On a day when financial woes caused the Los Angeles Times to fire its editor and the Orange County Register to can its business section, I found myself thinking about Amazon’s Kindle.

The Kindle, you’ll recall, is an ebook that allows you to wirelessly download any of 90,000 books over a 3G cellular network — as well as news and views from the New York Times, Time, the Huffington Post and dozens of other outlets.

It’s essentially a computer that downloads stuff from the Internet, the same type of gadget journalists are always complaining is stealing away their business.

The main difference is form factor and readability. The Kindle is about the size of a paperbook book and uses a technology called electronic ink that gives a reader the sensation of reading words on a page.

It exemplifies the best of both worlds: the accessibility of the Internet; and a comfortable reading experience that no computer or PDA can match.

Admittedly, there are plenty of flaws in the first Kindle: monochrome, inability to surf the Internet, no video and a rather ugly design. But those flaws will surely be addressed in future versions of Kindles — and its soon-to-be numerous competitors.

For newspapers, the implications are huge. Their biggest threat, the Internet, is now their delivery boy. They can reach an infinite audience and they eliminate their huge newsprint costs. They can update stories instantly and add video.

Most importantly, the readability of an ebook (or perhaps better, a connected book) mean that the over-30 set, who could never imagine sipping a latte and watching their computer screen, will feel perfectly at home once they’ve gotten used to the novelty.

And even my kids would surely prefer connected books to booting up their computers or squinting at their PDAs every time they want to read something.

We’re talking about a 10 to 20 year span, I’d think, before connected books replace the printed page. But the writing, as they say, is on the wall.

See Also

• O.C. Register to Drop Its Business Section
• Why Los Angeles Times Can’t Keep an Editor

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The music industry is broken. Any business whose main product is stolen far more than it’s bought can’t be considered anything else.

But how to fix it? Online and mobile music sales are still in their infancy; and it’s still unclear whether the vast  majority of people will be willing to buy songs for

their iPods they can simply download from their friends’ hard drives.

That’s why ad-supported music deserves a look.

The very idea probably seems heretical to music purists. But how obtrusive is putting banner ads on a music site? Even putting short ads in front of songs is not as unseemly as we might think; that, after all, is essentially what radio is.

Imeem, a fast-growing social community built around music, video and other media offers a hint of what music’s future might look like.

You can stream as much copyrighted music as you want for free. Banner ads by Discover, Microsoft Live Search and other advertisers help cover the royalties Imeem pays every time someone listens to a copyrighted track.

The concept has taken Imeem from zero to 18 million unique visitors a month since March 2006.

"We’ve signed three out of the four major and stream their entire catalogs," says Director of Business Development Ethan Applen, who is speaking Tuesday at iHollywood @ AFM in Santa Monica. "Our entire business model is built around given them a share of the ad revenue."

Users who wish to download music are directed to iTunes or Amazon to buy; Imeem gets a percentage of the revenue.

Labels or studios may also choose to pay for ads themselves to call attention to an act or movie. Members can also place their own material for free on the site. If enough users enjoy it, Imeem posts ads on the page and gives the content creators a share of the ad revenue, too.

Undoubtedly, you could poke plenty of holes in Imeem’s business model. But isn’t it nice to find someone in the music industry besides Apple who actually has one?

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