Newspapers And Digital Pixie Dust

 

 

If you think the problem with newspapers isn’t the news as much as the paper, today’s announcement by Amazon of the Kindle DX is encouraging, kind of like hearing that one of your hangmen discovered a previous commitment.

 

Aimed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as a better alternative to ink-on-paper newspapers, magazines and maybe textbooks, the pencil-slim tablet slightly smaller than a sheet of typewriter paper boasts a 9.7-inch diagonal black-and-white display and a $489 pricetag. (Two earlier, smaller and cheaper Kindle versions aimed more at books, although they included newspaper content.)

 

The idea behind all Kindles is that you pay a small amount to download what interests you and mechanical production/delivery costs for the information providers largely disappear. Since newspaper production can be 20 percent and more of fixed costs, publishers are tempted to jump into Amazon’s lap with tails at full wag.

 

New York Times Company Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., there for the Kindle DX unveiling with Bezos, called it "an important milestone in the convergence of print and digital."

 

The publishing industry buzzed with talk of subsidizing Kindle costs in return for multi-year subscriber commitments, taking the mobile phone industry as an example. And other equipment manufacturers hastened to remind that their own digital reader widgets were also in the running.

 

Now let’s insert some of the “balance” so beloved by traditional reporting.

 

Here’s a widget that costs as much as a cheap notebook computer and has lots less functionality. It may sell as well as mobile telephones that only make phone calls, assuming you can still find any for comparison.

 

Newspaper and magazine publishers hope you’ll stop getting news and information for free from the web and start paying for it on this widget. It’s the same strategy employed by smitten young things who move in with their boyfriends while their mothers wail “he won’t buy the cow if he gets the milk for free!”

 

Textbook publishers hope you’ll stop paying outrageous prices for new text books and buy them via Kindle. Already grumbling about used textbook sales, they know deep in their hearts that no student will ever find a way to copy and distribute the information illegally. They know because the entertainment industry told them it never happens with music and videos.

 

Maybe those hopes will come to fruition and maybe the whole idea of a newspaper, magazine or textbook will adapt to the digital age.

 

Or maybe it will develop that publishers as we know them once prospered because they owned the very, very expensive and therefore rare means of production and distribution. Advertisers paid hefty fees to in effect “rent” those production/distribution machines to reach readers, providing almost all the money in the game, grumbling but quite aware that for many markets, it was the only game.

 

The advent of technology supporting personal computing devices and the internet changed all that forever, and sprinkling digital pixie dust on old economic models does not guarantee that they’ll fly, even when Tinkerbelle is Jeff Bezos and Neverland is an Amazon subsidiary.

###

Back To Top