Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Time's Idea to Save Newspapers

I like it--charge per click, a la Itunes.

"Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for for an article or a dime fer that day's full edition. . . I suspect most [consumers] would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough."

The light bulb has flashed on but has not been implemented yet, so you can read Time Magazine's piece "How to Save Your Newspaper" online for free. And if you google the title, you'll get to see what all the bloggers are saying about the idea. But who cares about bloggers?

Walter Isaacson (the author) does. He is kind enough to include us in his idea: "magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands." Go, us!

The next article in the Feb. 16 2009 US edition of Time covers the new generation of readers that will be competing with Kindle in 2009-10: Plastic Logic, Pixel Qi, and Adobe AIR. Something on which to spend our tax refunds, oh joy.

I would love to have a Kindle, but the price of books for the device--given that there's no printing involved--still seems exorbitant. I'd rather go to the library.

As for the others, the Plastic Logic won't really be available until 2011 and the AIR's screen is to small for me. The Pixel Qi looks very promising but is not out yet. It all depends on how expensive the books and magazines will be.

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