mikolas

Hearst Goes for Digital Distribution?

According to CNN, Hearst is developing their own version of electronic reader that can be used to read both newspapers and magazines. While I’m all for digital distribution of books, I think there are some issues that should be considered before setting high hopes for electronic newspapers:

• The netbook. People already have portable devices suitable for reading news in web format. What is the real benefit of having to drag around yet another device?
• You might argue then, why a book reader is OK while news reader is not? Well, there are 2 things: 1) people rarely read more than a few articles in each newspaper so the need for paper like display is questionable 2) book reader is small form-factor while news reader is large form-factor. And then again, you don’t carry around dozens of magazines or papers so the usage scenario is totally different from book reader one.
• Price. There is tremendous amount of information available online, so why pay for it? If you really want to have the occasional paper, just pick one up as a paper version. No need to carry around another gadget just in case.

I understand this incentive from monetary perspective, as moving content to digital distribution channel might make for huge saving in the future when the whole logistics involving printing and distribution could be cut down. But once again, a good idea really should have more into it than the idea itself. Just take a deep look into the consumer behaviour and current capabilities to get the information they need and a dedicated device could be rendered pretty useless. You know, people are using their phones to listen music and web browsing and there must be a reason for that. And that reason is to not having to carry around so much stuff.