Archive for the ‘e-readers’ Category

Now that people are actually going to get their hands on the first iPads, it’s worth noting that few newspapers are jumping on the bandwagon — at least so far. Editor & Publisher reports that only three major national dailies — USA Today, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal — launched their iPad apps in time for its release.

We shouldn’t read too much into this. Chances are, a lot of publications are still trying to decide how much access to offer, and how much to charge for it. The Wall Street Journal will be free, but full access will cost $3.99 per week. It has lined up advertising from Coke, iShares, FedEx and Oracle. (It’s worth noting that the WSJ has never given away its content for free.) The USA Today app will be free until July 4, sponsored by Courtyard hotels. After that, there will be a fee, but they haven’t said how much.

By all accounts, if jazzy graphics and a cool factor rule the day, Amazon’s Kindle has reason to worry – especially for books. Especially with iPad siphoning only a reported 30%, whereas publishers have to pay Amazon 50% of the book revenues. But there are other factors at work:

• Most of the iPad models have no wireless access. The entry level model with 3G costs $629, and it has a paltry 16 gigs of storage. One of the major attractions of Kindle is that you can decide to buy a book and be reading it in a minute or less, even if you’re standing on a street corner. Without wireless capabilities, iPad users will have to go plug into a computer to get content on their machines. Ugh.
• For those who pop for the 3G model, there’s yet another expense ahead: a $30-a-month data plan. Add another $360 a year to the $619 for the box itself. And if you’re planning to tether it to your smartphone and borrow your phone’s data connection like you can a laptop, forget it. There’s no USB port.
• It’s hard to see iPad gaining much traction as a way to get publications without free wireless service. I have a Kindle and use it to access The New Yorker for $2.99 a month. It works. Where I’ve always had to wait until Wednesday or Thursday for the postman to deliver my New Yorker, it magically appears on the Kindle every Sunday night, right on time and undamaged. To be sure, it has it’s downside. Kindle graphics are horrible — so bad I can barely make out the comics. But in a text-oriented magazine, I can live with it. On the other hand, it’s hard to see the Kindle ever being viable for graphics-heavy magazines like GQ, Elle or Playboy.

The New York Times announced today that it will start charging for online content at the beginning of 2011. The company has settled on a plan that will allow readers to read a limited number of articles each month for free, then require them to pay for more.

The announcement left a lot of questions unanswered, including the number of free articles readers will be allowed to receive, the rate they’ll have to pay for more, and how usage will be measured. They did, however, say that print subscribers will receive free access to online content.

Before we get too excited about this, it’s worth noting that we’ve been here before. The NY Times has tried to charge for content on two previous occasions, the latest being a charge for select op-ed columnists, but they gave up on that in 2007. So the new plan is 11 months off, sketchy, and may or may not work. It’s an important announcement, but not the end of life as we know it.

Keep in mind, too, that the New York Times, like dozens of other newspapers and magazines, is already charging for content, via Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. For $13.99 a month, you can get the whole newspaper on your Kindle. Sure, you can get it free online (for now), but people seem to be willing to pay for the convenience of a wireless subscription.

Which dovetails into the question of whether today’s announcement has anything to do with next week’s rollout of a rumored Apple table/reader. According to a lot of published reports (mostly based on unnamed sources), the Apple announcement will include news of subscription agreements with book, newspaper and magazine publishers.

It’s no secret that a lot of publications are unhappy with Amazon’s terms, feeling that the book giant is taking too big a slice of the pie. An arrangement that makes subscriptions more attractive via the Apple tablet could be a game changer in the same way iTunes was for music. Indeed, the battle over the tablet market may have less to do with hardware than with payment terms.

Early entries into the e-reader market space – including those from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony – have focused on books while also accommodating newspapers and magazines. The new Skiff reader, introduced this week, does just the opposite. It has a bigger screen and is designed to make publications more appealing. Unlike the Amazon Kindle and Sony readers, it also has a touch screen. And yes, it’ll read books too.

Amazon’s Kindle has had enough success at selling subscriptions to newspapers and magazines to encourage other hardware makers, but some publishers have expressed displeasure at Kindle’s terms, which give it a hefty chunk of the revenues. More competition in the handheld market for publication subscriptions should result in more favorable terms for publishers.

Unfortunately, the new gadget won’t be available for months. There’s no word as to what it will cost or what terms will be available to publishers for selling their content. So all we really know now

Apple’s winning the tablet PC war just by staying on the sidelines. As long as they don’t show their hole card, nobody can take a poke at whatever they’re planning to roll out into the tablet/e-reader space.

Microsoft, on the other hand, turned everything face up last night, and apparently few people were impressed. One problem is probably that expectations were out of hand. Everyone was expecting to see the dual-screen Courier tablet, but Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that product won’t be ready until later this year. So what we got, instead, was a tablet that PCWorld called “basically a color e-reader running Amazon Kindle software. ” TGDaily.com responded with a “woo bloody hoo.”

I still think that when this new market space finally settles down and we can see who the players are, we’ll get a clearer picture on how media – including newspapers, blogs, magazines and other organizations – will deliver their product. Amazon’s Kindle has pretty much demonstrated that readers will pay a small fee for the convenience of wireless delivery, but there’s no competition yet, and the publications feel Amazon’s taking advantage of them, insisting on too big a slice of the pie.

In his excellent book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a strong case that the changes that really matter come out of nowhere, like a black swan. You can’t predict them. They don’t result from several generations of white swans gradually turning gray until the black one appears. They always catch us by surprise.

That being the case, most forecasts are nothing more than a projection of trends. That virtually ensures that our correct predictions will be mostly useless and the rest will simply be wrong.

So with that buildup, here are my predictions of what we’ll see in 2010 in the world of communications. Just keep in mind that they’re really nothing more than wild ass guesses (WAGs). Here goes, with hopes that nobody drags these out a year from now:

1. Newspapers will stabilize. The drastic cutbacks and bankruptcies are re-creating the newspapers into an entirely different kind of business with much lower overhead. Some major media companies will emerge from Chapter 11 with owners whose investment is a small fraction of the former value.
2. Blogs will grow into serious niche-based news sites, as displaced journalists secure startup capital, assign beats and apply historic professional journalistic standards to the new environment.
3. A major new player will emerge to challenge Twitter as the social medium of choice for broad distribution. We all have to remember that Twitter still doesn’t even have a revenue stream, let alone something resembling profits. Until one appears, its days are numbered.
4. Facebook will settle into a “relationship” medium, as users realize that as currently structured, it has limited value for broad distribution. As increasing numbers of users leave the page itself and access it through third-party applications, it will have to address a problem with lost advertising revenues, just as newspapers are facing.
5. Loyalty to publication titles — already weak — will erode dramatically as readers access the news through aggregators, RSS feeds and handheld applications. This will pose yet another layer of revenue challenges for media, making it more difficult to obtain reliable revenue streams through either subscription or advertising.
6. Handheld devices will emerge as a dominant way in which people receive their news, as iPhones, Blackberries, Android and e-readers pass the desktop in use.
7. Handheld subscriptions — in which readers pay for the convenience of mobile reading — will emerge as a key revenue stream as publications sell subscriptions based on mobile hardware and software platforms.
8. Efforts to charge for online content will fail for live news coverage, because that would require virtual 100 percent cooperation, and media never cooperate on much of anything. They will succeed, however, for proprietary stories such as analysis, columns and investigative reporting.

Amazon made a big deal of the fact that for the first time ever, the company sold more e-books than paper books on Christmas day.

Maybe I’m just being slow, but that doesn’t seem all that impressive to me. After all, who — after opening all their gifts — runs up to the computer and starts ordering paper books?

On the other hand, the first thing I did when I got my Kindle months ago was give it a trial run and purchase a book or two. (A reader’s not much fun unless there’s something on it to read.) I assume that happened a lot on Christmas day when folks opened their new Kindles and immediately started tinkering with them.

But there is one thing Amazon should probably be feeling happy about now: They practically owned the e-reader market for the all-important Christmas season. Barnes & Noble was taking orders, but couldn’t deliver in most cases until mid-January. (An order slip under the tree just doesn’t compare to a slick piece of hardware.)  Plastic Logic won’t introduce its widely anticipated Que reader until January, and we’re still waiting on Apple’s next move.

That means the main competition during the Christmas season was Sony, whose two models still don’t download books wirelessly — a fatal flaw if they don’t fix it in a hurry.

This all means that Amazon may have enough of a head start on the e-reader market to dominate for a good while.

Smartphone or e-reader?

iPhone, Pre, Blackberry or Android?

Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook?

The answers to those questions will tell us a great deal about the future of news media. The first is the most significant: Will consumers start using applications to read books and newspapers more easily on their handsets, or will they drop $250 or more on a digital e-reader like Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook? This question is important to newspaper execs, because Amazon has had some success getting consumers to pay a nominal amount (typically $6 or so per month) for the convenience of getting the news on their devices. This, of course, can be a source of badly needed revenue for the newspapers.

After leaving my own Kindle at a hunting lodge last weekend, I decided to experiment with the free Aikido reader, which allows me to read books on my Android. I downloaded a copy of Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol in .epub format, and I have to say it’s an entirely satisfactory way to read a book. Similar apps, including an Amazon Kindle reader, are available for the iPhone.

Keep in mind, too, that all of the handsets — including the Blackberry — can easily access virtually any newspaper online. The Android even has a Newspapers app that links the reader to online versions of more than 60 newspapers.

It’s hard to tell much about what consumers are buying for Christmas just yet. Barnes & Noble is already sold out of the Nook and won’t fill any new orders until Jan. 15, but their holiday offering seemed to be a rushed-up, last-minute effort anyway, so they may not have had that many units to sell.

Jan. 30, 2010.

That’s the magic date on which my contract is up and I can trade in my old Blackberry Curve on a shiny new iPhone – unless something shinier comes along. I haven’t anticipated anything this much since Windows 95.

As almost any iPhone fanatic will tell you (they all seem to turn fanatic the day they get them), the new phones are all about the apps – little applications that let you do everything but shine your shoes. It has a Kindle App that lets you subscribe to newspapers and magazines, reading them much more easily than you can in a handheld browser. Barnes & Noble has one too. As far as I can see, the B&N app doesn’t carry news yet, but that’s inevitable.

I’ve been saying for a few months that I expect handhelds to play a major role in providing a way for newspapers to charge for content. I was starting to think the idea had lost energy until I saw Steve Outing’s column on Editor & Publisher.

I don’t agree with Outing’s assertion that it’s the app itself that will energize the consumer; I think it’s the convenience. But that’s a quibble. If it’s in your hand and you’re paying money that goes back to the people who write the news, what else matters?

As we talk about the shift from print to online news reporting, we tend to overlook the fact that there are virtually no barriers to entry for those wanting to start up news sites. Anybody with a few bucks (a couple of skipped lunches can cover the cost for a year if you know what you’re doing) can register a web domain, install a copy of WordPress and start cranking out something that at least looks like journalism. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Hunke, the executive who left the wreckage of Detroit to take over at USA Today, says the Gannett flagship is “extremely bullish” on the potential of e-readers to provide new revenues to newspapers.

The comment was part of an excellent roundup on e-readers in the current MediaWeek.

As I’ve been saying for a while, e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and competing products from Sony provide enough convenience to entice readers to pay a small monthly price to have the content delivered to a reader even if it remains on the web for free.

The math from the end-user perspective is compelling. I pay about $12 a month to have my Birmingham News thrown in my driveway. Sometimes it’s late and I don’t get it until I return home from work – a whole news cycle later. During a hard rain, the plastic bag fills up with water and I have a sack of wet pulp. But if it were available on my Kindle (it’s not), it would probably cost $5.99 a month — half the price — and the News wouldn’t have any materials or transportation costs.

It’s working already. As noted earlier, I popped for Kindle delivery of The New Yorker for $2.99 (hey, big spender!). It’s always annoyed me that my weekly New Yorker rarely showed up in my mailbox before Wednesday or Thursday. Now, it’s there waiting on me every Monday morning.

While Kindle is the reader that’s attracting all the current attention, I really don’t think it’ll dominate the newspaper or even book market. Sony’s next-generation reader — which will be available just in time for Christmas — will be cheaper and have a touch-screen. And because Sony is using the open-standards e-book format, it already has twice as many e-books available (about 800,000) as the Kindle (about 300,000).

There’s some money to be made by those who can pick the right winner in this game. Amazon has the early lead, but the current Kindles are too crude to dominate. And newspapers distributing via Kindle are complaining that Amazon doesn’t give them a big enough slice of the pie. There are still a lot of products to be announced, including one being developed by Hearst and a rumored Apple product.

One of these — I have no idea which — will be the “it” product this Christmas. But the real gift may go to the newspapers who finally have a profitable revenue stream from subscribers again.