I’m spending much of Tuesday and Wednesday attending a conference for the Digital Publishing Alliance here at RJI. One of the main things we’ll talk about is the next generation of e-book readers, which the Times was kind enough to preview here. I’m interested in this especially because I was the managing editor of the Missourian’s eMprint editions, which were designed for optimal use on a tablet PC or an e-book device.
Possible spoiler alert below. If I had to guess, the RJI session would be an excellent time for this announcement:
As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.
An Amazon spokesman would not comment, but some news organizations, including The New York Times, are expected to be involved in the introduction of the device, according to people briefed on the plans. A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said she could not comment on the company’s relationship with Amazon.
One thing I’m not such a fan of in that story (though the author does step back from it later):
The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions. And publishers have found that they were not prepared to deal with the recent rapid decline of print advertising revenue.
Publishers could possibly use these new mobile reading devices to hit the reset button and return in some form to their original business model: selling subscriptions, and supporting their articles with ads.
I’ve dealt with the issue of paid online content in a couple places before, but it bears repeating: Only when newspapers have content that’s worth paying for will people pay for it. Right now, that’s not the case for most dailies. An e-edition needs to bring together a combination of completeness, ease of use and some other groundbreaking functionality (interactives? audio? video?) to capture a share of the market.
The real question for newspaper journalists is whether these readers can help out newspapers. I have to say I’m a bit skeptical for a few reasons, first of which is that I just don’t see newspapers offering all three of the features above (completeness, ease, and cool functionality) on an e-reader. Secondly, newspapers take time and money to redesign for those devices. You can certainly just dump text onto a page, but if you do so, you lose the advantage of having all the newspaper design elements that both convey information and help the newspaper brand itself. One of the advantages to the larger screens on the new readers is that magazines could send finished pages straight to them, rather than having to have staff members redesign content for them.
In any case, there’s good and bad from a larger generation of e-readers, partly due to the fact that the e-book readers that are out there have good and bad features. One thing to consider is that there are plenty of competitors in this market that aren’t made by Amazon, and each has its good and bad features. Roughly speaking, you can divide e-book readers into two classes — those with wireless capability, and those without.
The first kind, of which the Kindle is the most famous example, have the decided advantage of being able to download any book at any time, with just a few clicks. The drawback of these readers is that the wireless mode essentially makes it a very limited netbook, and winds up costing you a great deal of battery life. One of the great advantages of e-book screens is that they only draw power when they’re being turned; unfortunately, the wireless features of the Kindle kind of knock that out. (The iPhone also falls into this category, although it’s not a dedicated e-book reader.)
The second kind of reader is the sort made by Sony and other companies — it’s simply a reader, with no wi-fi capability. The pluses and minuses are exactly opposite of the wi-fi readers, of course — the battery lasts longer, but you can’t download books directly to it. There’s a slight price difference ($300 for Sony; $360 for the Kindle) and a major difference in book availability (the Amazon catalog for Kindle; a wider selection for other readers through other online stores Project Gutenberg.)
What do you guys think? Would you pay for a subscription on an e-reader, large or small? And how much?
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