By: Steve Outing They're commonly called 'e-book readers,' but that's really an
unfortunate name. Portable, handheld digital tablets that download and
enable reading books on a screen are currently used primarily for
electronic books (e-books). But they promise to do so much more -
including becoming a popular medium for reading news.
Today, you can read the latest from scary-tales author Stephen King on
an e-book device. Tomorrow, you'll be able to read columns and articles
from many newspapers.
Ready for takeoff?
E-book readers are about to become more mainstream. RCA-branded e-book
readers should hit the market in the U.S. by the end of this year.
Thomson Consumer Electronics, the U.S. arm of the French firm Thomson
Multimedia (no relation to the Thomson publishing empire), which
manufactures all sorts of consumer electronics devices under the RCA
name, is almost ready to introduce two models of readers. They are
based on the existing e-book readers by Rocketbook and Softbook, and will
build upon those technologies. (Thomson/RCA is producing the readers
under an agreement with Gemstar, which recently acquired both of the
companies that make Rocketbooks and Softbooks.)
So far, e-book readers have made modest progress at becoming mainstream
computing devices. It's estimated that the number of e-book devices in
circulation currently is in the tens of thousands - though analysts
watching the industry expect there to be a couple of million devices in
circulation within a few years.
Thomson/RCA's move into the e-book reader realm could go far in
popularizing the devices and lending legitimacy to the technology in the
minds of mainstream consumers familiar with the RCA brand. But for that
to happen, they must be useful for more than just reading books. That's
where the news industry enters the picture.
The search for content
Jay Small is a veteran newspaper man, who most recently spent
several years at the Indianapolis Star-News heading up its new
media department. Recently, he moved to Thomson Consumer Electronics'
Indianapolis headquarters to join its New Media Services group. His new
job is to think about and encourage development of content for the
next-generation of e-book readers so that sales of the devices will ramp
up quickly.
His group at Thomson is faced with a classic 'which comes first, the
chicken or the egg?' situation. For the e-book tablets to become
mainstream - in the way handheld organizers like the Palm Pilot
have done - there must be a compelling amount of diverse content
available for them. If the devices do nothing but substitute a portable
glass screen for a printed book, that's probably not enough for success
and few people will buy them. The tricky part, of course, is convincing
enough publishers to develop content for the devices in advance of a
profitable marketplace existing for that content.
What's available other than books today is but an inkling of what's to
come. Rocketbook users, for example, can subscribe to several sections
of The New York Times - $24 a year for Book News &
Reviews; $30 a year for the Sunday Magazine; and $40 a year for daily
top news. You can get highlights of The Wall Street Journal for
$40 a year. Several magazines, including The Industry Standard
and Fast Company, also offer paid subscriptions for Rocketbook.
Other publications are offering their content in Rockeboot format for
free for the time being. Esquire magazine recently experimented
with making a special edition, 'Men and Disaster,' available free.
Softbook users also can subscribe (for a fee) to several magazines,
including Time and Newsweek, and newspapers like The
Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post. You can
even buy a single edition of a newspaper for reading on your Softbook
device, for a buck or two.
Future e-reading habits
What will consumers be reading on e-book devices in the future? Books
(especially best-sellers) are obviously the low-hanging fruit for this
business. Next up are newspapers and magazines, but not necessarily in
the same form as the print edition or even a periodical's Web site.
Further out are opportunities for enterprise document sharing, and
electronic forms. (The devices have touch-sensitive screens for user
input.)
Small thinks that news publishers will offer customized editions for
e-book device users. So instead of receiving the entire daily newspaper
on your device, you might pay to receive just the business or sports
sections. The device will know your ZIP code or physical location, so
you may get a localized version of a publisher's news content. A
magazine subscription may not deliver full content to e-book readers,
but rather subsets of the publication.
What's likely to happen with this new medium is that news content will
be on a round-the-clock publishing schedule. Just as with the Web or
publishing news content to wireless phones or PDAs, e-book users will
expect news to be updated throughout the day.
Eventually, most of the e-book readers will have wireless connectivity
to the Internet, so that users at any time will be able to download the
latest news or editions of a publication. In the near term, however,
e-book readers will follow a 'synchronization' model similar to how news
is received by Palm Pilot users. The device is seated in a cradle hooked
up to an Internet-connected PC, and updated when a synchronization
command is issued to pull down the most recent content from news
sources.
Technology direction
Roger Fidler, director of Kent State University's Ohio Institute
for Information Research and Management and a long-time proponent of the
digital tablet as 'newspaper of the future,' says that for the tablet
devices to succeed, they must be 'information appliances.' He expects
the devices to not only be useful for reading books and news, but also a
myriad of other uses.
The direction the technology will take is to for the devices to be
modular, with additional capabilities added by inserting a memory card
- to turn it into a GPS mapping device; a games machine; etc.
- so that the tablets don't get too bulky by having lots of
features built in. Fidler also believes that the tablets will evolve to
include features of handheld organizers like the Palm Pilot - such
as personal calendars, to-do lists, and address books. What will happen
is that those applications will work for you on both a Palm-like
handheld and a larger e-book tablet. Simply move a memory card from one
device to the other, depending on your needs for the day, and your
personal calendar data goes with you.
Fidler thinks that as news devices, the e-book tablets will win the day.
'For newspapers and magazines, delivering content to handheld devices
(PDAs and mobile phones) will have limited consumer value' because of
the small screen size, he says. Tablets, especially as the next
generation devices appear with 10.4- and 12-inch diagonal screens, are
much better suited for news presentation.
Business model up in the air
For news publishers, e-book readers represent a different type of
opportunity than the Web or smaller handheld wireless devices like
phones or PDAs. In each of those media forms, news publishers have found
that news content 'wants to be free.' It's the rare exception when a
news Web site can charge for its content (such as the successful
paid-subscription model of The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition).
News received on handheld PDAs likewise is mostly free, and few industry
observers expect general news to attract paying readers on mobile
phones.
Will news as read on e-book devices break this pattern? Possibly,
because the model is that of a subscriber requesting specific content
and having it delivered on a scheduled basis. The e-book user might
subscribe to Time magazine and The Miami Herald, for
example. Receiving those publications in digital form is merely a
replacement for buying the corresponding print editions at a newsstand
or having them delivered via postal mail. The logic is that consumers
should accept paying for this content, just as they have to consume
their print media of choice.
If the paid-subscription model does work, however, most industry experts
believe that prices will be lower than corresponding print rates. After
all, publishers discard the expense of printing and physical
distribution - and e-book device owners will be less willing to pay
high fees for content, since they feel that they've already paid for the
device itself. (This is similar to Internet users' resistance to paying
for content, because they already pay monthly access fees to ISPs and
resist the notion of spending more money 'for the Internet.')
Advertising actually looks to be a pretty good revenue source for e-book
device content. As the devices evolve and get color screens, the larger
size of the screens makes for a better ad medium than wireless phones or
PDAs.
So, the short answer about e-book device revenue models is that there's
much to be thought through by the industry. Nevertheless, the prospect
of paid content plus attractive advertising possibilities may mean that
the next-generation e-book reader is a new digital medium that holds
financial promise.
Hurdles ahead
Publishing to the e-book devices won't be easy in the near term. Fidler
describes the situation as akin to when the online industry consisted
primarily of proprietary systems like AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, and
Delphi in the early to mid 1990s. Publishers wishing to reach those
audiences had to format content for each service. Today, companies
wishing to publish to e-book devices have to format their content for
several e-book devices and work separately with each company.
As with any new e-publishing technology, standards will come in time to
create a single format that all e-book devices will be able to read. An
organization called the Open Ebook
Forum is working on developing an open specification for e-book
device publishing, which will include digital rights management and
publication structure standards. And a related initiative is under way
by the Electronic Book Exchange (EBX)
Working Group.
Other recent columns
In case you missed recent Stop The Presses!, here are links to
the last few columns: Small Daily Paper; Big Online Profit Goals, Wednesday, July 5
It Takes Killer Content To Generate Killer Revenue, Wednesday,
June 28 What Makes Good Wireless Content?, Wednesday, June 21 Archive of columns
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This column is written by Steve Outing for Editor & Publisher Online.
Tips, letters and feedback can be sent to Steve at
steve@planetarynews.com.
(c) Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher
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