Moderator’s note: The Kindle can display magazines and newspapers from Amazon, but not in color or at magazine size. So a Ficbot-friendly Kindle has yet to surface. Let’s hope prices come down to make her vision possible. Meanwhile you can use services like Newsstand on your laptop or tablet PC if you don’t mind scrolling. As for existing E Ink machines, the iLiad, with a black-and-white eight-inch screen, comes closest to being a promising gizmo for periodical reading. – DR
So much digital ink has been spilled lately about the Amazon Kindle and the various tired debates surrounding this type of gizmo. Will people pay this much to read books on a screen? My opinion: no. Do people really need a dedicated device for reading books? My opinion: no, they can do it on cell phones, PDAs and computers just as well. Is the Kindle like an iPod but for books? My opinion: no, but there is potential.
Potential! Not at that price point, and not for an e-book reader, perhaps. But picture this: take a magazine-optimized Kindle with its existing built-in always-on network and its ease-of-use for even the techno-newbie. Grow it to perhaps the size of a magazine page, and add color.
Give us a universal format that all participating vendors can adhere to, and which is compatible with desktop computers. Now, make the Kindle browsery magazine a subscription service similar to what Amazon is doing now. Instead of subscribing to a print edition of People Magazine, you can pay perhaps 75 percent of the print subscription price and get the magazine automatically sent to you on your gizmo—not a cheesy abbreviated on-line version, but the actual, full page, no scrolling needed print edition, with nothing missing except the paper.
When you are done reading, you can delete it, or archive it to your PC (from which it can be of course be reloaded onto the gizmo later should you wish to read it again) and wait for the next issue (the current Kindle won’t let you archive DRMed content on a PC). Or, heck, leave it on there, the device could comfortably hold a couple hundred. Looking for a certain article? Do a global search and up it comes. Want to save that one recipe from this month’s issue? Copy it to the clipboard, beam it to your PC and print it out. Or treat your magazine like a book and jot yourself an annotation reminding yourself which groceries you’ll need to pick up on your way home.
Newspapers, too
How about this one: let’s bring the newspapers on-board too, as Amazon is doing—but with a larger screen to do them justice. Have the Sunday Times (again, not a truncated on-line highlights-only, but the whole paper, page by page) beamed to you for slightly less than the cost you’d incur by trekking out to the corner store, in the snow, to buy it. And if you get tired of reading the latest stock quotes, your issue of People Magazine in glorious color is one click away. What a great thing this would be for travelers! No more putting your newspaper on hold for your holiday, it will still be waiting for you in the morning no matter where you are. Smart publishers would also sell a la carte. Let’s say you are out of town for a wedding or a weekend or a holiday. Browse on your device for the local daily and buy today’s issue in a snap. A smart device will even offer you the option automatically. Imagine waking up in your hotel room to a friendly message from the virtual concierge: “Good morning! I hope your vacation in the Big Apple is going well. Your Detroit Free-Press is waiting for you in your in-box, as usual. Did you want to buy a New York Times as well?” That’s service!
Why a magazine-sized media reader would work
I think a magazine-sized media reader would work well for a number of reasons. Firstly, I think the size of a print magazine or newspaper makes a stand-alone device more necessary-seeming. People already carry around many book-shaped objects, so they don’t want another one. But I see a ton of people on the subway every morning toting around a newspaper. Secondly, this is content people are already used to paying for. I accept that if I want my local newspaper, or the latest issue of Self Magazine, it is going to cost me. This isn’t a blog we are used to reading for free
already. It’s not my own document, that I would bristle at paying to convert to appropriate formats. It’s not a website, which is more for highlights only. It’s something people are used to buying already. You’d just be giving them a break on the price to thank them for saving you paper.
I also think you could price a device like this much lower than you could with the Kindle by using advertising to subsidize the cost. Magazines and newspapers already have advertisements in them. So, have them plug the gizmo in their pages. Or have them pay for premium listings in the itunes-esque browsery. Have an editor or two plugging ‘the best in this month’s magazines’ or something like that, and everyone wins—magazines get more subscribers, they offer price breaks to subscribers to help plug the gizmo, and the readers get the same content they are already used to reading (and paying for) in a format they can cart around with them search, annotate and enjoy at well. So, how about it, Amazon? An iTunes for magazines? That, I would buy.
A good post, I would only further qualify one statement:
“Do people really need a dedicated device for reading books? My opinion: no, they can do it on cell phones, PDAs and computers just as well.”
With this I would answer, at this stage of technological development, a dedicated reader (with whatever extra functions that may be added) is absolutely necessary.
It boils down to two things, a reflective, stable screen (no refreshing merely to display what is there) and longevity of battery life. To which I would add lightness, and easy handling (held like a book).
Page size needs to be bigger, but this could be resolved best by cheap devices available in a variety of sizes for a variety of reading purposes.
These, side from the last, are essential to reading, the ability to read anywhere unhooked from any recharger for prolonged periods. 8-10,000 page turns seems a reasonable battery use – more or less achieved.
That books can be read elsewhere on other devices is a useful secondary feature, but unless the device is an adequate replacement for paper then we would be stuck.
Whatever improvements are made to eink, its role is that of a watershed development.
Newspapers and magazines need, as you say, to come on board and better eink devices are definitely needed for these to gain general use, good colour would be a major enhancement, flexible eink another.
The points made about screen size are very important, also the prices have to be low enough that some people would own several devices of several sizes.
Eink makes electronic reading possible as an adequate replacement for paper. It is not just a matter that ebooks can be read, but ebooks can be read as well as pbooks.
>>>Grow it to perhaps the size of a magazine page,
No. I don’t want something that frikkin large to tote around. There is absolutely nothing sacred about the size of a magazine page that says an *electronic* version must mimic the physical printed size. That’s just stupid, period.
Here I am reading teleread and all I really want is this column of text that’s on the left. It’s not magazine size, is it? Everything outside of that column is distraction — but, boy, doesn’t it look purty mimicking printed magazines? No, not on a screen. It is clutter (though necessary clutter).
Go rethink and stop saddling the e world with the limitations of the p world.
There are times a large diagram would be nice, and I wouldn’t mind at all having a light-weight magazine-sized epaper screen, but I freely admit portability doesn’t matter much to me.
On web page layout, yes, for the most part it’s just an annoyance. I deal with space-wasting layouts by banishing them. Here, for instance, a +13 page zoom makes the main column full screen width and pushes the sidebars off-screen. Alternatively, user mode changes the fonts and colors to my preferences, makes the real content full-width at whatever page zoom I want, and make the sidebars into footers.