Newsweek Discusses the e-Newspaper

Newsweek dicusses e-newspapers in its September 15 edition. Here's a short excerpt--to read the entire article, click here.

A No-Paper Newspaper
After years of hype, 'e-newspapers' are getting closer to reality. Can they save a shrinking industry?

Daniel McGinn
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Sep 15, 2008

When scientists inside the MIT Media Lab began toying with "electronic paper" more than a decade ago, much of their enthusiasm focused on single killer app: a portable, paperless newspaper.

E-newspapers would be a huge environmental win, eliminating the need to pulp trees and burn gasoline delivering the traditional folded parcels to readers' driveways. Like many technologies, however, e-paper has been slow to take off.

In the past year, since Amazon introduced its Kindle electronic reading device, thousands of Americans have experienced the pleasures of e-books—but for most people, e-newspapers aren't yet a reality.

Millions of us already read paperless newspapers and magazines on the Web, but e-newspapers, read on devices like the Kindle, would offer different benefits for both readers and publishers.

For consumers who already spend too many hours staring at PC screens, e-newspapers would offer portability and an uncluttered reading environment, blissfully free from e-mail bells ringing or IMs popping up mid-paragraph.

Among publishers, there's real hope readers will pay subscription fees for those benefits (something few Web readers do), and that advertisers will pay considerably more for ads on e-readers than they do on the Web. If these new streams of cash materialize, they could help an industry that's seen revenues fall sharply as readers and advertisers have begun abandoning high-margin print products. E-newspapers would also eliminate printing and delivery costs—typically half of what publishers spend to put out a newspaper.

For a primitive look at how e-newspapers might work, consider the Kindle. Amazon currently offers 24 newspapers for use on the device. Subscribers pay $5.99 to $14.99 per month, and each issue arrives wirelessly before sunup.

Even e-reader enthusiasts describe reading a newspaper on the Kindle as disappointing—and after reading four dailies on the device for the past two weeks, I'd have to agree. I loved not having to walk to the driveway to fetch my morning papers, and I enjoyed not having to recycle them afterward. But this convenience carries a cost.

The Kindle's black-and-white screen doesn't handle photographs or graphics well, and its e-papers carry no advertising. Navigating between stories is cumbersome. The biggest problem, though, is that e-readers work best for "linear reading"—reading long pages of text, as in a book—and not as well for the buffet-like browsing behavior that makes reading a newspaper one of life's great pleasures.

Instead of offering well-designed pages that entice readers to skim a story they might otherwise skip, today's e-newspapers merely list headlines or tops of articles, which makes it hard to decide what's worth reading. As a result, although some analysts predict Amazon will sell a half million Kindles in its first 13 months on the market, they estimate only a few thousand buyers have used the device to read a newspaper. (Amazon won't discuss its numbers.)