Newspapers – Page 4 – Auxiliary Memory

Zite versus RSS

Up until recently RSS was the best technology for taming the Internet. You selected a RSS reader, like Google Reader, and subscribed to all the sites you thought valuable. The trouble is most sites send too many posts, so you get way more feeds than you want to read.

What I dreamed about was software that would look at what’s being published on the Internet while being able to read my mind and select just the stories I would love to read. Zite isn’t that software, but it’s pretty damn close. It does all the hard work of surfing the net far and wide to find what I might like to read, and then slowly learns from what I really like. It becomes a customized magazine.

When I got my iPad I started out with the popular Flipboard app that supposedly sent me the stories I wanted to read, but not really. I then discovered Zite, and within days, nearly every story they send to the main section is one I want to read. I get stories from The New York Times, The Economist, and from blogs I never heard of, as well as hundreds of other sources famous or obscure, but they all produce great essays and articles I want to read. Of course those same sites might produce dozens of other articles too, ones other people want to read but not me, but Zite doesn’t send me those. This is how Zite beats RSS.

As I read I thumbs up or thumbs down what I like, just like with Pandora and music, and the Zite engine pays attention. Whatever kinds of algorithms Zite uses, they are very smart.

Sadly, Zite is only for the iPad. I wished they had a desktop version. Zite has made me love my iPad, but I spend most of my time at my desk.

I really look forward to reading Zite every day, or even twice a day. I’m thrilled by the content it finds for me. It is the best of the best of the internet, suited for my tastes.

There are some obstacles to overcome. Are there stories I’d also like to read that Zite misses? For instance Zite introduced me to the website The Millions, a site for book lovers, with two great articles, “(Re)Imagining True Lives: On Historical Fiction” and “The Million Basic Plots.” While in Zite and reading the article, there’s a button for the Web. I pushed it and it takes me to The Millions home page where I can read other articles. And if I find another one I like, I can click the Options button and thumbs up that article too.

Yet, with all the great reading Zite provides I still wonder what I’m missing. But Zite provided an answer to that too, with “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to Productivity, sanity” by Jacqui Cheng at ARS Technica. Cheng makes a good point about living with ignorance. The reason why RSS is flawed is because it gives me too much to read. And thinking about all the stuff I might be wanting to read is just as flawed. Cheng said she went without RSS and just read a few good sites and felt just as informed. I’ve always wondered if I could pick just one news site, or newspaper, or news magazine, or even news television show, and get all the news I really needed. But when I think about doing that, I start fearing what I would be missing again.

Zite seems to be a great compromise. My experiment now will be to see if Zite can be my only source of news by being the best news aggregator. Zite was recently bought by CNN which is putting a huge scare in us Zite fans, but owners of Zite and CNN swear they will not allow Zite to become a conduit for CNN News.

When I read Zite I use several built-in tools. It has buttons for Instapaper, Twitter, Facebook, Email and other social functions. I have a Twitter account that I use like Instapaper. Most web sites now have icons for tweeting all their articles. To remember what I’ve read, or want to read, I just tweet it to myself. But I’m also using Instapaper to compare the two. I email articles to friends I think would like them, and on rare occasions I’ll send an article to Facebook.

Zite begs for the synergy of all these programs, and it would be cool if Zite eventually incorporated their functionality into Zite. Zite needs to be incorporated into the browser so it will work from desktops including PC, Mac, and Linux, and it needs to work with smartphones and all tablets. Instead of saving to Instapaper or Twitter, it should let me mark the articles I want to save to call up within Zite. And it should allow people to share their Zite reading with other people. Wouldn’t it be fun to see what your friends or famous people like to read?

Zite has a lot of possibilities, but it needs to get away from the iPad only platform. Zite is the first app that I feel makes my iPad worth owning.

Now there are some storm clouds on the horizon for apps like Zite, Flipboard, Pulse and others. They take content from other sites, often removing their ads, and presenting them to you in a reformatted, easy to read format. This undermines the financial foundation of the original news sites, but it’s well within the link sharing paradigm of the world wide web.

The Internet is killing paper newspapers and magazines. And paper newspapers and magazines are having a hard time transitioning to the internet and find new financial models of support. These news aggregators are a threat to them, but if both sides work together it could be a big win-win situation. Newspapers and magazines have always had the same problem as RSS feeds, they present you will more stories than you want to read. In our fast paced world that’s only going faster and faster, that’s too much of a time waster.

To see what all these apps look like:

JWH – 9/7/11

A New Kind of Reading: iEssays

What’s the best economic model for finding the absolute best essays to read?

I decided to go paperless with my periodical reading back in February, 2008, and my last magazine subscription (Popular Photography) has finally run out. At one time I subscribed to over 20 magazines. I love magazines, and I spent six years working in a periodicals department at a university library back in the 1980s.

At first this effort was to do my part in fighting global warming, but over the last few years I’ve realized that magazines aren’t the most efficient way to read about the world. Out of a year’s worth of The New Yorker, I might only read 1/20th of the printed pages, and it was probably less. I now subscribe to The New Yorker on my Kindle, but I don’t even look at every issue, so I’m wasting my money. I do wish I read each issue cover to cover because it’s a great magazine, but in reality I spend far more time reading on the Internet. There’s something compelling about jumping from one web site to the next grazing on information.

Long before the Internet was a gleam in its designers’ eyes, magazines and newspapers were the world wide web of information. Most print magazines and newspapers have a web presence today, and they all compete for eyes and dollars, while still trying not to compete against their own print editions, but I can’t imagine that lasting for many more years. With ebooks, smartphones and tablets all offering periodicals and news reading apps, how can paper periodicals compete?

I wish I could take a news pill every morning and just know what’s happening around the world, but that’s not possible – yet. But here’s the modern reality of reading – petabytes of data are being created daily, but we all still live in a 24 hour world, and at most I might spend 7 of my 168 weekly hours keeping up the world by reading short non-fiction essays, and when I’m busy or lazy it’s a lot less.

The Challenge of Keeping Current

We live in exciting times, and this is a happening world, but it is surprising how ill informed we are about what’s going on. For most of my life I’ve watched the half-hour evening news and then supplemented it with some magazine reading, and figured I was doing pretty good keeping up with current events. But I realize now that I’m not. Too much of the evening news on television is worthless. Are daily stories about natural disasters, politics, and economics really that valuable to keeping up with external reality beyond our tiny lives?

In any 24 hour period, what really are the most worthwhile stories to know about? Let’s say we spend 60 minutes a day, whether surfing the net, scanning RSS feeds, watching television, reading a newspaper or magazine – what’s the most productive way to spend those 60 minutes in terms of learning about what’s going on in reality?

Generally, we all have a passive attitude towards acquiring news. We take in whatever’s in front of us, whether it’s the NBC Nightly News or Slashdot.org. But what if we read with conscious intent? What if we systematically reviewed data sources ourselves, instead of letting editors at newspapers, magazines and TV shows decide what we need to know?

The Old Way

Before radio and television, people read newspapers. Your daily paper might present 25 stories and you picked the ones you wanted to read. With mass broadcasting on radio and TV, news was bundled into shows of 30 or 60 minutes and you just sat through all the stories, even if you really weren’t interested in all of them. If you wanted to know more you subscribed to magazines and hoped they presented in-depth coverage for stuff you missed from your newspaper, radio and TV. Before the plague of attention deficit syndrome hit the world, magazines often presented long essays, thousands of words on a topic, offering far more data than you’d get in a one hour documentary.

The Current Way

The Internet publishes thousands, if not millions, of stories every day. There are many ways of finding stories to read. You can go to a editor driven sites like Google News, MSN, Slashdot, Engadget, or any of countless other outlets and scan for interesting items to read. Or you can go to social sites like StumbleUpon or Digg and hope serendipity will bring you a great news surprise. Or, you can add all your favorite sites to a RSS feed reader and try to manage the internet fire hose of data that way.

With the advent of the tablet computer we now hold a magic magazine that can overcome the limitations of the printing press.

The Better Way?

Money makes a great editor, in more ways than one. I guarantee if you go buy copies of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American, or any of the many top printed periodicals and read the longest articles you’ll get the best bang for you reading time. These publications pay writers top dollars and there is a kind of survival of the fittest in information quality going on. However, we still have the problem of subscribing to paper copies, or tediously searching the net for the web editions. And whether we pay for paper copies or subscribe to digital editions, we’ll buy a lot of content we won’t read.

What we need is the iTunes of essays, iEssays or a Readers Digital Digest. Articles under 1,000 words should be 49 cents, 1,000-4,999 should be $1, and stories greater than 5,000 words that aren’t considered books, should be $1-3. If you buy one $5.99-6.99 magazine a week, you’re spending a $1 a day for essays, and I doubt many people would read more than one long essay a day, so these prices are about equal to average magazine reading. Leave the under 500 word content to free web sites supported by ads.

Picture The New York Times Most Popular section but getting content from hundreds or thousands of magazines, newspapers and web sites. This is how I read the NY Times, start at this page and only reading the best/most popular articles.

At our iEssays site, we could follow best seller lists set up by topics to quickly find the Hit Essay of the Day from a variety of subject categories. They can also keep lists for Hits of the Week, Month or Year. Imagine sitting down with your iPad once a day with the intent of spending 30-60 minutes reading a very high quality article and you’re willing to spend a buck. This would definitely weed out the crap and silly stories you mind at most social news sites.

And it’s important that the site not charge a subscription for the whole site. What we want to do is generate hit essays like iTunes creates hit singles. It would be important to still read newspaper sites or watch TV news to get a general impression of the news, but if you wanted to really learn something new every day about the world, I think the iEssays would be the best way to go.

Also, to help the survival of the fittest process, I think as part of your purchase you get to send an article to up to five friends, or link it on your blog. So articles could be promoted up the Hit List by purchase votes, recommendation votes, or link hit votes. The New York Times allows free reading to its articles if they come in via links. I think that’s an innovative way to promote stories and still collect payments.

And finally, I think the iEssays should be an app that stores your purchased articles forever in the cloud, so they become part of your digital memory.

Conclusion

I’m not expecting this system to supplant subscription systems. Most people prefer passive news gathering. Most people are happy to subscribe to a newspaper or magazine and just skim and read, tossing the issue out when they are done. But I think there’s enough people like me who are annoyed at buying far more content than we read, and wanting to get the most for our money. It’s like cable TV plans, spend $60 a month and get 200 channels. Some people don’t mind channel surfing, but I don’t. Not only would I like a la cart cable, I think I’d like to buy television by the show.

Unless magazines and newspapers go the way of subscription music, I’d prefer paying by the article rather than the issue. I pay $4.99 a month to Rdio and get to listen to essentially everything. I use its social tools and charts to narrow my listening. But I think by the essay pricing would help me find the best article reading the fastest.

Right now The New York Times charges $20 a month for unlimited tablet access. That seems way too expensive when compared to what I get from the music business. If The New York Times also presented content from many major newspapers and magazines, then I might consider a $20 monthly bill, like how I spend for TV and movies through Netflix. But the NY Times is trying to price their digital newspaper like the old paper copies, and this is different world. Netflix and Rhapsody are changing content pricing models in people’s minds and I don’t think they will go away.

I think the Rhapsody pricing model is superior to the iTunes pricing model, which is superior to the old CD pricing model. iTunes sells hits, and I want to buy hit essays. I don’t want to buy whole papers and read just a handful of its stories. I want either the Netflix/Rhapsody model which is gigantic piles of content for one low monthly price, and I’d use built in tools to find what I want, or I want the iTunes model, where I buy just the hits.

When it comes to reading quality essays (or short stories and poems for that matter), I predict the price per song model is superior for quickly finding the best reads. And ultimately I think more writers and publishers would benefit from this model too. If I spent $20 a month for The New York Times I doubt I buy any only periodical. Which is why I can’t make myself spend $20 for one online newspaper. If they added 20 top magazines to their deal, I would gladly pay $20 a month, but I’d rather pay $1 an article for an even larger pool of hit providers.

The monthly library model like Netflix and Rhapsody is great for music, movies and TV shows if you like to try out lots of different songs or programs. But reading is different, at least for me. I have a limited amount of time I spend reading, and I only want the very best stories to read. It’s like people who prefer iTunes to Rhapsody. They just want to get a few hits to play and aren’t concerned with trying out one or two dozen new albums a week. That’s why I think some enterprising Readers Digest wannabes should apply the iTunes model to creating iEssays. Or if the Best American Series editors came out with a monthly digital issue rather than a series of books once a year.

JWH – 7/17/11

Are You Willing to Pay for News?

If you subscribe to newspapers or magazines then you are already paying for news, so the precise question is: Are you willing to pay for news on the Internet? One June 1 The Times (London) is going behind a paywall, and The New York Times is planning on trying yet another online subscription plan next year. The gold standard of news has always been to read a world-class newspaper. For years people have gotten used to reading these papers online for free, but now it looks like free days are over.

For most of my life I got my news from the plebian news source, television. Since the 1990s, Internet has introduced me to the world’s great newspapers and I now realize their value, and I have decided to become an online subscriber. I just have to decide which paper to marry for my news partner.

The old way of doing things was to subscribe to the local paper and it would include a syndication of state, national and international news stories. Newspapers were the world wide web before the WWW. Now, I’m not sure that’s the way to go. I’m thinking I’d rather have the best news writing, and go with something like The New York Times. But if everyone thought like that, we’d end up with half a dozen newspapers for the U.S.A.

But then I’m not typical. I think most people prefer local news. It’s sad to admit, but I pay zero attention to what goes on in my city and state. My local paper has a beautiful, and extremely easy to read, free web site, but I don’t read it. They also offer a modest $10 a month digital edition that’s closer to the looks of a newspaper, but their free site is so nice I can’t imagine even spending that much money.

I think it’s going to be awhile before people pay for local news online, but if The New York Times and the The Times are indicators of the future, will people be willing to pay for a national newspaper? I don’t think we will know until publishers cut off the free news spigot. And that’s what the The Times is doing June 1. The Times will even cut Google off from indexing the paper. That’s going to be a major experiment.

So far The New York Times has always kept it’s free web edition going concurrent with any of its paid experimental editions, which have always failed. I do read the free portions of TimesReader 2.0 that I got when downloading Adobe Reader. The full edition is $4.62 a week. $20 a month seems steep compared to what I get from Rhapsody for $10 a month – access to 9 million songs across many major and minor record labels. The New York Times is preparing a new paid edition for iPad owners, and I think that might be the turning point for switching from paying for printed news to paying for online news.

If I had an iPad I would subscribe to The New York Times, if the web site edition closed down. I would also consider subscribing to magazines for the iPad. Again, which magazines I bought would depend if they weren’t available online. Right now I have little incentive to subscribe to electronic editions of The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Wired because they offer too much content for free.

I used to spend hundreds a dollars a year for magazine subscriptions, but cut them all out because I believe it’s more Earth friendly to read the content online. And I don’t always expect to get a free lunch, but as long as the content is free I have no incentive to pay either. I pay Rhapsody $10 a month because I want the music and I don’t want to steal it. There’s plenty of free legal music on the web, but it’s too much trouble to collect. For $10 a month I get legal access to 98% of what’s for sale. I’d rather pay $10 a month to a service like Rhapsody if they distributed legal news and magazines reprints, than make individual subscriptions, but that’s not available.

I’m currently pay Safari Books Online $34 a month for online access to 10,000 plus computer books. Thus, I’m proving I’m willing to pay for online content. But I don’t always like the deals being offered. The online editions of The New Yorker and Scientific American are more expensive than discount offers I get for the paper editions. No incentive there to subscribe. I don’t like paying print edition prices for digital editions – it feels like I’m getting ripped off. Publishers are saving on paper, printing, shipping, distribution, and postal costs, and they aren’t passing any of those savings on to me.

Rupert Murdoch wants people to pay for what they read on the net, at least when they are reading something he’s selling in the analog world. Now that’s totally against the way the Internet works now. The reason why the Internet is great is because you can share links. If some content goes behind paywalls, the Internet will fork into the free and non-free, that which can be linked, and that which can’t.

The Internet is big enough to handle such diversity, but what does that mean at the social level? We get part of the population reading high quality paid journalism, and the rest will live off of free blog news. It will also mean those sites that depend on ad revenue will have more readers, those fleeing the paid sites, thus beefing up their financial model.

But think of it this way. Do you prefer paying for HBO shows, without ads, or watching NBC shows with tons of ads? That also means, any content I subscribe to on the net better be ad free. If the TimesSelect 2.0 was $5 a month, instead a week, I’d probably subscribe now if it was totally ad free. The free, but extremely limited version, has a few ads, but they are still tastefully placed so I can ignore them. And the amount of great content the New York Times provides with the free edition of the TimesSelect 2.0 also discourages me from paying.

Publishers are going to have a hard time selling content online, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It’s better for the economy, and creates more jobs if we pay for what we read. And we get better written news. But publishers can’t sell quality content in one place if they also give it away in another just as easy to get to location.

JWH – 3/31/10

Going Paperless 4 – Alternative Methods

I’m not sure how many people are interested in the topic of going paperless since it gets few hits on the stats page – but I’m enjoying exploring the idea. And I did get an email from Adam Kadleck suggesting I try out Zinio, an online magazine service. Since he works for the company he also provided me with a sample subscription to Saveur Magazine, a colorful periodical about cuisine.

A huge shortcoming of the Kindle is its lack of ability to show photographs and color graphics. I remember reading an early complaint about the Kindle from a Slashdot kid who whined the Kindle couldn’t handle comics and porn -reading material that Zinio can handle.

A magazine is not very magazine-like on the Kindle. Zinio sells magazines and has a custom software reader so magazine pages look exactly like they do in their paper form. It even fakes page turning with graphics and sound. Zinio is paperless but with more of the natural features of paper. Saveur Magazine would not work on the Kindle. Without the appetizing photos of the food it would lose much of its appeal.

The Zinio software reader works very well on my 19″ wide-screen LCD monitor showing two full page at a time. However, I need to zoom in to read the content. Zinio makes this a breeze, but I wonder if I had a 22″ monitor if I could read without zooming. The height of my 19″ monitor is about an inch less than the height of a standard magazine after you take into account the Zinio menu. The screen view on 22″ monitor could well be the same height as a paper magazine.

Right now Zinio has a decent selection of magazines, but far from the selection of a good bookstore. And like ebooks, the issue of the pricing of e-magazines is still questionable. Why pay the same subscription price for a paperless magazine when the publisher isn’t covering the overhead for paper, printing and postage? It’s not uncommon to see $5.99 and $6.99 mags at the bookstore – I would think going paperless and using Zinio they should sell for $1.99 at most. PC World is $19.97 a year on Zinio. I’ve gotten better offers than that in the mail. Science is $99.00 – and that seems way too much for electrons.

The photographs on Zinio look pretty good but nowhere near the quality of a slick paper print. Strangely enough the quality reminds me of the new paper used in Sky & Telescope, a big step down from their old paper. You can magnify Zinio photographs but they break up. It would be great if the Zinio photographs offered quality features over print magazines, like larger hi-rez popup views.

The feature I would want the most from Zinio is full text indexing. I have several years of Sky & Telescope on my shelves, but finding an article means lots of flipping pages. It would be great if I had a library of Zinio magazines that I could quickly query for instant data.

There is an online company Press Display that offers reading newspapers online in the same way Zinio works for magazines, but their reader is browser based. Even though many of these newspapers offer free online editions, the ability to read a newspaper that looks like the printed edition does have value, maybe even value worth paying. The New York Times offers the Times Reader for $14.95 a month. It’s not a system for seeing the paper as printed, but a online viewer to making newspaper reading better than reading through a web browser, so its yet another alternative to paper.

The problem with these solutions is being tied to your monitor for reading. Now I don’t mind reading off a monitor – screen resolution is now better than newsprint and fonts can be enlarged to beat tiny magazine typefaces. What I’d like is to read in my La-Z-Boy, but to do that will require waiting for an ebook reader with a hi-rez color screen the size of a standard magazine page. I expect such a Star Trek like tablet in the next few years.

I don’t think it will be long before we’ll stop murdering millions of trees just to let people read a couple headlines and do the daily crossword. Going paperless means changing habits but I think there will be technology to help us to keep our old addictive reading behaviors while adding new features that help us process knowledge.

Going Paperless 5

Jim

Going Paperless

When my Time magazine renewal came in recently I decided not to renew. I had been paying about $29 a year and now it was $49, and I thought that too much. Then on Saturday I saw the new issue at my favorite bookstore and wanted to read it, but I passed on it thinking I’d need to learn to do without. Later that evening I had a V-8 moment where I imagined hitting my head. Hell, I have a Kindle and I can get Time from the Kindle store, I thought. It turns out subscribing to the Kindle version of Time is only $1.49 a month or about $18 a year.

Flipping on my Kindle I zoomed over to their store and subscribed and instantly saw a download completed message. A couple clicks later I was reading the article I saw at the bookstore about George Clooney being the last Hollywood star.

Then it occurred to me that I should check Time’s web site, and I’ll be damn if the whole article wasn’t there for free. Not only was the read for free it also included a video segment of George Clooney going into the writer’s crawl space looking for source of an alarm that had gone off unexpectedly. Seeing the video of a fancy movie star at the writer’s modest house for dinner doing ordinary things really did accent the piece. I could have had all of this for free.

The trouble is reading Time online isn’t exactly pleasurable, and reading the Kindle is, so I’m happy to pay for my Kindle copy. However, this experience reminded me of an article in the latest issue of Wired (hard copy $12 a year) called “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business” – which I now link so you can read for free. Once again I wished I had this article on my Kindle. The Kindle is actually as near perfect for my eyes as I can imagine anything formatted for reading. Among all the little buttons at the bottom of online reading material I now wish there was a “Send to Kindle” button. It would be worth the dime Amazon charges for receiving such stuff.

We are really very close to having a paperless society that pundits have talked about every since I can remember. People always exclaim they hate reading off the computer screen even though they spend hours a day doing so. Now the Kindle offers a better way to read, even better than paper, and that starts to suggest going paperless is possible.

By the way, I kid you not when I say I prefer to read the Kindle over paper. If my paper material was formatted like the Kindle, paper would be fine, but modern layout artists format magazines for people with 20-15 vision. The typeface on the Kindle is sharp, large and the scan line is just a few inches across – very easy on the eyes.

I subscribe to a lot of magazines, most of which I only read a tiny fraction of each issue. All those trees cut down and processed with tons of water, power and dangerous chemicals so I can just flip through and read a few tidbits here and there. Now that’s wasteful. I’ve been feeling guilty for years, but with global warming I really feel terrible about such waste. I’ve decided it’s time to go paperless. Besides that I’m tired of carrying so much paper out to the curb for recycling.

I canceled the paper over the protest of my wife – we finally compromised and get just the Sunday edition, but I’m aiming to eliminate that too eventually. I hate to see newspapers lose business and carriers lose jobs, but we recycle pounds of newspaper after only reading ounces of pages. That’s just too wasteful. Now I’m on to finding new ways to read my magazines.

Most magazines do not have Kindle editions, but they usually have a web edition. However, many of those do not have full text online. I got the latest Scientific American today and checking online I find two articles available as full-text, including the cover story “The End of Cosmology,” the one I wanted to read the most. The others articles are available for money online and SciAm also offers a digital subscription for $39.95 a year that includes 12 new issues and access to 180 old issues. That seems steep because my paper copies cost just $24.95, and that includes shipping and the slaughter of the pulp trees. Seems like bits of electrons would cost less.

What I’d really like is a service like Netflix that for a single fee provided me with full access to a range of magazines and their back issues. I still don’t believe Wired hippie pie in the sky about everything being free. And if everything free is going to be plastered with ads like a race car then I don’t want free.

Going paperless will be tough. I don’t think the online Popular Photography will be as nice to read online as flipping through the paper version. They do a pretty good job and sometimes the photos look better online. And it’s much easier to maintain back issue information online. It would be great if they truly showcased every photo with a 1920 x 1200 pixel version. Now that would be worth subscribing too. This would be especially great if I could add them to my Desktop Art Gallery.

I currently subscribe to two paper editions of science fiction magazines, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Recently I bought an issue of Analog which had the #2 part of a serial so I zipped over the Fictionwise and bought the past issue and as it turned out the third issue was already on sale too. Fictionwise then sends me my magazines to my Kindle for reading. So I read a Kindle issue, then read a paper issue and then finished up with a Kindle issue. That really convinced me I preferred reading SF by Kindle.

The SF mags are slowly losing subscribers so I’m wondering if e-book subscribers are helping or hurting their business. It costs the same to sub with either edition and once again I feel like I’m getting more for my money with paper but I actually read more stories when I get the Kindle edition.

It will take a year or two for all my paper subscriptions to lapse. During the time maybe more magazines will come out on Kindle, or I’ll just start reading them online. I hope the Kindle does become a success and the “Send to Kindle” button starts appearing on web pages.

Going paperless is a lot like going CD-less. I assume DVDs will be next. Can magazines and newspapers survive and thrive off of online and e-book editions? That’s the real question. If Wired is right then they can, but I don’t know. So far the tide is against online subscriptions – people expect everything on the web for free and I don’t know if that’s possible in a paperless world. Right now publishers make the bulk of their income off of paper editions. Can they even survive in a paperless world without charging? I don’t know. I do know I gave up reading my local paper years ago when I discovered I could read the NY Times for free online.

Maybe they could combine free web versions but have a fee based button for sending to the Kindle. I’d gladly pay 10-25 cents an article for such a fee.

With global warming, oil and water shortages, paper is an expensive luxury if you have a digital world.

Going Paperless 2

Jim