The Newspaper Isn't Dead YetWhy newsprint still beats the Kindle.
Posted Thursday, June 18, 2009, at 5:17 PM ET
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StumbleUponFor instance, look at page A25 of the national edition of Thursday's Times, which contains four stories: a big piece on the Obama administration's decision to fire a federal inspector general; a smaller story on the administration's plan to replace members of the White House bioethics panel; a piece about asbestos contamination in Libby, Mont.; and a small wire-service story about Sen. Roland Burris' inconsequential meeting with an Illinois state prosecutor. A newspaper skimmer can get through this page in less than two minutes. The IG and bioethics stories are obviously the most important, so you dip into those for about 45 seconds each. Then you spend about 15 seconds on the asbestos story, followed by five seconds on the Burris item, which is just five paragraphs long. Going like this, you can easily get through the whole A section in less than a half hour.
Getting through these same stories on the Kindle is much harder and more tedious. First, they're out of order. When I scrolled through Thursday's national section on my Kindle, the shortest and least newsworthy of these pieces—the Burris story—came first. Worse, because the Kindle gives every story the same headline font, the list item doesn't clue you in to the story's slightness. The only way to know if a story merits your attention is to click on it. But clicking is time-consuming—the Kindle takes a half-second or so to switch between a section list and a story, and another half-second to switch back. This sounds nearly instant, but it's not; the delay is just long enough to change the way you read the news. Now, instead of skimming, you find yourself reading the newspaper as you would a book—when you find a story, you stick with it until the end. You trade breadth for depth: In 30 minutes of reading the Kindle, you get further into a lot fewer stories.
The Kindle's newspaper-as-list design made sense on the original version of the device, which didn't have enough screen space to show you a graphical version of the paper. But the DX's screen is massive—and that's precisely what's so disappointing about it. According to an Amazon rep, nothing in the Kindle store has been formatted specifically for the DX—all content displays the same way on both devices. This means that much of the DX's extra screen space is wasted.
It's easy to imagine a solution for this. Newspapers could feed Kindle a version of their content that carries information about each story's relative importance; the Kindle could then read this data and display stories in a semi-graphical way rather than as a staid list. Many papers already have this information on hand, because they already rank stories on their Web sites.
Until then, though, the Kindle is an imperfect match for the paper. Indeed, it's not even as good as a smartphone. At about 10:30 last night, I loaded up my Kindle expecting to find today's newspaper—which, after all, had already been posted online. But all I found was old news; the Kindle updates once a day, in the middle of the night. My iPhone gets news all the time, and, through each paper's Web site, it shows me the news in a way that suggests what's important. It makes calls, too.
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The problems with graphic display, ranked stories and timeliness of updates are all very easily correctable once Amazon or the newspaper company decides to do it. I don't have a kindle but you have to believe that a thin, full page electronic reader with a long battery life (graphics and color will help) has got to be the future of newspapers AND many (but not all) magazines. The cost to layout, print and delivery and everything else that goes into production can be totally eliminated. This is huge. This is how and why newspapers CAN survive and thrive. This model will work for many magazines, many blogger types can create their own magazines, you can read Slate on the road without your bulky computer...the benefits are enormous. Now, the business model is still flawed. These readers should cost far less, because the manufacturers should get a cut of the subscriptions, and the subscriptions should cost next to nothing. The papers can still sell advertising for revenue but at, say, $1 a month for the NYT instead of $60 for the print edition, the subscription base will increase a thousand-fold.
How great would it be to have a very thin, instant-on, lightweight, cell driven (for regular updates), stash of 10 newspapers and 50 magazines at your fingertips.
I'm sure this will eventually happen if the publishing world isn't as stupid as the music publishing world.
-- tcn
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I wonder if some of the objections raised to reading the Times format on Kindle wouldn't be solved by the technology the New Yorker uses to digitally display its magazine on a computer screen. Absolutely the whole New Yorker is displayed up to two pages at a time. (i.e. it includes ads and cartoons and is in color.) One is able to skip to any two page sequence so it has some of the attributes of folding over pages to a part of a publication. Right now it is somewhat slow but that I think that is a separate problem of connection.
-- Raywish
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