David Carr has a piece about how the rumored Apple tablet may be able to save print media:
The tablet represents an opportunity to renew the romance between printed material and consumer. Think of sitting in your living room, in your bed or on a plane with a publication you really adore nestled into your lap. Since print was first conceived, people have had an intimate relationship with the text, touching, flipping and paging back and forth.
The tablet, properly executed, will be an iPhone on steroids, and anybody who has spent any time with that device knows that much of its magic lies in replicating that intimate offline navigation. It is a very human, almost innate, urge — readers want to touch what they are seeking to learn.
Honestly, I think this is sheer wankery — any time you’re betting that a new technology that doesn’t yet exist will save an industry via a new business model that doesn’t yet exist, you’re probably wrong.
And yet I find the idea kind of intriguing. There is something about the lay-out of hard-copy papers that I prefer to online editions (even though I mostly read online editions) and in some ways I prefer reading the NYT on my iPhone to reading it online (I also like the Sportacular and Fandango Apps better than their online counterparts).
Do any of you think there is any way some kind of table device could revive the print media industry? Obviously, it’s unlikely, but is there any chance? I assume a lot of you know much more about this stuff than I do.
burnspbesq
Hard to imagine. What’s the revenue stream, subscription? Not going to work, unless the providers can come up with something that heretofore has not existed, i.e., an impregnable subscription wall.
Online media are an enormous, self-inflicted, and IMHO insoluble free-rider problem. Once people get accustomed to getting valuable content on someone else’s nickel, it is terribly difficult to wean them from that.
chrome agnomen
a media that did its job could possibly save the industry. in other words, RIP.
Existenz
Um, can’t we just sit in bed with out laptops and read the NY Times?
I guess I don’t have a kindle so I can’t say whether the experience is completely different from web-surfing, but I’m not sure how this would save the industry. Newspapers would have to actually start charging subscription fees, and customers would have to feel the experience is superior enough to stop reading via the web browser.
fraught
No chance. Print is obsolete. Words in any form are not. It’s publishing that’s in peril.
inkadu
What is this with “since the invention of print?” What about Sumerian tablets? What about Egyptian papyrus? What about medieval vellum?
You want to save the New York Times? Switch to clay tablets. Ever since the invention of pottery people have enjoyed engraving shit on it. And when you’re done reading, you can use it as a hot plate.
petera1
I get the L.A. Times – kerplop – in my driveway every day. I read maybe four, sometimes five, books a week. I love having the paper pages to turn. But I fly overseas, 19 to 23 hours at a time, to be with loved ones. I aver that electronic media are a godsend to us readers who must transit oceans and time zones on a more or less regular basis. They are not bad, either, on the bus to and from work.
jrg
What a load of bullshit. People are no more attached to the physical media of print than they are the physical media of music.
Could the Apple tablet make people more willing to pay for content? Sure. It worked for iTunes. It should work for original reporting. That said, people still will not pay for crap, or commodity stories.
People will not pay for an AP story they could get off a MSM website, and they will not pay for opinion pieces (unless the writer has some expertise in the subject matter – academic journals and nonfiction books still sell, after all).
Incertus
@fraught: This. Just so happens I wrote a little something-something about it last night. And the only thing that’s making people connect the printed page with the words on it is memory–that’s how we learned to read. Kids being born today will learn to read on tablets of some sort, and kids in grade school today will be using tablets to carry all their school books instead of lugging around those vertebrae-crushing oversized backpacks by the time they’re in college, if not sooner.
The Other Steve
Wow, that has got to be the biggest dose of Apple kool-aid I’ve ever seen.
The tablet computers already exist, and with Windows 7 they’re better then anything Apple is going to come up with. Not to mention you have dedicated reading devices such as the Kindle. And still I don’t think the news is going to be redeemed until they start reporting better news.
mcd410x
Newspapers don’t get by on subscriptions but on advertising. ETA: At least in this country.
Things undoubtedly still have to change a bit in the newspaper business. But remember: many predicted the demise of broadcast tv when cable came along. Hasn’t happened. (People are almost as good at prognosticating as they are at risk assessment).
petera1
Don’t you mean “better reporting the news?”
different church-lady
Look, I hate to point out the obvious here, but… if it’s glowing electrons on a screen, it’s… (wait for it…) not print.
burnspbesq
@jrg:
Your analogy doesn’t work because there is a fundamental difference between print and audio.
Once you get a trivially low resolution, print works just as well on paper as on a screen.
The only people who don’t care about the physical media of music distribution are people who don’t give a fuck about whether what they are listening to bears any resemblance to actual voices and instruments. Vinyl rules, and get off my lawn.
Ridge
I’ve been following the rumors of this product and have had thoughts along the same line as Carr. Not to save an incompetent, incestuous industry….but to add value to my Apple stock.
The trick Apple discovered with iPod is that there are no sustained profits selling hardware at the consumer level. The profits come from selling the content to run on the hardware. Apple surpassed WalMart as the major music retailer in the US through its Apple iTunes store years ago. It wants to do the same thing with print on the iSlate.
By linking the tablet or iSlate to a wireless carrier (with a cut of the fees of course)…then selling ebooks, mags, journals, through its Apple store to the tablet owner (in probably a proprietary format)….they hook owner into returning to Apple and giving their money again and again in order to use the product to its full extent. Print will find a new outlet and revenue source. Apple will have others develop content for it to offer and get a cut in the proceeds. The iSlate will become the latest Executive jewelry which every up and comer will have to have to read the WSJ or Barron’s on while commuting. Hipsters will have to have it to read the latest Art or fanzine…etc…
And to supply the content, Apple is building a new server farm in NC which should come online in time for the release.
It will no doubt do other things but its main purpose will be as a reader. Its success will depend on how well the wireless network will work and if there is enough content to make the price worthwhile.
Ridge
Corey
No – the problem isn’t the media itself (print vs. digital vs. stone tablet or whatever), it’s the fact that the content can be easily distributed across the world via the web. Print newspapers survive on what are effectively local monopolies (and the occasional duopoly). Digital distribution ended those monopolies and have led to the kind of consolidation you see now.
Carr, by the way, is one of the biggest wankers in the media, but since he doesn’t typically write about politics he doesn’t get the mockery he deserves.
Corey +3
burnspbesq
@The Other Steve:
And you’re accusing somebody else of having drunk the Kool-Aid?
Pot, meet kettle.
Moonbatting Average
Why do we care what former Texans quarterbacks think about technology?
+6
Corey
That’s not to say, of course, that I don’t think reading the Times on a tablet would be pretty cool. It just won’t “save” the industry or whatever.
Incertus
@The Other Steve: But the other tablets won’t be as cool as the Apple tablet will be, and that’s going to matter. People aren’t still buying the iPhone because it’s the best smartphone out there–it isn’t, and by many measures it never was. But it was cooler than anything else out there, and it continues to be. You can try to discount that if you want, but that’s been at the heart of Apple’s success for the last ten years–selling cool. It worked for the iPod, it worked for the MacBook, it worked for the iPhone and it’ll probably work for the iSlate, or whatever they wind up calling it.
Jason Bylinowski
I don’t know the answer to your questions, DougJ. Nobody knows the answers to these questions, the primary of which is: have humans as a general rule come to demand all their news content transmitted to them for free, forever? I don’t think anyone can answer that, but I can tell you this much: if iTunes can manage a model which can get a guy to spend five bucks just to install a button that makes a fart noise on his iPhone, you can probably talk him into paying for news, as long as it’s easy to do and as long as the “wow” is there.
I think Fox News could sell a “Fair&Balanced app” which would tie into the Kindle, but nobody would buy it because the Kindle has already been labeled as just more “effete nonsense” for the intellectual crowd. The Barnes and Noble Nook, version 2 or 3 (the current one is not good enough) could make some traction, but of course then you’ve got to work out the transmission rights, the data transfer methodology, and a whole bunch of other stuff that someone else has probably already done for free on the iPhone, or will do shortly for a one-time payment. In short, I think print media is way behind the curve, and by the time they get there, someone else will have beat them to it. It’s a sad thing in a way, especially for the local papers, which cover news that noone else will when the void opens up by their passing.
Basically, I give it all about another ten years, and then the government will either have to step in (publishers and large-scale farmers will stand together to collect their yearly subsidies, I guess), or we’ll just let it all slide to nothing, or to whatever the new thing is that is coming which I have no ability to foresee whatsoever.
Martin
I’ve been saying this for a year now and I’m 99% certain it will happen.
I think people fail to recognize how expensive print is to do. The NYT costs $250M per year just in ink and paper. That doesn’t include the equipment, operators, distribution, and so on. At least double that number.
Publishers can’t risk a paywall on the web. If it doesn’t work, they’re fucked – they’ll never get the customers back when they take the paywall down. Distribution by device is their best revenue opportunity when combined with a good payment system. Apple has the best payment system out there, by far. It’s fast, easy, and flexible, and scales very well.
My guess is that the big winners will be textbooks and glossy magazines more than newspapers. The problem with newspapers is that their content is too… fleeting. I’m not quite sure how to put it. They are expensive to put together and need to be put together every day. They work well for print advertising (coupons, local store flyers, etc) but not as well for electronic ads.
But print publishing with the benefits of dynamic publishing, video, and so on – big winner, but all the pieces need to be there. Amazon got close, but no color, no video is crippling. Apple’s will be a full general purpose device that excels in a specialized market. Just like the iPhone in concept, but different in execution.
gbear
Going to book stores and record stores is still one of the pleasures in my life. I don’t mind doing news/current events at the computer, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to access everything I listen to and read without some kind of human interaction and the joy of browsing in the store.
gdinosaur
Sentient Puddle
How the hell does any of what he said NOT apply to the Kindle? I mean, cripes. How would a potential Apple tablet be any more appropriate for print media?
I don’t know, about the only way I could see this train of thought making any sense is if Apple’s entry into the market somehow or another “legitimizes” it by getting all the Kool-Aid drinkers to buy in. But I don’t see how Apple would be carving out a unique new market with this.
freelancer (itouch)
@Incertus:
Hey, this is OT, but did you tweet this video recently?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_BLggf-mqs
it is one of the funniest things ever, so if it was you that found it, thank you.
arguingwithsignposts
Print newspapers survived on advertising. They still do. WaPo gets less than 15 percent of its revenue from online. Ad revenue for online distribution formats will never equal what they did for print. Not to mention all the competitors (craigslist, etc.) that have chipped away at newspapers’ markets (jobs, autos, housing).
Apple’s tablet isn’t going to bring back those revenues, either.
ETA: I hate it when people compare the news situation to the music business, because music is an entirely different thing than disposable news. People buy music to enjoy it later. I’m not buying the NYT to enjoy it next week, much less next year.
mcd410x
@Martin:
Bingo. This is why newspapers will continue to exist.
A couple other points: Someone said something about digital distribution ending monopolies. I don’t think so. Newspapers, apart from the NYT and WaPo, are all about the local: schools, community, crime, etc. Nothing has come along to change that. Also someone talked about resolution: Print resolution is greater than computer screen resolution (200-250 vs. 72 dpi).
Martin
@Jason Bylinowski:
That’s the observation people miss.
People aren’t cheap. Hell, the history of the last two decades in America is that we spend too much, and generally on shit.
The problem with newspapers and a lot of similar things is that they are hard to buy. Compared to 1-click, which has become the norm for shopping, buying a subscription to the paper is hard and annoying. The app store is so successful because it is freakishly easy to buy things, and the stuff there is cheap. $2.50 for a week subscription to the local paper when you are travelling is a no-brainer if it’s easy enough to do. Have the GPS look up the local papers and ask me. Just don’t make me try and figure out what the local paper for Duluth is.
Jason Bylinowski
@freelancer (itouch): That there link on the Youtubes has me laughin aiight, hoo boy. A fisherman who moonlights as a rod & reel stress tester.
Zach
My killer device for this is basically the kindle with a fast-responding, full color screen (but the same qualities of digital ink or whatever otherwise) and a great touch interface that will remember any notations you take and make them searchable. You could basically get rid of textbooks.
It’s easy to think of other features… automatically posting excerpts to blogs or facebook, keeping notes and sources together to make sorting out citations a breeze, etc.
I figure that all of that is pretty obvious and will be available in the next few years unless there’s a huge hurdle to making color screens; the biggest issue would be legal hurdles dealing with the actual content.
Corey
@Martin:
Just don’t make me try and figure out what the local paper for Duluth is.
Dude.
http://www.google.com/search?q=duluth+newspaper&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Martin
@Sentient Puddle: Kindle was close but is too limited, and Amazon’s focus was primarily just on Amazon. Hell, you couldn’t even read PDFs on the thing until recently without going through their goofy gateway.
And when most major print papers today have color, a B&W device is a step down. And forget textbooks and magazines. Kindle works for traditional books with minimal illustration and some news content.
@mcd410x: I think newspapers may continue to exist, but remember that there’s a HUGE fixed startup cost to printing. If the circulation isn’t high, the per-subscriber costs can’t cover the fixed cost and the cost to print the paper climbs rapidly to the point that it’s unsustainable. Apple promises to eliminate that by knocking the fixed cost of publication down to almost nothing beyond the cost of securing the content.
But newspapers also present the biggest challenge to move to a reader because that ad revenue is the hardest to replace. The papers may not care though – they’re losing that revenue steadily over time.
But Apple presents a free shot at a solution. If it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t cost the publisher much, unlike a paywall which now is their only other alternative.
El Cruzado
@mcd410x:
Being pedantic, most computer screens these days (especially laptops) are over 100dpi. The iPhone is around 160dpi IIRC.
Print can of course do a whole lot over that, but we’re reaching the point in electronic screens where it doesn’t matter for casual reading/usage.
fraught
@gbear: I’m not sure the browsing experience will be the same if everything in the store is years old, and no one is there to buy because they get everything, books and music, on their devices. What would be the purpose of the enterprise? A social venue? Maybe there will be ebook bars for that.
Martin
@Corey:
Yeah, okay, Duluth only has one paper and it’s clearly in their market. Not always so easy, though.
Zach
@Martin: I was expecting the link to be a story about Duluth’s only paper going under.
Jason Bylinowski
@Martin:
There you go, that’s going to be key. Of course, this sword is at least two edged in that the GPS function also going to open up a new can of worms on the advertising front, which we won’t like at all – I imagine it will be something like those unwanted fax ads we get ALL DAY LONG at our office, just because they know where we are and what we do to make money. A third edge of this blade (this is one one scary sword indeed, heh) is going to be the further evolution, to put it nicely, of what we consider to be our rights of privacy. But that’s probably another topic. Hell, it may already be happening to some extent – I don’t have or want a smartphone as of now, so I remain mostly ignorant of all this nonsense.
But thanks for acknowledging my little contribution.
Martin
@Zach:
Pretty close is the Pixel Qi. It’s essentially a color epaper device with a lower-resolution, higher refresh video mode. It’s also a year old. Not sure if Apple would use that or something similar, but Apple can easily bring something to market ahead of other players.
BK
Just a hunch, but I would guess Apple is looking to bust into the video content provider game, not so much the print media. I could see people paying $30/month for X amount of ala carte TV instead of paying $75/month for a pile of channels of which you only watch a handful. Like others here note, I’m not seeing a viable revenue stream for print media. The ebooks section of the app store seems ridicuously overpriced when apps are a couple bucks, but books are $10+.
People don’t read much these days. But they sure do watch a lot of TV…
Sentient Puddle
@Martin: Color would be a good next step, yes, but the first tradeoff that comes to mind is battery life. Right now, the display technology that the Kindle uses (which gives it an absurdly long battery life) only does black and white. It sounds like color displays might be coming late this year, but I have no idea how that will impact battery life. And of course, Apple might not even use it, going with an LCD instead.
But then when I think about all that, I have to stop and consider why anybody’s even bothering to speculate about the tablet. I feel like I’m trying to shoehorn a very specific use for the tablet, and I’m not entirely sure this is what Apple is aiming for anyway…
Comrade Luke
I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but my gut tells me that this won’t work.
The other important thing to consider is this: Apple doesn’t give a shit about the newspaper industry, Apple cares about selling their hardware.
My guess is that at the initial rollout of the tablet the newspaper angle will be trumpeted, but the device itself will be more than able to hold its own without any of this content. Most people will buy it because “Hey, it’s super cool AND I can get these cool new-style, multimedia newspapers on it for only a buck!” And the vast, vast majority of those people will either try it a couple of times and stop, or more likely never do it at all.
End result: Apple makes a shit-ton of profit on their devices, and newspapers and magazines get a near-term bump followed by a precipitous fall.
MikeJ
Blow jobs. Other than that, fuck the media.
Jon
The key to any Apple tablet/slate/pad/whatever, as John Gruber has said (daringfireball.net), is this: what does it offer that you can’t get from a MacBook or an iPhone? Or, as Steve Himself said, “what’s this good for other than surfing the web on the can?”
Until Apple – or anyone – answers that question, you’re looking at a product with no future. Even the Kindle only works by dint of its ridiculously long battery life and unmetered network access – if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you have very little need of a Kindle and certainly would have a hard time justifying the $250 for something your iDevice already does for free.
Graeme
This reads like the wishful thinking of an aging Boomer.
Print layouts will remain the preserve of the fetishists, but most people will ignore them. Yes, @burnspbesq, it’ll be just like vinyl.
Jules
Have y’all seen this yet?
http://analyzeglennreynoldsbodylanguage.posterous.com/
Analyze Glenn Reynolds Body Language
“Foppishly obsequious”
freelancer (itouch)
@Jason Bylinowski:
He should also work for Consumer Reports as an A/V tester. The cameraman at 2:07 just KILLS me.
Martin
@Sentient Puddle:
We don’t need to worry about what problem the tablet will solve, Apple already did that.
I’ve made a lot of money off of Apple stock. I know the company probably as well as anyone outside of the company, and probably better than a lot of the people inside the company.
Apple won’t release a tablet unless they’ve found a compelling reason for it. They’re not going to ship an upscaled iPhone or a keyboardless laptop. It’s going to do something that their other devices don’t do, and it will do it better than their other products can do. It won’t be radically cutting edge technology-wise (don’t underestimate their ability to get color epaper on the market – they have $30B to take a startup device and get it manufactured on the scale they need – and they’ve done that sort of thing before) but it’ll likely be a combination of new software, perhaps a whole new variant of Mac OS X (which the iPhone OS is), and new content – and the content is what will win people over. But Apple has been rejecting the idea of a table for years now, so why now?
So, the rumor that Apple is coming out with a tablet begs the speculation of what it’ll do that we can’t do as well now. The problem is already solved, we just need to figure out what the problem is, and what the solution turns out to be.
bago
Print media is going the way of pocket watches. What newspapers need to do is realize that the only way they can add value (and thusly recieve revenue) from their work is by intelligent aggrigation and fact-checking. In other words, by working. This will destroy many existing papers in the stenography business, but when you see a piece from McClatchy, you know they have done their homework. THAT is valuable. Putting a name on the data that signifies it meets your standards is something worth paying for. It’s like a signature on a check. The xerox game played by many operators is doomed.
freelancer (itouch)
@MikeJ:
Early candidate for 2010 COTY. Good luck in the primaries. Don’t write off Florida and Michigan.
bago
@mcd410x: Wrong. With geo-targeting, you can still do local ads on global sites.
bago
@Graeme: Vinyl actually has a better fidelity than red book audio, and the tactile response when scratching is unmatched. Final Scratch comes close, but there will always be an audience for the purists.
There is not a comparable purist newspaper market segment.
bago
Sorry if I come off as a know it all, but I have owned a tablet, and worked in online advertising for a fortune 500 company fixing doubleclick crap.
Comrade Luke
To carry over my comment from the other thread, The Reader turned out to be awesome.
Zach
@Martin: What problem did the Apple TV solve?
General Winfield Stuck
mcd410x
@bago: Of course, you can. And when was the last time you clicked on one?
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s effective.
mcd410x
@El Cruzado: I believe, and I very could be wrong here, that what you’re talking about is logical resolution as opposed to physical resolution.
Yes, you can bump your monitor higher than 96 dpi for PCs, but the image must get smaller to compensate — that’s why icons shrink when you raise the resolution of the screen.
But like I said, I’ve had a couple drinks and could be wrong.
freelancer (itouch)
@bago:
“One word, Benjamin…Plastics.”
Comrade Luke
@freelancer (itouch):
It’s all ball bearings these days.
mcd410x
The biggest problem in the past year for newspapers was that their biggest advertisers — banks, department stores, car dealers — got hammered.
Citizen Alan
Any chance we could legalize marijuana and reduce the cost of producing paper by replacing timber pulp with hemp pulp? No? Is it because it wouldn’t do any good, or is it because saving the publishing industry isn’t worth the price of surrendering to that ole debbil marijuana?
mcd410x
@arguingwithsignposts:
The rates advertisers pay are proportional to the effectiveness of the ads. Until there’s a more effective way to advertise products, the medium of print will survive. It has nothing to do with stenography or how crappy the NYT or WaPo op-ed pages are.
mcd410x
@Comrade Luke: Perhaps you need a refresher course.
Sweet.
arguingwithsignposts
@mcd410x:
Um, no. There has never been a valid way to measure the “effectiveness” of the print advertisement, apart from coupons, which have their own problems. The rates advertisers pay in traditional media are proportional to the cost of producing and distributing those ads (tv ads > print ads, for instance) plus the amount of potential eyeballs.
But there’s a limited amount of time/paper in which to get those ads. With online, there is a limitless amount of space available, which destroys the scarcity argument for the high cost of print/tv ads.
Martin
@Zach: Video bypassing the cable/satellite providers. Apple wasn’t hugely committed to winning that market because they didn’t have the content properly positioned (nobody does). Boxee is probably the closest right now. The AppleTV came on the heels of the introduction of video downloads from iTMS, but the setup was a mess. Consumers spending money only wanted HD, Apple couldn’t get it out of the content providers, and the bandwidth to distribute it really wasn’t there – barely is even now.
Steve Jobs has a serious hard-on for fucking over the cable companies. He hates them – calls them criminals, and he knows the video market especially well from his time running Pixar.
But Apple has always called the AppleTV a ‘hobby’. Maybe the stars will align later, but Apple doesn’t have it now and may never, but the content setup was already in place for the iPod so it was just the cost of slapping together the hardware, which was semi-trivial (I’ve talked to the guys that designed it).
mcc
The Roku actually seems to be sort of succeeding at what the AppleTV set out to do.
mcd410x
@arguingwithsignposts: Of course, there’s never been a yardstick, but advertisers know the difference between the relative effectiveness of a print ad vs. an online one.
That’s why they pay 100-1,000 times more for print. And it has nothing to do with print ads costing 100-1,000 times more to produce or scarcity. (That said, the cost of doing TV ads does make them less cost effective).
ETA: I can do without the “Um, no”s and the “Wrong”s. We’re not battling to the death here (and it doesn’t add anything to your point or subtract from mine). We’re having an amicable conversation. Right?
freelancer (itouch)
@Martin:
Apple wasn’t hugely committed to winning that market because they didn’t have the content properly positioned (nobody does)
…………..
Netflix has done a pretty decent job of that, at least in the eyes of content providers. (Just see Leverage showrunner John Rogers’s blog at Kung Fu Monkey)
As far as the future, it looks like Netflix x Hulu x iTunes x XBox Live.
Cable/Satellite will slowly decline. The future is niche.
Martin
@mcd410x:
Apple has resolution independence built into the OS (it’s in the iPhone as well). They just haven’t clicked it on yet. Basically they can tie the size of on-screen objects to the physical dimensions of the screen, ignoring the actual screen pixel density.
It also allows the user to set the size of onscreen objects to whatever they want. It’s really very cool.
arguingwithsignposts
@mcd410x:
fair point. but a lot of the price of print had to do with the actual production cost (printing + distribution) + monopoly status.
The print ad market would have done well to have adjusted their prices downward rather than keep them so high. Of course, if we were to start talking about all the things newspapers could have done better, we’d be here all night.
BTW, as soon as online/smartphone ads become more location-specific, newspapers will be even more screwed.
Insert obligatory “um, no” and “wrong” here. ;-)
ETA: that was a joke, for the humor-impaired. We’re not battling to the death here.
Martin
@freelancer (itouch):
Yeah, video is a really sticky wicket because you need to pull in the movie folks grabbing both first-run and back catalogue, plus TV, first-run and back, plus other little nooks such as YouTube, home video, and so on.
Netflix has done a nice job on the movie front, but it’s not fully portable, so there’s more work to do. The TV stuff is still a fucking mess and neither the cable companies nor the distributers/studios are willing to fix it.
Guys like Boxee and Roku are trying to glue all the disparate pieces together, but they’re honestly too small to not get steamrolled as soon as someone gets irritated by the arrangement. The big players are all scared shitless of Apple because Apple played hardball for years with the music studios, forcing them to drop their DRM and per-computer restrictions, keep prices down, and so on. They want the option to back out if it blows up on them. Give it a few more years.
jimBOB
It’s unamerican to say this, but in principle there’s no reason you couldn’t have a publicly-owned nonprofit news media if the privately-owned version collapses. Assuming it’s insulated from political influence (a big if, admittedly) it could solve the free-rider problem and stop people desperately searching for profitable business models that probably don’t exist.
A truly public media (as opposed to what we have slid into with PBS/NPR, which is pseudo-commercial media with corporate sponsorships pretending not to be advertising) could be financially independent enough to not be captured by its private commercial supporters, and could do a lot of the heavy lifting for basic reporting, which could then be further processed by numerous nonpublic entities. For what we spend on a couple of weeks in the ME, we could have a serviceable public news media covering all the major metro areas and pushed out on the net in the clear without ads, paywalls or other tediousness.
WRT whatever is slouching forth from Cupertino, unless it has awesome human factors juju of some sort, I don’t see what it offers as a unique proposition. Otherwise it’s just another pixelbox, of which we already have more than enough.
Martin
@arguingwithsignposts:
Google going after AdMob is a big move. I’m not sure if the Feds will allow it, but the online ad market would probably be a trainwreck without Google. They and Craigs List have done more to kill newspaper revenue than almost any other thing.
mclaren
Obviously no, the publishing industry is doomed, along with the music industry and the TV networks. Clay Shirky already wrote the definitive article about this.
If you want a peek into the near future, take a look at this Bruce Sterling short story.
Roger Moore
@Sentient Puddle:
I assume that an Apple tablet is likely to be like the bigger cousin of the iPhone. It’ll have an iPhone like UI, WiFi and 3G, and you’ll be able to buy applications for it through the App Store. The whole point of it is that Apple is smart enough not to design it as a limited function appliance. It will be a general purpose computer, specifically so it won’t depend 100% on what Apple is aiming for. If somebody smarter than Apple figures out a killer app for it, Apple will still make a profit selling the hardware.
D. Aristophanes
That’s why the marketing of the Droid is so interesting – for the first time a competitor is attacking Apple on style rather than substance … the Droid ads are basically saying ‘you’re a chick or a fag if you like the iPhone’ … crass, but that’s the basic message.
freelancer (itouch)
@Martin:
I agree, but I have a cable/sat free life right now and I don’t miss shit except for say, tonight’s broadcast of the food network. I’m so sheltered, I know.
NobodySpecial
If I had to put my Doctor Future cap on and predict the next step for papers, it would go like this:
1) ‘National’ papers will die out slowly. The future will be almost entirely local papers, dealing with your community, and aiding that will be aggregators like the UK News Project, one big link center for those interested in other communities.
2) Reporters will be subsidized, independent workers, much like musicians in the post-record company era. They’ll be raising money much like bloggers, getting donations from readers and advertising from interested parties.
3) In ten years, most papers will have a physical subscription rate of about 30% of what it is now, being almost entirely the unconnected. Some papers will be entirely online, with the rest headed that way as older readers die off.
bago
@mcd410x: Well, to put it simply it adds to your CPM. You get paid. Next question?
bago
@mcd410x: You have scalars for your icons, you have scalars for your text, and then ultimately you have a scalar for the resolution you want to display. Then of course you have to choose your filtering method for anti-aliasing. It’s not a simple two-tier resolution mapping at the hardware level.
Roger Moore
@mcd410x:
No. The rate that advertisers are willing to pay is proportional to effectiveness. But if there’s a technological shift that makes it cheaper to provide ads- and the web definitely qualifies- then the new medium can offer equally effective ads for less. That’s a big part of what’s killing the newspaper industry. Maybe banner ads aren’t as good as traditional advertising for big ad campaigns, but there are a whole host of web sites that have replaced traditional classified ads. That’s a big chunk of newspaper ad revenue that’s gone and isn’t coming back.
bago
@arguingwithsignposts: Ads are already geo-targeted. They do a lookup based on your IP to determine which ads they show. This has been going on for the better part of a decade.
bago
@Martin: Google bought DoubleClick. Seriously.
Martin
@jimBOB:
Yeah, that’s what they said about the iPhone. It was too complicated a space, too entrenched by established players, too strongly dictated by the carriers, too many product forms already tried, too rapid device turnover and development, and too constrained in what you can do on a phone for a player like Apple. Apple instead dictated terms to AT&T and shipped a handheld computer that made phone calls and was really goddamn easy to get software and other content on. The App store makes the iPhone what it is. Hell, Microsoft had how many years making Windows Mobile devices and Apple passed them in available apps and app sales in a matter of a year. Windows Mobile device hardware is pretty good (I have one) and the software is pretty good too, but buying an app and getting it running on the platform is so shitty an experience that I haven’t installed a new app in years.
The iPod was similarly derided until the iTMS showed up. It wasn’t the device, it was the convenience of being able to buy music how you wanted to. The iPod exploded at that point. Apple is now the worlds largest music retailer, having passed WalMart (who even did the online music thing to compete). What was the last segment that anyone passed WalMart in retail?
I’m not saying an Apple tablet will be a raving success -who knows. But Apple doesn’t win markets on their hardware – they win it by getting content to consumers better than anyone else. They have something up their sleeves here.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
This. The main reason media piracy has been such a big problem isn’t because people are unwilling to pay for movies and music*. It’s because piracy was easier to deal with than anyone’s payment scheme. iTMS made it easy enough to pay that people stopped bothering to steal.
*Which isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot more pirated movies and songs out there than legitimately purchased ones. When something is free, many people will take far more than they’re ever going to use just because they like the idea of it being free. I’m sure that there are a lot of downloaded movies and tunes that were never watched or listened to.
Ruckus
I had a long screed on newspapers, advertising and change.
WP seems to have eaten it. I’m not typing it again.
FYWP
Yutsano
@Ruckus: Word Press is allergic to long screeds. Trust me I’ve tried.
Ruckus
@Yutsano:
So I noticed.
Martin
@D. Aristophanes:
Apple doesn’t win on style. Apple’s computer sales started climbing once they switched to Intel processors so users could easily run Windows alongside the Mac. For developers, they could buy one machine and run Mac/Windows/Linux. That grabbed a pretty big market. If it was about style, Apple would have had those customers before.
Apple may be cool, but that’s not why people buy their stuff. Have you been in an Apple Store. Have you been in a CompUSA or Best Buy? Which has a better buying experience? Too many armchair analysts think that the computer consumers only care about price, and if customers pay more for something, that it must be attributable to nebulous ‘cool’ variables that they just can’t see. But people don’t buy cars that way. The Nissan Versa starting at $9,990 isn’t the top selling car in America. The top selling vehicle (both car and truck) start at 2x that price. Are they ‘cool’? It’s the Ford F-150 and the Camry. I don’t consider either one cool, but there are clear reasons why people buy them – reliability, buying experience, color choice, cup holders, all kinds of reasons. In fact, price is a relatively small variable in car buying.
What Apple’s competitors are fucking clueless about is all of these other variables. They go after price, megahertz, pixels, and skip over all of the other bits and pieces. Yeah, ‘cool’ is part of it, but a small part. Case in point:
Android has one serious flaw – device makers (and carriers) can use some or all of the Android OS features and can extend the OS features to fit the device. This is nice for the carriers and device makers, but shitty for the marketplace. How do I sell apps into a marketplace if I don’t know if the devices have accelerometers or not? Or WiFi? Or big or small screens? Keyboards? and so on. As a developer, I don’t want to deal with that support problem – I don’t want to certify my app to work on this Android phone but not that Android phone and I don’t want to hear my customers bitch that it doesn’t work right on their new wizzy thing that I’ve never seen before, nor do I want to have to build and test a version for each phone. There’s about 28 Android devices out there – all different, and as a developer I don’t want to have to own all 28 of them. It’ll be interesting to see how things look a year or two out.
Apple has effectively 3 devices – iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch. They all run the same (upgradable) OS and have almost identical features, well documented. Apple will tell you *exactly* what you can count on and what you can’t. And there are about 80 million of those things out there forming the customer base. It’s a much, much easier place to operate.
D in ME
Nope – the “Lucy” kindle already yanked the football away from the “Charlie Brown” papers and this kind of pie in the sky thinking is why papers will die – and not a moment too soon. You can pay for a subscription to the WaPo, or read Josh Marshall about international affairs and national politics for free. My local paper, the Lewiston Sun Journal, is a steaming pile of dung and when it croaks, we’ll finally get some alternative forms of media to fill the gap, ie news websites, blogs etc.
Jim Schimpf
Major problem for any of these devices (Kindle, Nook, iTablet….) is PRICE. The fricking things cost multiple hundreds of dollars. Get something down to $50 and it begins to replace print. Above that and its a toy of the technofreeks or rich.
Jim Schimpf
Major problem for any of these devices (Kindle, Nook, iTablet….) is PRICE. The fricking things cost multiple hundreds of dollars. Get something down to $50 and it begins to replace print. Above that and its a toy of the technofreeks or rich.
geg6
Jim Schimpf is correct. Price is a major consideration for most. Hell, I can’t afford a home computer, let alone some other device costing several hundred dollars on which I’d have to pay gawd knows how much to access content. Plus, I’m old and have a fetish about the tactile experience of books and newspapers. And the smell, too. I’ll never give it up. So print will be around for people like me and older. I won’t live long enough to see a total switch and I thank the FSM for that.
The Grand Panjandrum
Add remote control capability to that bad boy and Cole wouldn’t ever have to get out of the Lazyboy, except to take Lily for a walk.
asiangrrlMN
@Moonbatting Average: You stole my line. And, no. It’s not going to save the industry.
asiangrrlMN
I just wanted to add that I love the printed page. I don’t have a Kindle because I like holding an actual book in my hand. I prefer reading an actual paper to papers online (except for the smudging print thing), and I still wouldn’t pay a dime for a print edition of a paper. I think within my lifetime, print will become obsolete–and I think it’s a damn shame. However, most newspapers are not worth saving. That’s a shame as well, but it’s true.
WereBear
I’m a longtime bibliophile who loves haunting old bookstores… and now I also love the Kindle app on my iPod touch.
Over the Christmas break I read Stephen King’s latest, a monster book that added not one gram to my iPod touch’s weight.
But the real reason combines them both, and that’s a little artifact known as the “midlist.” Once upon a time, when publishers cared more than they do now, one could find a new author and then read their old books, because they would be in print.
Now you have to be a bestselling author to have your previous books in print.
But the future that the Kindle points to does not have those economic or material constraints. I love browsing old bookstores because that’s the only way to get those books since the publishers killed the midlist.
Very low cost publishing will bring it back.
As far as newspapers, they have demonstrated NO value. Rewarmed right wing ravings and AP stories are not worth paying for. That’s all my local paper offers. What about yours?
El Cid
‘Would you like to be able to read the news but have all the fake journalism establishmentarianism and kiss ass ‘unnamed sourcing’ automatically edited out so that maybe you’re left with something like actual journalism? There’s an app for that.‘
I’d think about it, in that case.
grass
Price is only a concern with ereaders if you intend to purchase the ridiculously overpriced books for them (I do not consider an ebook to be worth the same as a real life paper back). I got my ereader in order to read the numerous free books you can find in online PDFs that no longer have copyright. I only have to read 15 – 20 books and I’ve broken even.
kommrade reproductive vigor
In its current state 10 frowning helicopters couldn’t save big print media. But for now it will give the transcriptionists something to write about when they aren’t covering Obama’s golf swing.
The Other Steve
@Martin:
I’m afraid you missed your own point. Apple’s competitors must be doing something right considering Apple still only has 6% marketshare.
That’s because Apple’s competitors make the Nissan Versa, the Toyota Camry, the Ford F-150 as well as the BMW 3-series that competes with Apple’s Audi A4.
geg6
@grass:
I’d have to read about a hundred thousand free books to make the original outlay of cash for the device worth it to me. I’m 51 years old. I won’t live long enough to do that supposing I’d even find enough free books I’m interested in to add up a hundred thousand. And, honestly, if I can’t justify the outlay for a home computer, I certainly can’t justify the outlay for a device that does nothing more than provide reading materials.
Chyron HR
@Martin:
Yep.
Yep.
The ones that aren’t the Apple store. Was this a trick question?
Brian J
If they can distinguish the experience of getting the content in some way, it’s worth a shot. I’d bet, though, that they have to be willing to bite some heavy losses at first in order to make it work.
tesslibrarian
@asiangrrlMN I also prefer print, primarily because I feel I catch more information by scanning pages of full stories rather than pages of headlines/links. But there are a couple of models that mimic paper and do a pretty good job with it: Sporting News Today’s daily e-subscription is free and does a nice job with copying the experience of going through, page by page, a physical paper. And the SF Chronicle’s e-edition even allows you to view two pages at once, the way you could spread out the open newspaper.
SNT is free, just requires registration; the e-edition of the Chronicle costs about $100/year. That’s more than many people might pay, but if I’d had the option of such a well-designed Atlanta Constitution newspaper after they quit delivering to our area, I probably would have shelled out for it. I’d been paying twice that annually for print, and our local paper does a terrible job with state government news.
What the AJC designed (at $5/mo.) just showed how little interest they had in people reading their paper–which is too bad: they’ve done some amazing work on the horror that is Georgia’s public mental health system (when even the Bush DoJ feels the need to step in to protect people’s rights, a nadir has been hit).
JD Rhoades
@WereBear:
The publishing industry, sad to say, has been very slow to recognize this. However, some writers are finding out that they can put their old out of print titles up on Kindle themselves…and keep ALL the money (assuming they’ve done the work to get the rights back). .
Geeno
This thread simply requires this link.
And for equal time
asiangrrlMN
@tesslibrarian: Huh. That’s pretty neat. I might try the SNT. Thanks!
Tomlinson
@Chyron HR:
Second that. In the last month, I’ve bought four MacBooks (for writing software, so not for me personally), two at the Apple store, two at BestBuy. I’ll take BestBuy every time. Apple was slower and they gave me bad advice (wrong spare power adapter.)
The Apple store was way more styling, I’ll give them that.
Also, the Apple store was the only place I have seen actual people shopping wearing those dorky five-toed vibram running sandals. Too.
The funny thing was, I called a friend and said “I’ve just been in a store and saw someone wearing those dorky five-toed vibram running sandals…what store was I in?” And he immediately replied “The Apple Store.”
aimai
I just want to say that I love the name “sentient puddle.”
Also, I still love books, paper books, more than I love reading long text on the kindle. Which I abominate. But, and this is a big but, if they could give the book text a better feel, lighting, and more linkage I would probably skip over in a heartbeat. Perhaps they already have made it possible to hyperlink within a regular text? because in terms of academic intertextuality, or looking shit up, I’d love a combination book and internet concordance system. Its what I like about blogs.
I suppose what I’m saying, as well, is that if they would invent a large size, unfolding/rolling screen like a magazine that stored my books on itself permanently, or allowed me to keep two book windows open simultaneously (for comparing texts) I’d probably love it.
aimai
D. Aristophanes
@Martin – good points, though Apple’s devices obviously don’t use Intel chips, and I doubt even the coming tablet will. Yes, there’s the superior Apple store retail environment and yes, the App Store is a runaway success for both developers and consumers such that other tech companies (Intel for example) are trying to replicate it.
But style (or ‘cool’) is also a major part of what Apple sells. What is Jobs’ obsession with industrial design if not an obsession with style? And my narrow point was that in terms of marketing, few competitors have ever attacked Apple on style — an area where it is perceived to be very strong. Instead, competitor ad campaigns have always tried to expose Apple’s ‘weakness’ in terms of cost for performance and interoperability and such.
So along comes Droid with an ad campaign that goes straight after Apple’s perceived strength. The Droid ads point out what nobody else apparently had the guts to say previously — that from a lifestyle perspective, Apple’s devices are for metrosexuals and androgynous hipsters who flounce around to vapid bubblegum pop (I mean, have you seen those iPod video ads?)
This is a great campaign, because it’s an Apple rival finally saying straight up: ‘Apple targets a specific, rather small demographic in its marketing — and guess what, that demographic is not you. Apple doesn’t value you or your lifestyle — it thinks you stink and that you have grease under you fingernails and that you are tragically unhip. So screw trying to impress Apple and screw trying to live up to a hipster lifestyle that you don’t even want to be a part of anyway … buy our product, which is built for you and which you will use and enjoy much more anyway.’
zzyzx
@freelancer (itouch):
Nope, for one reason – sports. If it weren’t for that, I would cancel my cable, attach a computer to my tv and watch that way but I need my fix…
zzyzx
@D. Aristophanes:
Actually what Apple is selling is ease of use. I’ve owned smartphones from before they had phones attached – a palm pilot that cost money for every second you used the wireless 14.4 modem attached to it – and the iPhone is the first one that my wife would like. She uses her iPhone all the time and would never have been able to figure out most of the other ones…
D. Aristophanes
zzyzx – I understand that Apple sells more than style. However, in the narrow context of my original point, I am trying to address the style Apple sells rather than all the other things it sells.
For example, to your point that Apple sells ease of use, I could easily say – wrong! Actually, Apple sells better access to more apps and music content than any other vendor!
But that would be misreading your point, because of course Apple sells apps and music, but it also sells ease of use – and guess what, it also sells ‘cool’.
Socrates
Books are sensual. Books are beautiful. Books are collectible.
I have a library in my house that is a wonderful place to be. It’s full of books that are memorable – gifts from family, friends, lovers, books that mark my trips to Chicago, art books that were terrific bargains, rare books, large oversize books, very small editions, signed editions, first editions, amazing finds, sets, my collection of various editions of “Leaves of Grass”, etc.
They are on shelves, tables, book stands, the floor. The ones I’ve finished are markers, trophies. They are an essential part of the character of my home. And they will be perhaps the most important things I will pass on to my daughter.
All of this essentially goes away when books become electronic files. That will be a significant cultural loss.
Nutella
@Martin:
You’re right that it is easier in some ways to provide software for Apple devices since
But it is also harder in other ways. You may find that your successful app is suddenly banned from the app store because Apple doesn’t like its name or its button style. And next week it might be banned for some new reason.
The PC market shows the difference, too. There are only a few very tightly controlled choices for Mac hardware. There is a huge, sloppy mess of almost unlimited choices for hardware that runs Windows. This allows opportunities for hardware vendors that are just not available in the Mac market. It’s different in the PC software business. Macs are quite open since OSX is Unix. That accounts for a lot of the Mac sales to software developers. They have a nice GUI with a Unix base so the whole Unix software world is open to them. And since web apps are hosted these days mostly by Unix servers, OSX is better for developing web app server code.
I see the success of Mac and iPod/iPhone as very different. I wonder how long the closed iPod/iPhone software world can last.
Martin
@The Other Steve:
Marketshare is somewhat overrated. What’s the marketshare of the big 3? And they still needed to be bailed out. What about airline marketshare, and half of them on the verge of bankruptcy as well.
You need marketshare and the earnings that go with it. Apple’s share has been steadily climbing and is now 9%. They’re the 4th largest computer company in the US on unit volume, ahead of Toshiba and behind HP, Dell and slightly behind Acer.
Dell is the marketshare leader, yet Apple could buy Dell with cash-on-hand. The main thing Apple’s competitors are doing is lowering the cost of computers. The average price of a desktop PC (excluding Apple) is $475. The average prices of a laptop PC (excluding Apple) is $515. That’s less than what an unlocked iPhone or Droid costs. Put another way, 80% of all profits coming out of the PC sector are going to Apple, and about 50% of the R&D dollars coming out of the PC sector are going to Apple. Nobody else in the market is going to be doing much innovation on the next generation of computing devices. The other guys are making computers cheap, but they’re getting almost nowhere doing it.
Martin
@D. Aristophanes:
Industrial design and style isn’t about cool, it’s about utility. Yes, it’s stylish in the conventional sense, no point leaving that out, but the big developments on laptops, for example, have been rigidity, durability, weight, and so on. The last generation of Apple laptops are milled out of a single piece of aluminum – no flex to the body, no seams to come apart or crack, etc. The magsafe adapter is a great example of what Apple really wants to do in industrial design – it’s a shallow, magnetically activated power adapter that if you trip over your power cord, it won’t break or even yank your computer off the desk. There’s nothing cool about it in the traditional sense, but it’s a fantastic little innovation that makes the computer easier to own or use. Same with the click wheel, and so on.
Are they cool? Maybe, but that’s not what drives the effort. Utility is 100% of what drives the effort.
D. Aristophanes
Martin – regardless of what ‘drives the effort’, Apple’s marketing is clearly directed at presenting Apple products as stylish and cool. Do you disagree with this?
Tomlinson
@Martin:
Martin, magsafe, milled aluminum bodies, etc – those really are fripperies. I’ve had laptops for more than 10 years and never had one come apart or tripped over a cord and not had it unplug. Sure, Apple’s is nicer, but a fundamental improvement? Nah.
Take a few more examples. If I want to open this MacBook Pro sitting in front of me, I flip it over and pull 10 screws. 10! Why do I want to do this? To upgrade the memory or to clear cat hair out of the fans (do this every few months, your laptop will run cooler and last longer.) Take my last Dell. Pull one screw, you are done. Apple could have done that, but some nitwit decided they could mirror polish the screw heads, which they did, and boy would that be cool (it is, BTW, until I strip one of them, then…shit.)
Or take the MBP keyboard. Very, very pretty. Now, if this were true industrial design, it would include a set of keys that anyone doing a lot of typing needs: home/end/pgup/pgdn and delete.
But no, adding those is inevitably NOT PRETTY, so they are not there.
That’s cool, not industrial design.
At its core, this MBP is an Intel clone. No better (but prettier) than a Dell. Same exact guts, in some cases worse than what Dell spec’ed, in some cases better – but very much the same. So much the same that I’m running Linux on this puppy, and it’s just plain old linux.
Jason
I eagerly await David Carr’s appraisal of the Segway.
D. Aristophanes
My favorite was that round mouse for iMacs that Apple used to sell … least functional POS ever.
Jason
What fantastic device, I wonder, will revive the CRT monitor industry?
Tomlinson
@D. Aristophanes:
Ah, the trackpad and its lack of buttons. Those buttons are not only useful (yeah, I know about drag lock, not the same), but intuitive, which the trackpad ain’t.
Cool, not industrial design.
The lack of a right mouse button (yeah, I know about the tricks to get it.)
Cool, not industrial design.
Brachiator
Short answer: No.
I’m not even sure that tablets are an answer to anything. There’s an interesting collision between smartphones, laptops, desktops and notebooks, with smartphones currently in the lead.
Electronic devices might transform publishing in some ways, but the old media ain’t coming back.
But then again, TV and radio are not-so-quietly being transformed as well.
By the way, a few weeks ago, the Economist ran a great column about predictions that new technology would put newspapers out of business. Newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett wrote:
Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, was writing about the invention of the telegraph, in 1845.
Ruckus
Haven’t heard anyone bring up the ecological issues of newsprint. A quick read about newsprint recycling shows that there are many issues with this that will only grow in the future. So if a reasonable reader and desired content could come together the costs of newspaper production could come down and possibly a side benefit would be the environment. The main issues with most of the readers now seem to be cost and in the background, the format standards (many diff) and content. I can see why books probably will be around for quite a while, but newspapers? You read it (and probably not all of it), you throw it away (ok recycle). A layout done with a reader in mind and the ability to index the articles could mean more eyeballs on a piece of information not fewer. And could force the content to get better and be worth reading.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Unfortunately, unless a beneficial environmental impact can be transformed into an asset or revenue stream, then the ecological benefits are nil. Apart from this, the newspaper industry is collapsing because readers and advertisers are deserting in droves, and decreased production costs can’t really help here.
Electronic newspapers require a different kind of model. In the end, nobody cares about how many eyeballs read editorial content. In the old model, you wanted people to respond to the ads. Here, even an old newspaper had value, especially if there were ads for a future sale, for example over the weekend, or for merchandise which would be in stock for a while.
And different sections of a newspaper, and their ads, might appeal to different members of a household. A person might also leave a newspaper on a train or lunch counter, where someone else might pick it up and find the content and ads of value.
If only one person is reading an electronic newspaper, with a single user license model, the entire dynamic changes.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I was not clear then.
I see a change is necessary and inevitable in not only the business model but the delivery and content model as well. You are correct that some papers get passed on and that advertising is/was the paymaster for newspapers. I see that having to change and at a price that people are willing to pay. I don’t think that newspaper advertising works with anywhere near the effectiveness that it used to. And the high cost of printing and delivery is going to get higher. How many people on this site alone don’t read the paper any more? It seems like a lot to me from reading the comments over time/many posts, about where people get their news. Many don’t watch tv anymore, at least broadcast and cable. They use delivered news, over the intertubes or on their phone. I’m suggesting that with all the problems of the current newspaper industry and with technology marching on, the newspaper industry will become, some day, obsolete. I don’t think this day is as far off as others do. I’m 60 and I expect it in my lifetime. Notice that I said the content has to change not only in substance but in delivery style. We have sections of the paper but we have to look through the paper to find all the bits and pieces of a story or what we want to read. That’s done to make the layout work and to make the advertising seen by more eyeballs. When the advertising fails to work then the layout no longer makes sense and changing it for electronic delivery is easier. The unspoken thing in this thread is that advertising will have to change as well. People have more info available now and as they get used to that they be able to make better buying decisions. They may not make them but the info is getting out there to enable them to.
CalD
One of the big things the Sony Reader and Kindl bring to the party are their e-paper displays. The problem with LCDs, particularly for longer documents is that they don’t have sufficient resolution to render type at small sizes without promoting eyestrain. So on a smaller screen, you either end up with so little text that it feels claustrophobic or you go blind staring at the damned thing, or both.
LCDs are also relative battery pigs, even with LED backlighting. Also unlike e-paper, an LCD is drawing power the entire time you’re looking at it whether the image being displayed is changing or not. All those factors tend to limit the smallness and lightness of the form factor for LCD devices as well as the amount of information you can comfortably display on a given display size at one time. So unless Apple has come up with color e-paper — and if they have I haven’t heard about it — I can’t imagine they’re really going to be saving anyone.