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The Los Angeles Times announced that it is the first Tribune Company paper to be available for Amazon's Kindle Reader. This is a further step in the reinvention process that newspapers worldwide are adhering to.

The Kindle Reader offers newspapers a chance to adapt to today's world laden with mobile technology, by offering an e-reader-compatible version of their paper. Some editors, however, do not trust in the full-fledged future of the e-paper the 2008 Newsroom Barometer showed.

Kindle e-papers are offered by top US papers like The New York Times and the Washington Post as well as international papers like France's Le Monde, Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine and China's Shanghai Daily.

Source: Los Angeles Times Blog

See also:

A Paperless world?
Are we heading for all-elecronic papers?
   
 

Amazon's Kindle is a handheld device that displays magazines, books, and newspapers on electronic paper.

Innovative? Yes. Welcome? Getting there.

The Kindle has been met with instinctive distrust from some in the newspaper industry; to print traditionalists, the idea of compressing a newspaper into a 7.5" x 5.3" screen borders on irreverent. The Kindle is, however, making strides.

In a review for BusinessWeek, Arik Hesseldahl labeled the Kindle "a fair, if imperfect, replacement for the daily newspaper." Hesseldahl, a self-proclaimed newspaper junkie, liked the Kindle's sleek frame, and was pleasantly surprised by its readability. He was less thrilled with the tedious job of recharging the Kindle and its altered "visual conventions of the printed page."

"Headlines on the articles of Kindle-ized newspapers are all the same size, and so they lack the emotional punch conveyed by big, screaming 80-point type," he wrote.

Hesseldahl is cautiously optimistic about the Kindle. He believes it represents a potential opening for newspapers, a means of distribution, and could prove to be lucrative for Amazon. But first, he says, the Kindle - the old-fashioned newspaper's "imperfect substitute" - must be perfected.

 He believes, paradoxically, the way to do this is by looking to the print newspaper: getting rid of the Kindle's uniform headlines and adjusting headlines according to their importance.

"Improvements to the digital ink display technology that the devices use will help," Hesseldahl writes. "But so will finding a way to stay true to the traditions of the newspapers."

Related links:

Editors Weblog series on paperless paper: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Editors Weblog analysis: A paperless world?
The latest on electronic paper development

Source: BusinessWeek

According to Michael Agger from Slate, online reading is slower and users are more likely to lose interest faster.

The most effective text online is bulleted, in a list, occasionally bold, has informative subheads and contains no puns. Aggers refers to Jakob Nielsen's theories, labeling humans as "informavores" who look for "an information scent" on a site.

According to earlier research, there was no difference in reading speeds between reading on paper and on the Web. Nielsen, however, believes that reading online is 25 % slower.

The advice that experts give for reading on the computer is to choose a default screen font such as Verdana, rest your eyes every half an hour, have a good monitor, minimize reflection and skip long lines of words.

Nielsen thinks online readers are "selfish, lazy, and ruthless."

In order to fight this (read Nielsen's post), websites need:
- One idea per paragraph
- Bulleted lists
- Bold text
- Have informative subheads
- Contain no puns
- Shorter text

Nielsen points out that if users are motivated to read lengthy paragraphs in order to get the information they need, then they will. Otherwise, hyper-texting is advisable.

Agger says reading for pleasure is a whole different thing, because you are "engrossed" in the text and do not care about its length but this is a less common practice online.

Nielsen does not promote blogging, but Agger says that bloggers can beat the Internet by "offering a comprehensive take on a subject" and "supplying original thinking."  

Agger concludes by recommending paper as a "balm." "It's contained, offline, tactile," he says. Find out more by reading "A paperless world?"

Source: Slate.com through IFRA Executive News Service

See also:

New eyetrack research can help online editors

On one hand, there's a 2007 report entitled "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal," written by William Powers, media critic for the National Journal. For Powers, all this talk about readers' migration to digital formats isn't taking into account the millennial virtues of "the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years."

On the other hand, there's yesterday's editorial in The Guardian, a major news outlet that still heavily relies on the strengths - revenues - of print, that assesses that readers "are starting to migrate in earnest to electronic reading devices, and the interesting thing is that early adopters are surprised at what an agreeable experience it is."

Will we live to see a paperless world? Most unlikely. Are we slowly moving in the general direction of a less-paper world? Definitely - although the demand for paper and newsprint is constantly rising.

Some of the pros and cons for both formats are straightforward: paper is more tangible, more engrained in our habits, and it is still typically easier to manipulate and browse. e-paper is expensive but can be cheaper in the long run, friendlier to the environment, lighter, can network with other devices and carry animated graphics.

According to Powers though, "many of paper's affordances are rooted in its limitations - its physicality, the fact that it can only be in one place, etc." Citing a study by A. Sellen and R. Harper, Powers contends that paper has four 'affordances' that supposedly can't be matched by digital platforms: tangibility, spatial flexibility, tailorability and manipulability.

Traditional paper's overall ease-of-use is undeniable, as it remains and will remain the cheapest and most practical information medium in many regions in the world, for many years to come.

But a quick look at Sony's foray into e-paper (this was more than a year ago!) would tend to show that digital platforms already can - and will - yield some very impressive results, even in the four aforementioned 'affordances'. The developments brought by the i-Phone's touch screen also show how much the public is increasingly embracing the tactile attributes of digital readers.

A paperless world may still be inconceivable to us who've grown thinking through paper. As Powers notes, paper is not only a container for information, it is also essential in defining our relationship to that information, in the way we treat and interpret it (as are all media). The newspaper doesn't only store; it organizes.

But for future generations, for whom the digital screen could be just as common as its 'dead-tree' counterpart, who's to say they won't criticize the warmth of paper, its opaque texture, the fact that it's so easy to scribble upon, to tear apart - the very attributes we have appreciated for two millennia?

The point here is neither to vindicate e-paper, nor does it mean we're moving into a paperless world. Even less to presumptuously fix a date as to the 'death' of paper and the crowning of its digital successor.

A few newspapers have ventured into e-Paper, including business daily Les Echos in France, the Shanghai Daily using Amazon's Kindle, or the NRC Handelsblad in the Netherlands. In May, French telecom firm Orange launched an e-reader that offered access to a range of books and French papers. But these experiments remain just that at this stage - experiments.

Responding to the 2008 Newsroom Barometer, only 7% of editors believed that e-Paper would be the standard news platform in their countries within 10 years (although a combined 18.5% thought it would be either mobiles or e-Paper). Likewise, when we visited the Göteborgs Posten in Sweden a week ago, an arguably innovative and new media-oriented paper, its CEO and editor Peter Hjörne made it clear he had no plans to particularly invest or research e-Paper solutions in the near future - for the next 15 years. This doesn't mean that Hjörne won't be keeping his eyes open for developments, as should any conscientious editor or manager.

But even in the digitally ripe Scandinavian market, consumption and distribution of e-paper on a mass scale remains a distant thought for editors and publishers.

In fact, some of the biggest brakes to the advent of e-Paper may be e-Paper manufacturers and media players themselves, as they battle to try set an industry-wide standard for a reader.

"It would be nice to think that ebooks will avoid the format wars between the likes of Apple and Microsoft that have dogged the development of digital music players, but that seems unlikely," reported the Guardian.

It's impossible, and would certainly be foolish, to set a date for the 'disappearance' of print paper. It will take years before its digital alternative becomes cheap enough for the mass public and really booms. And even then this will be limited to a few select regions.

But most importantly: the emergence of a new technology like e-Paper won't suppress the need for real paper - not for a long time. It's not an either-or situation.

Said the Guardian's editorial: "In the future books will have to welcome a new member to the family with which they will share more similarities than differences."

The twice-weekly Sonoma Index-Tribune in California is to convert to a "hybrid news medium" in the next six to 12 months, after launching an electronic edition in addition to its website.

According to its publisher, the move is motivated both by cost reduction and environmental concerns.

The community newspaper currently offers, in addition to its home-delivered print edition, a subscription e-edition, a paperless "SmartEdition" produced in partnership with NewspaperDirect (which also produces electronic editions for The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph in the UK or Le Figaro in France).

"We already use recycled newsprint and soy-based ink and recycle every bit of waste we can," said Index-Tribune publisher Bill Lynch.

"We cut back on the number of sections and pages we print and deliver by more than 30%. But the most important change, the one that can really make a difference, is getting our readers to join us in the biggest green revolution in the history of newspapers -- going paperless."

The e-edition already offers a number of useful features, according to Editor&Publisher: subscribers can read their newspapers from PCs and Macs, smart phones and iPhones. Suscribers will have access to up to 90 days worth of previous issues, can listen to news stories thanks to an audio function, and use an "add to my blog" function to reproduce content on their own outlets.

"NewspaperDirect's SmartEdition is loaded with features that will make this transition easier. But we know it will take time for many of our subscribers to get used to it," Lynch added. "The other part of the hybrid model is our Web site, which we will continue to improve as well."

Source: Editor & Publisher through IFRA Executive News Service

"Digital magazines are either passé or the next big thing - depending who you listen to," writes Robert Andrews, editor of Paidcontent:UK.

Digital magazines, in PDF version, are online replicas of a print product that offer readers the experience of reading a traditional magazine. Many magazines use this format to be eco-friendly.

In line with the argument of digital mags being passé, Drift, a digital surfing magazine launched in 2005, is switching to a printed format. It originally began in a paperless format as an alternative to tree-based paper.
 
Drift Editor Howard Swanwick said, "With the internet there's a lifecycle with these things - buzzwords such as digital magazine, podcast, blogging - they tend to come and go. I think digital magazines have had their day. As a medium to put features in, they don't work."

Drift also had problems selling space because "advertisers did not understand the digital format" according to Swanwick.

On the other hand, The National Union of Journalists' monthly mail-out members' magazine The Journalist is going online, ending all print publications to save print, post, and packaging costs.

Furthermore, Courrier International.com peruses an article in Die Tageszeitung by correspondent Gina Bucher, who deems PDF magazines such as John Magazine and Dot-to-dot-mag to be the new trend on the Internet because of their layout. Text, photographs or illustrations are displayed exactly the same on everyone's copy because PDF is a file format compatible on various platforms.

Magazines, digital or not, are still figuring out which platform works best, but newspapers may want to further experiment with PDFs or other digital formats on certain sections to save costs.

Source: Paidcontent.org, Press Gazette , Courrier International.com (in French)

Actually, the paperless newspaper is no longer around the corner: it’s already here and now, as web-only news publications flower, whether launched by pros or in collaboration with citizens. The question is whether – or when – this will apply to major newspapers. Business Week and Fortune investigate.

Another step toward the paperless paper: Fujitsu is set to debut the FLEPia e-book, the first e-book with color e-ink capability. It will also have WiFi connectivity and the ability to store up to a year’s subscription to a digital daily newspaper.

David Evans of Forbes says that newspapers’ advertising revenue woes lie in the paper-advertising format, where papers can’t get feedback on who looks at their ads and thus can’t target them accordingly. The answer, he thinks, is in creating a paperless paper wherein news organizations can employ better-targeted advertising.

Roger Fidler, presently Director of Technology Initiatives at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (Columbia, Missouri), has been exploring and engineering the electronic tablet newspaper for over a decade. After years of cautious experimentation and limited interest from the industry, he now sees the breakthrough years approaching. “With the arrival of new generations of eReaders and improved, dedicated software, new ways of journalistic newshandling and distribution are becoming imperative”, he assesses.
This time, that quest should have sufficient critical mass.

Now that the e-ink technology is maturing, the newspaper industry has decided that the time has come for serious testing and application. Most experimentation took and takes place using the trusted print content, converted for electronic reading. That will never do the job. What is mostly needed in this phase are newly developed editorial formats especially designed for the generations of e-reader hardware which now are coming to the market.

Well, the newspaper world could do with a glimpse of hope. And there it came: after all the signals of steady decline, at least in the industrialised world, digital paper finally offers a perspective for innovation and growth of the beleaguered sector. The digital paper technology combines the best of two worlds: the look and feel of the traditional paper and the versatility of the online editions (see 'E-Readers, Background'). The promise it offers is mind boggling: a newspaper era without newsprint, rotation presses and complicated distribution lines: all serious cost factors. The practice however is less convincing. The enabling e-ink technology is around for several years, but its application is still scarce and purely experimental. That is, until now.

After originally quashing talks about launching a Brisbane paper, and just a week after News Limited launched free afternoon tabloid mX, Fairfax just unveiled a new online-only Brisbane edition. Mike van Niekerk, Editor-in-Chief Online for Fairfax Media, gave the Editors Weblog an exclusive taste of the new venture, www.brisbanetimes.com.au.

Microsoft Corp. and Hearst Corp. jointly presented a software device that allows readers to download newspaper stories and read them offline. The News Reader is already available to readers of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Launched on November 1, the Czech Republic's newest daily focuses on the country's growing Internet users, publishing exclusively online. The paperless newspaper, entitled Aktualne.cz, will be put out by Centrum.cz which is the largest Czech Web portal on the market in terms of visitors.