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
Posted under Uncategorized
This post was written by Michael Stroud on January 22, 2008
