Will electronic ink save print?
Rick Nelson, Editor in Chief -- Test & Measurement World, 6/1/2009 2:00:00 AM
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Will devices like the Kindle revive the fortunes of "print" publications? Amazon and newspapers hope so, according to "Amazon Hopes Its Bigger Kindle Ignites Demand," posted May 7 on the Wall Street Journal's Website. The article notes, "As part of the efforts to broaden the Kindle's appeal, the publishers of the Washington Post, New York Times, and Boston Globe will test selling the Kindle DX at a reduced rate to a small number of people that subscribe to their Kindle editions."
Magazines, too, are getting into the Kindle business; 29 magazines (including, oddly, the online-only magazines Salon and Slate) are available for Kindle on amazon.com as I write this. Print magazines offering Kindle subscriptions include mostly news and literary titles (for example, Time and The New Yorker); the tech community is represented only by MIT Technology Review—and, if you like, a couple of science-fiction titles.
So, will Kindle catch on as the new medium for traditional print magazines and newspapers? Writing in the "Brian's Brain" blog at edn.com, Brian Dipert is skeptical. He writes, "At 2.5x the total screen area of the Kindle 2 (9.7" diagonal versus 6"), it's got the hardware chops to render large-format newspapers in a reasonably readable manner. But its $489 price tag (plus media subscriptions!) isn't amenable to mass adoption, especially in this dismal economy."
I’m with Brian. The Kindles (both the smaller Kindle 2 and new bigger DX) seem extremely expensive for what they do (download, store, and display static black-and-white content). For the price of a Kindle, you could almost get a laptop or a couple of netbooks. Furthermore, we’ve heard a lot about convergence, but Kindle and other readers seem to take a step in the wrong direction—creating yet another electronic device to drag along.
I'm not convinced that even free electronic devices can offer a reprieve for troubled newspapers. Writing April 3 in the Huffington Post, the author and journalist Will Bunch advocated "Giving Away Free Netbooks to Save America's Newsrooms." He writes, "Big-city newspapers...should have teams of people walking up and down the rowhouse streets of a city like Philly, giving these newfangled devices away to people who've been left behind by the Computer Age, and perhaps also offering them at reduced prices to people who can afford them and simply want easier or more convenient online access."
That sounds reasonable, and even feasible if netbook prices fall below $100, as has been predicted by Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia. And I'm sure there are some people left behind by the computer age who would like to take advantage of such an offer. But many people have been left behind by the computer age because they want to be left behind—or perhaps they have caught up with the computer age at work but want to leave it behind when they get home. You could give these people a $2500 MacBook Air and they won't read the Boston Globe or the New York Times or the Washington Post on it. And finally, when the dust settles, print—ink on paper—is going to survive because, whether or not you've been left behind by the computer age, it's going to be the medium that cuts through the online noise.
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