you in the kidneys and when you double over they go around behind and kick you in the Jimmies when you least expect it.
Honestly, Media companies hate the consumer.
Re:Thinking about things the wrong way (Score:4, Informative)
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/ [mozdev.org]
Step3) Install greasemonkey https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 [mozilla.org]
Step4) Install this script in greasemonkey http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/42134 [userscripts.org]
Step5) Profit!!
Re:Standardization (Score:5, Informative)
You don't know what you're talking about. Papers have had digital format editions of the paper product for years (Knight Ridder did theirs corporate-wide in '05). Trying to push those (hilariously undersubscribed) editions using portable readers doesn't cost them anything.
It's a waste of time though. Bad pictures, no color...Hell, it'll look worse than the paper product.
And, as for going completely ad supported, it's not going to happen. The village voice can pull it off, and dinky little entertainment papers with 10,000 circ can pull it off, but they do it by having an extremely small permanent staff and practically zero physical plant.
I ran a weekly with 20,000 circ for a couple of years, and we were quite popular, but our margins were high enough to support more than 5 or 6 permanent staff, and we couldn't afford to pay our stringers more than a pittance. I work as a regional IT guy for two papers now (50,000 and 75,000 circ, respectively)
Each paper employs 30+ staff who do nothing but gather news, and that is down from the 50+ glory days when we could afford to send someone to every government meeting, and cover all our outlying coverage areas with their own reporters, and crap like that...Crap that makes a good product.
Without permanent employees, you lose all the benefits of working sources, you lose all the specialized knowledge of the area, and knowledge of the people who will and will not talk on the record...Hell, if you're not a full timer, you probably don't even know who to call.
And that's just reporters. Add in the ad people, the finance people, and, in your fantasy world, the production people (you won't even be able to pay for the paper edition on your ad revenue, so just give that one up), and you have a business that'll cost about 70% more than you can make with ads alone, even wicked expensive publication-of-record print ads.
Drop the print product, and your shortfall drops to about 20% (print is about 80% of your costs, but print ads are MUCH more lucrative than online ads, so ditching the print hurts your ad revenue as well). After that, you're cutting meat and bone. You need finance to collect your ad money and do your books, you need ad people to get your ads and deal with your ad customers, and you need journalists and designers to put up the actual product.
Basically, they need to find a way to make up those costs. Maybe ditching the office space. Maybe centralizing your finance people. Plenty of companies would love to do your ads for you (like Google) but they'll take their pound of flesh, and that's probably more than you'd lose if you did it yourself.
THAT, is how it can be done. Fucking armchair wanker. I can't believe all the people who think they have the answer.
Re:Answer: (Score:4, Informative)
Am I the only person left on earth that like and often prefers to read things printed on dead trees?
Hardly.
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.
0. eInk is not at all comparable to TFTs/LCDs/CRTs. It's a stable image, with contrast approaching normal printed text even now.
1. You can bookmark on kindles (and other readers) as well.
2. You can even make 1 file per 'printed bit of information', and still keep it organized (in 'file folders' etc)
3. Sure, currently the opening times aren't in real time yet, but in a 3rd gen or later device i imagine they'll be fast enough to be at least as quick as first having to find a piece of paper in a humongous stack (say, 50 printed research papers of 30-40p each).
I find that when I have things I"ve printed off, I often doodle on the pages and mark or highlight things.
Have a look at, say, the DR1000 [irextechnologies.com], or the coming PlasticLogic reader. at least the iRex device has a wacom pen that allows you to scribble in pdfs/image files.
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.
You realise that with very little extra effort you'd be able to attach tags or whatnot to bookmarked passages, or have the reading program spit out all bookmarked/underlined/marked passages into a different file that links back to the main file, etc.?
I can't seem to do the same thing with a computer screen.
Which is why eReaders aren't pc screens without tablet functionality built in (although those touchscreen PCs as displayed by Jeff Han, or in the latest James Bond film or Knight Rider (2008) might allow you to do similar things).
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.
So, advertising will change. Shops will have to in order to survive. Just Be Patient.
And frankly, how the hell are you supposed to start the charcoal in the 'chimney' starter without newspaper?
With something else [wikipedia.org]?
Re: Tree Editions (Score:4, Informative)
I like my little library inprint edition. It nicely displays color and utility on my shelf.
But newspapers are a print disaster. Floppy, yucky layouts full of miscellanea on skip-pages, sorted by day instead of topic....Then you get to throw out a metric ton each month.
I'd seriously consider one of those readers if it kept all the dailies on tap so if you wanted to review your notes you could turn back to October 2004.
Re:Standardization (Score:3, Informative)
The newspapers are failing because they no longer generate the income from advertisements [wikipedia.org] from auto dealers, real estate brokers and large retailers that have pulled back on their advertising due to the US economy sucking wind. In many papers, these categories generated more than two-thirds of their income. Classified ads have moved to Craigslist and have taken another income source away.
It would be nice if a tech solution could cure the problem, but it's just not that simple.
Re:Answer: (Score:3, Informative)
There are benefits of having a dead tree, and there are benefits of having a device. The dead tree is reusable in a different fashion and can be used to light a fire, don't need batteries and can also be used to take care of liquid overflow.
The battery powered device is good in another way because it won't get bigger and heavier just because you load it with more information. And it can do things a dead tree never can - like being interactive or interact with other devices.
But if a battery powered reader isn't allowing the user to use it the way the user wants it it's going to be a dead end because you will only get a limited number of users and you will see competition from other data formats and manufacturers. The DRM hell will also cause a lot of agony and make it fail.