Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press
The iPod stemmed losses in the music industry. The Kindle gave beleaguered book publishers a reason for optimism. — Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor …
Context & Ripple Effects
The save-the-press-by-device idea has been cycling through the corpus since the Kindle's late-2007 debut, when Silicon Alley Insider called it a fantasy and the Wall Street Journal found the first Kindle easy to buy from but hard to read on [[a:1181606|]]. By April 2008 CNET argued flatly that e-book readers "don't stand a chance" [[a:1183222|]], so today's New York Times piece lands against two years of accumulated skepticism rather than a blank slate.
What changed since then is supply on the publisher side: Hearst said in February 2009 it would launch its own wireless e-reader rather than wait for Amazon [[a:1184686|]], and now the Times frames a coming class of larger-screen devices as the newspaper industry's equivalent of the iPod for music and the Kindle for books — a hope the paper itself presents as aspiration, not fact. Engadget's same-day pickup, flagging a bigger Kindle possibly imminent, shows the story travelling well beyond the business press.
First-order effects
- Amazon faces pressure to prove the format at newspaper scale: the Engadget pickup points at a large-screen Kindle arriving imminently, which would put a dedicated periodical device on shelves while the recession squeezes print ad revenue.
- Hearst's planned wireless reader moves from concept toward a content deal — publishers building their own hardware means negotiating with Amazon stops being the only path onto a device.
Second-order effects
- Device makers will compete for publisher catalogues, echoing the music-industry dynamic the Times cites: whoever controls the popular device sets the revenue split and the subscription terms newspapers accept.
- Magazine and newspaper advertisers gain a measurable digital format to compare against shrinking print pages, accelerating the reallocation of budgets away from the physical product even before any reader proves profitable.
Third-order effects
- If the iPod-and-Kindle analogy holds, daily publishing shifts from owning its distribution to licensing content onto hardware made by others — a dependency music labels accepted after 2001 and book publishers began accepting with the Kindle in 2007.
- Whether large-format readers can actually carry a news economics built on advertising, not unit sales, remains the untested assumption underneath both the Times's framing and the skeptics' earlier verdicts.
The trend: Print publishing is moving from resisting e-readers to betting its paid circulation on them, with each new device announcement resetting who controls the customer relationship.