At Ifra's annual Beyond the Printed Word conference this afternoon, Atsushi Sato, deputy manager of the Digital Media Division of The Asahi Shimbun of Japan described how his newspaper operates its sites for mobile phone users.

His newspaper, which has a daily circulation of 12 million copies daily, operates 12 mobile phone information sites and earned $33 million, in a nation in which almost everyone uses a mobile phone. His divisions average annual revenue per users is $53.30, which by comparison puts its mobile on par with the revenues earned by only a few top American newspaper websites. It earns those revenues despite earning a relatively small commission on use of its content by mobile phones. When a mobile phone user accesses the content, she is billed by her phone company, which in turn gives Asahi a ten percent commission. The average amount that Asashi earns per user per service is only $0.07875 per month. Fortunately, his services have lots of users.

Asahi has created and grown its mobile sites by creating a main site, seeing what topics of content are most used on it, and then creating new sites about that content. Among its sites:

• Asahi-Nikkansports, a joint venture with Nikkansports, provides up to 170 sports articles per day, updating throughout the day.


• Asahi Lifeline, a site that keeps users informed about natural or man-made disasters.


• Asahi Mobile Shorts, which provides nine 15-second video clips and 5 still photos daily. Sato said that Asahi had found 15-second to be a good length of time on mobile phones.


• Nikkan Geino, an entertainment news site, heavy on celebrity and Hollywood news.


• Asahi Otona no Hondana, a site that offers the contents of ebooks and manga (graphic comics). Sato said this site had grown 386 percent during 2006 and was a major source of revenues.


• R25 Mobile, which offers a free magazine (no charge to the user's phone bill).


• Mixi, a social networking service, which has 10 million users.


• Mobage, a free game service, which has 7 million users.


• Kaor-Checki, a site people can user to compare themselves to TV personalities, which has 10 million users.

He said it faces threats from Web browsers becoming installed into Japanese mobile phones (which are based on more simpler graphical interfaces); from a saturation of the Japanese mobile market; and from the disinclation of young people (ages 18-30) to pay for online content. Sato said that part of his division's future strategy will be to concentrate e-books, manga, and also on paid services for older people.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I frequently write about newspapers' experience with the new medium because theirs has been the longest experience.

The New York Times launched the world's first online edition in 1974 with LexisNexis, followed by many magazines and other newspapers on that professional online service or competitors such as Dialog. Though I forget which printed periodical launched the first online edition aimed at consumers , but it probably was on an dial-up bulletin board service around 1980. Many newspapers and magazines launched online editions on CompuServe and Prodigy later that decade. And in 1995, The San Jose Mercury News became the world's first newspaper to launch an edition on the World Wide Web. Broadcasters followed years behind.

So what have newspapers learned during all that time? What can anyone learn from newspapers' experiences with the new medium?

One facet can be glimpse in the cover story of the October edition of Editor and Publisher magazine, the trade journal of the American newspaper industry. Entitled 2020: A Press Odyssey, it asked print newspaper executives what they think their products will look like in 15 years. [Unfortunately, the cover story is available online only to the magazine's print edition subscribers or to paying subscribers of its online edition.] Here are some excerpts:

Industry veterans across the country imagine neither the disappearance of printed editions nor the likely appearance of all- digitally printed newspapers by 2020. Almost all, however, point to improved targeting of advertising and customer-selectable content. "I don't think that in 15 years our economic model is going to allow us to mass-market everything to everybody," says Richard Rinehart, operations VP at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.

"The idea that we call ourselves a newspaper is a problem," says St. Petersburg Times Tampa [sic] Publisher Joe DeLuca, because it identifies the business by its distribution channel -- something like "Coke calling itself a can." The former Times operations director now responsible for the paper's business operations in Tampa says advertisers are focused more on niche markets, and want to target them in ways that mass distribution now cannot.

"I believe the whole paper will have to be targeted," with only requested sections delivered, says LA Weekly Production Director Robin Shank, adding that subscribers shouldn't have to toss out half their papers. … What's more, she and others think revenues should rise from charging subscribers by the section and raising ad rates to correspond with subscriber-section targeting. … Advertisers know not everyone reads every section. "They're not stupid," says Shank. "If I'm buying that section, I'm a heck of a lot more valuable to that advertiser because I'm going to read it." Rather than selling an ad on the strength of total circulation, she urges charging advertisers a premium rate to reach those they know will see their ads.

"We just need to become more of a niche product," says Rinehart, even if it means doing some custom assembly. "It's not all about savings."

Shank says [this] unbundling is hard to sell, nowhere more than in the newsroom. At Gannett, Production Vice President J. Austin Ryan isn't buying either. Besides waste and time-consuming replates and restarts of many small zoned runs, he worries that if publishers tell advertisers that few read the section in which their ads appear, many will just ask to move their ads to the A section, which cannot hold every ad.

On the other hand, Ryan thinks distribution needs only to be better utilized. "We have a distribution system that works very well -- at 4 o'clock in the morning," he says, calling it the envy of the U.S. Postal Service and wondering if it couldn't deliver whatever customers are willing to pay for.

Future post-press automation, therefore, will need to shrink the workforce and "allow mass customization," … says consultant and former Gannett production executive Chuck Blevins The good news, he adds, is that systems at the front end of publishing are up to the task.

Most of the rest of the cover story details the pre-press, press, and post-press technologies needed to make such things happen, details that will probably bore newspaper online edition executives as much as their talk about server technologies, JavaScripting, and Flash bore the print executives. It's nonetheless an excellent article by E&P Senior Editor Jim Rosenberg.

I've been writing since 2000 (example) about how printing press technologists are moving towards the idea of the individually customizable newspaper, yet most newspapers' online executive dismiss the concept of offering equally customizable editions online. Why is that?

Of course, this E&P cover story begs the question of whether or not a print newspaper industry will exist in America by 2020. A few years ago, when the industry's perrenial circulation declines were only in the 0.5 to 1 percent range, Journalism Professor and former Knight Ridder newspapers executive Philip Meyer, the author of the recent book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, noted that "the last daily reader will disappear in September 2043."

During the past few years, despite a rising economy, those annual circulation declines have accelerated into the mid to high single percentages. If all these trends continue, that predicted last reader might arrive 23 years earlier and read an individually customized edition.

Comments:

"Thanks for the summary Vin, but you got the E&P homepage link wrong. The article you cite is at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/magazine/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001181115

"If any non-subscribers want to read it in full, ping me (jdefoore AT yahoo DOT com) and I'll send you the text with the hope that you'll subscribe.

"And if this subject really interests you, check out E&P's Web Exclusive here (FREE): http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/technology/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001181750"
— Jay DeFoore, E&P's Online Editor

(Jay: Thanks, I've corrected the URL in the original posting. - Vin)

"I'm as baffled as you are by the industry's insistence on the persistence of print, given that they were asked to project 15 years out. I'm not among those who think print will entirely disappear, but I can't help but wonder if the value of those multimillion press plants for all those targeted editions won't be wiped out before the cost of them is even amortized?

"Cheers and thanks for your posts." — Mark Hamilton

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Press Gazette trade journal looks at U.K. newspapers' use of digital editions for circulation and archiving. The story focuses way too much on one vendor (Olive Software) than an objective examination should. It also omitts any circulation figures, a glaring oversight, probably due to the newspapers refusing to provide any.

However, it gives at good look at The Scotsman's financial success from using digital edition technology to create an online archive of editions from 1950 back to 1817. That "substantial six-figure investment" was recouped within three years and has greatly eased use of the archives by historians, academics, business people, and other researches.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More than 100 U.S. magazines, twice the number from a year ago, now count significant numbers of digital editions among their circulation figures, according to the auditing firm of BPA Worldwide. Here are the top ten as of December 2004:

• eWeek 65,000 among 400,100 circulations (16.2 percent)
• Computer Weekly 40,065 among 139,817 (28.7%)
• Microsoft Certified Professional 39,092 among 119,092 (32.8%)
• NASA Tech Briefs 31,179 among 190,428 (16.4%)
• Electronic Weekly 16,853 among 43,498 (38.7%)
• EDN 16,397 among 134,025 (12.2%)
• ECN 16,324 among 126,020 (13.0%)
• Computing 15,000 among 115,000 (13.0%)
• SD Times 13,997 among 51,481 (27.2%)
• Foreign Policy 13,804 among 103,589 (13.3%)
• Cadalyst 12,442 among 62,818 (19.8%)

It's perhaps no surprise that computer trade journals are most of those with the largest numbers and percentages, but the inclusion of Foreign Policy magazine shows that computer geeks aren't the only users of digital editions. (A tip of my hat to Digital Magazine News for providing these figures.)

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At the highest inhabitable level of the Empire State Building in New York City is something redolent of the University of Missouri's new EmPRINT digital edition project.

When the Empire State Building was designed in the late 1920s, architects gave its top floor a function that nowadays makes sense only in retrospect of their knowledge of what was then the highest technology in transportation media. The architects gave it a dirigible docking port.

Read the history of aviation until 1930 and you might understand why the architects' belived that lighter-than-air crafts were the transportation medium of the future. For nearly one and a half centuries — ever since 1783 when two Frenchmen became the first world's aviators, using a linen balloon to ascend into the skies over Paris — balloon-format aircraft had been the top technology for air transportation. Though the Wright Brothers invented heavier-than-air aircraft only 27 years before the foundation of the Empire State Building was laid, that was only as long ago as 1988 is now. When Charles Lindbergh flew his tiny heavier-than-air craft solo across the Atlantic 42 months before the Building was completed, dirigibles had already been ferrying hundreds of paying passengers in comfort across the world's oceans for nearly a decade.

During 1929 alone, the Graf Zeppelin logged more than a million miles and hundreds of transoceanic and transcontinental flights. At 776-feet long, it was the size of an ocean liner (the steamship Titanic was only 106 feet longer but 18 feet less taller) and had many of the creature comforts of a steamship. Passengers aboard it and sister ships such as the Hindenburg traveled in ornate individual cabins with shower baths and clubrooms featuring grand pianos, with meals cooked aboard by expert chefs. No wonder that the architects of the Empire State Building thought dirigibles would be the transportation medium of the future and built a docking port, aerial gangway, and customs shed atop their iconic skyscraper.

No wonder too that the architects of the University of Missouri's EmPRINT digital edition may think that Adobe Acrobat editions will be the future of news communications media. Indeed, the newspaper design has been the primarily format for news vehicles during the past half millennium. During that time, there's been no better vehicle for conveying news than ink on dried sheets of cellulose pulp.

It can’t travel fast, but the newspaper format has more room in it than any other news vehicle. It's not as fast or timely as a broadcast, but it convey news and opinion in a statelier fashion. If you’re above a certain age (test: were you alive when Nixon was President?), then you probably feel that newspapers are the most comfortable of all vehicles conveying news.

Yet, how does someone propel an old format in a new century? A decade before the first girders of Empire State Building were delivered, balloonists attempted to answer that question by attaching the newfangled diesel or gasoline engines to their lighter-than-air crafts. The era of ponderous dirigible was born. Ten years ago, some veteran newspaper executives tried to answer their equivalent question by attaching the newfangled Adobe Acrobat graphical rendering software engine to printed newspapers. The era of ponderous digital editions was born.

The Count Zeppelin of these newspaper experiments is Roger Fidler, formerly the first corporate Director of New Media for Knight Ridder newspapers, now professor at Kent State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and director of its Institute for CyberInformation, and nowadays the inaugural Visiting Fellow of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. EmPRINT is his Fellowship project.

Like Count Zeppelin in transportation media, Fidler is a true pioneer in news meda. In 1979, he joined Knight Ridder's videotex development team and served as the first Director of Design for that company's pioneering consumer online service, Viewtron, and as Knight Ridder's first corporate Director of Design and Newsroom Technology. Four years later, he founded the first computer news graphics service (now Knight Ridder/Tribune Graphics). Then in 1985, he founded the first global online service for the newspaper industry, PressLink. He established Knight Ridder's Information Design Laborator in 1992. As Fidler's bio at the University of Missouri states, "I have pursued the development of digital alternatives to traditional ink-on-paper newspapers."

What he launched earlier this week in Missouri is a digital doppelganger to traditional ink-on-paper newspapers — specifically a weekly Adobe Acrobat version of the University’s Missourian daily newspaper. If you like to see soaring examples of huge digital editions, then this 126-page, 12.7-megabyte virtual dirigible is for you. Even the language of its associated website FAQ is soaring: " The Missourian was one of the first newspapers in the world to launch a news Web site. Now the Missourian is the world’s first newspaper to launch an EmPRINT edition."

That's a big shadow to cast. EmPRINT is an operable, but huge, slow, and ponderous high-tech vehicle for conveying newspaper news. EmPRINT stands for 'Electronic Media Print'. It's emphasis truly is on older vehicles in its medium. Just as the users of dirigibles enjoyed many of the comforts of steamships, users of this EmPRINT edition enjoy many of the comforts generally enjoyed when reading dried sheets of cellulose pulp. Fidler calls it "an innovative, new digital publishing standard that brings together the familiar qualities of printed publications — newspapers, magazines, journals, books, etc. — with the interactive, multimedia features of the Web."

The Missourian EmPRINT edition has colorful, portrait-format pages and layouts lifted from newspaper design; it even has newspaper-style display ads. But does it offer any advantages over cellulose pulp editions or newspaper websites?

Except for better graphical resolution, there are none that I can find.

Unlike websites, the EmPRINT edition can be read when offline; but so too can any other digital edition such as the the dozens of newspapers and magazines offered by Newsstand.com. Or the Microsoft Reader editions that used to be published and e-mailed by the Hampshire Chronicle in the UK could also be read offline. Or any newspaper website converted into full MHTML and e-mailed as an attached file can be read offline. Most of those require far smaller files than this inflatible's 12.7 megabytes!

Though it is true that users of broadband can download a 12.7-megabyt file in a minute or less, what about the 55 percent of American Internet users who don't have broadband access at home? (After a Zinio executive once boasted to a publishing conference that one of his company's users downloaded a digital edition via a mobile phone modem while on safari, I was impolite enough to question him publicly about how long that must have taken via a remote African cellular phone connection: one or two days?) Or is EmPRINT designed only for broadband users in homes or offices?

Although the EmPRINT project's website states that EmPRINT offers "...the interactive, multimedia features of the Web," I'm at a loss to find those features in it. The only hyperlinks appear to be those denoting 'next page' or when a story jumps ('continued') from one Acrobat page to another. This EmPRINT edition is basically a flat file, like newsprint. It doesn't really utilize the Web hyperlinking or embedded multimedia features of Adobe Acrobat.

The project's website offers as an advantage that, "There is no page scrolling and no distracting computer or browser clutter." What that really means is the reader loses the navigational controls he used to download the EmPRINT edition and to go elsewhere online once he's reading this edition. That's not an advantage.

Unlike digital editions from Newsstand and Zinio, EmPRINT's format uses far larger text fonts, which does make it easier to read onscreen but also creates the large number of page in this edition. Reading it, you don't have to scroll (you can't), but you will have to click to new pages very often per story.

Why does EmPRINT so electronically replicate the flat newspaper format?

Continue reading "The Digital Edition Dirigibles" »

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hitachi plans to begin selling a color-capable electronic paper in 2006.

Rather than use organic light-emitting (OLED) diodes, the way that Philips' e-paper does, Hitachi's device will use a liquid crystal displays (LCD) 3-centimeters thick and equipped with a special panel that has doubles the noral light reflectivity of LCDs. Hitachi showed a 7-inch prototype, said the device is capable of showing an image bright enough for easy viewing without using a backlight, and can display a high-resolution image for several months on commercially available lithium ion battery cells. Unlike Philips e-paper, the Hitachi device can't display video.

Nor can it be rolled up or bent. So, Hitachi believes its market for this e-paper will be used in shopping malls and trains for posters and ads, as well as at public facilities, offices and homes for information and message boards. Those are also the markets that currently use E -Ink's black & white, lower resultion electronic paper.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

[UPDATE: Some blogs which have linked to this item call it my vision of the newspaper of 2010. Calling it that is inaccurate. I believe that e-paper devices will be in common use by 2010 and that consumers will use these device for reading books, magazines, business reports, grocery lists, homework, etc. But whether or not the newspapers industry will take advantage of this by 2010 and make newspapers available on these devices is very much an intangible. Perhaps a few individual newspapers will, but I now don't see much concerted work by the majority of the newspaper industry or its industry groups to prepare for these technologies.]

I believe that by the end of this decade we'll begin to see portable, flexible (capable of being rolled up and put into a pocket or purse when not in use), handheld, color electronic display for sale to consumers.

If that sounds far-fetched, please understand that the first generation of electronic paper displays from Philips can display B&W text or flickering video and can be rolled into a cylinder less than one inch (2.54 cm) in diameter, and that Philips will start pilot plant production of one million such displays next year. Technical improvements on these display have been swift, so I believe that further improvements will lead to color, high resolution versions during the remaining half of the decade. Nonetheless, Philips (plus Sony and other manufacturers) are already planning sales of those versions in an even shorter time.

These electronic paper displays will have a CPU and a battery (note that today's e-paper consumes a fraction of the electricity of contemporary LCD screens, allowing 3 to 21 hours on a charge, according to a report in Nature). The CPU and battery will probably take the form of a narrow cylinder bound along longest perimeter of the display, around which you can roll-up the display when not in use.

If these devices will contain a CPU and battery, why not also a wireless chip? The display will need outside connectivity and wireless is a better means for that than docking stations or plugs. GSM/GPRS wireless telephony chips have already become so inexpensive that disposable cell phones are on sale in Europe. Later this decade, broadband wireless (3G/UMTS) will be in use (it's already being implemented in Hong Kong, Korea, and many European companies). Why not a chip that combines 3G/UMTS, Wi-Fi (whatever 801.11 alphabet exists then), and BlueTooth. Moore's Law should reduce the cost of such of wireless chip to a reasonable level this decade.

And if this e-paper device then has wireless connectivity, how can news publishers or news broadcasters utilize that to automatically and routinely deliver their content into these devices to people who subscribe to those news organizations' content, without those people having to remember to download the content each day?

Until six months ago, I thought the only likely answer to that question would be by publishers sending their content into these devices via the wireless telephony subcarrier frequencies that now provide SMS and MMS. That solution is still viable. However, RSS feeds delivered via wireless broadband GPRS/UTMS, Wi-Fi, or even BlueTooth might be a viable alternative.

These wouldn't be today's plain-text, graphically empty RSS feeds. Instead, this future form of RSS would encapsulate publisher's or broadcaster's entire daily report in full graphical, interactive layout. This would include all hyperlinks to video or other multimedia. Imagine a hybrid of digital edition and website; all the graphical capabilities and layouts of the former, plus the interactivity and multimedia of the latter. Click the photo, see the video, etc. Click the links embedded in texts and related stories appear, etc.

If RSS can be adapted to encapsulate radio or video programming into Apple iPods (as is now beginning to be done), then future versions of it should be capable of encapsulating entire, hybrid 'converged' editions.

Automatic and routine daily delivery would eliminate one of the fundamental flaws about publishing news via the Web: A web site doesn't actually delivery anything; its contents instead away retrieval, which consumers have proven to do infrequently (the average online consumers retrieves it only 2 to 5 times per month, according to Nielsen//Netratings or ComScore Media Metrix). Like the automatic and routine daily delivery of a printed newspaper onto your doorstep or into your office, the newspaper (or broadcast) that you request would be automatically and routinely delivered daily into your e-paper device.

By automatically and routinely receiving an entire edition that is a hybrid of digital edition and website, rather than simply a website home page, the subscriber wouldn't need to deal two with another flaws of the Web: (1) having to download Web pages one at a time and (2) the HTML's graphical layout inferiority when compared to printed editions. By hybrid of digital edition and website, I don't mean a 2MB to 20MB PDF file embedded with hyperlinks, but a file format that is thinner than that.

[Update: tthe presentation of these editions' content — in other words, whether or not full graphics are visible — will be controllable by the consumer, not solely by the publisher as with today's printed publications. These editions also would utilize tagged files formats that flow to fit device screensiz, rather than be fixed size like today's digital editions or print editions. And the content in these editions will also be individualizable. I indeed don't see any reason why an 'edition' must necessarily be from a single publisher.]

This hybrid of digital edition and website wouldn't utilize Web banner ads. The major economic problem banner ads is that as an Web edition's popularity grows, so does that website's inventory of ad space that must be sold. For example, if the 60-page daily The New York Times somehow doubles its print circulation, the newspaper probably wouldn't begin printing an 120-page edition. It instead would probably continue to print its 60-age edition but begin charging twice as much money for an advertising page in it. However, if NYTimes.com someone doubles it site traffic, the website now has twice as many advertising spots to sell. It can't simply double its rate per spot, as it could with print. The economics of print ad rates operate according to the principle of scarce space, but the economics of banner ads operate according to the principle of surplus space. (This is the reason why NYTimes.com's ad revenues haven't increased 250X during the years that its site traffic increased that much.) The economics of electronic publication advertising need to brought back to the principles of scarcity.

This hybrid of digital edition would delivery interactive print ads. Neither the advertisers nor the publisher would need staffs to create or sell separate banner and print ads.

Electronically publishing an edition with a fixed number of pages (such as in a digital edition), ostensibly does that. Electronically delivering an entire edition intact also creates a package that websites don't offer, a service that will more likely motivate subscribers to pay something for a subscription.

These are only some of the ideas involved.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (4)

More than a year ago, we wrote about Mario Garcia, a world renown expert on newspaper design, predicting that the majority of the world's newspapers would became tabloid-sized within his lifetime. Garcia a few years earlier had predicted that a large number of American papers would switch to the smaller format by 2020.

This weekend, Garcia updated and accelerated his predictions. "Based on the happenings of the last two years alone, and primarily the last year, I would say it will happen quicker than that. By 2010 we will have many American papers converting," he told the Chicago Tribune.

Garcia cited the recent conversions of the British broadsheet the Times and The Independent (and soon The Guardian) to the more compact format, and how readers readily accept that the American tabloids Christian Science Monitor, Long Island Newsday, and Denver Rocky Mountain News offer quality, not sensational, journalism. He also noted that, in his more than 25 years experience on five continents, no research he has conducted has ever shown a reader preference for the larger format.

Conversion of broadsheets to tabloid format is important to electronic publishing as portrait-format electronic reading display devices begin to supercede landscape-format video monitors as this century develops. Today's broadsheet editions are woefully hard to read on landscape-format monitors, and table PCs, e-books, and e-paper will almost certainly be landscape, not portrait, formatted. Garcia said, "the [broadsheet] newspaper is really sort of anachronistic as a huge blanket which covers you."

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The annual IFRA/WAN/FIPP Beyond the Printed Word online publishing conference was held in Prague yesterday and today. A summary of the presentations is available from WAN and there is an interesting conference moblog.

Here from the conference (my thanks to the IFRA and WAN summaries) are some interesting ideas about mobile and digital editions:

Continue reading "Mobile and Digital Edition Ideas from 'Beyond the Printed Word'" »

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The American Press Institute's Cyberjournalist.net picked up our item last week about the woeful circulation of newspaper digital editions. Cyberjournalist's lead sentence, although well-intentioned, made a conclusion that we didn't: "In case there was any doubt that digital editions of newspapers were a horrible experience and destined to failure,...."

It's not quite a simple as all that.

Retailed digital editions of newspapers (i.e., those sold directly by the publication to the consumer) do have dismal circulations. This is because the proper technologies (i.e., truly interactive files of less than 1MB per edition delivered routinely, wirelessly, automatically, and without proprietary applications into consumers' handheld, portrait-screen, 4x6" or larger-sized combination phone/music/video/reading devices or e-paper devices) are still three to five years away. Retailed digital editions of newspapers aren't destined to failure, but will fail until those technologies are in the hands of consumers.

However, the Olive Software retailed digital editions that are hybrids of digital editions and Web sites (such as at the Arkanas Democrat Gazette but not at the Washington Post) have had a modicum of relative success for newspapers that insist upon charging for online content (itself is a questionable practice and not particularly successful).

The picture is different for digital editions of business-to-business magazines, scientific journals, or trade journals. They've generated healthy additional circulations from digital editions. For example, 65,000 of Ziff Davis' eWeek magazine's 400,000 circulation is now from digital editions.

Meanwhile, wholesaled digital editions of newspapers (sent by the publications via the Internet to distant locations, such as kiosks, hotels, resorts, corporations, cruise ships, etc., where the editions are printed out and distributed to consumers) are certainly successful for publishers. These generate ten to 20 times the additional circulations that retailed digital editions do and all major publishers should use these (vendors include NewspapersDirect, Satellite Newspapers, etc.)

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SEE AN UPDATE TO THIS POSTING

Here are a few circulation figures for some U.S. newspapers' digital editions:

Last week, the Christian Science Monitor (an excellent, objective, and non-religious newspaper) published a story admitting what's long been no secret within the American newspaper industry: it's parent operation, the Christian Science Publishing Society (CSPS), which also publish the Christian Science Sentinel, Christian Science Journal, and Christian Science Quarterly, is US$30 million in the hole, despite cutting 150 of its 900 employees.

The CSPS is still recovering from its lost tens of millions of dollars in an ill-advised attempt to create a Christian Science cable television channel nearly two decades ago. The stem those losses, the CSPS ten years ago closed one of its most popular new outlets, the Monitor radio service (which was carried by many public radio stations in the U.S.) And during the past 40 years the print circulation of the Christian Science Monitor newspaper itself has dropped from more than 250,000 to 69,000.

Meanwhile, the CSMonitor.com website has grown to receive 1.7 million different online visitors each month.

I've heard that the CSPS will force the Monitor website to begin charging for access. I've also heard that the savvy staff of that site will instead ask for donations in exchange for access, rather than charge a set price. (I wrote a ClickZ column last February about how the donation method can be ably used). Nevertheless, charging for general news content is almost always a bad idea, even when some site visitors are church members who might gladly donate money.

What should the CSPS really do? PDF edition of the Monitor downloadable from CSMonitor.com, not on postal mailing printed copies daily to reading rooms.

Yet, I'm sure that this advice will be anathema to CSPS. I think they'll sacrifice their growing new-media operation before they'll sacrife their dying print media operations. But what would founder Mary Baker Eddy have done the same in this situation?

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many corporations and companies prohibit employees from installing outside software on company computers. That prohibition has long been a problem for digital editions that require users to install a such application such Newsstand, Inc., or Zinio. Newsstand responded today with iBrowse, its version of browser-based digital editions that don't require installing such software.

"iBrowse is especially appealing for controlled circulation magazines whose readership is often based in small businesses or large corporations, including those using Apple's Macintosh. For subscribers working in companies with rigorous IT security standards, iBrowse eliminates firewall and administrative rights issues that would otherwise inhibit downloading an executable reader to an employee's desktop, laptop or tablet PC," said Newsstand, Inc., CEO Kit Webster in a press release.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I keep telling publishers that electronic paper isn't science fiction but science fact, technologiy that will go into commercial production this decade. I'm particular a fan of the rollable versions. For example, the picture above is of Polymer Vision B&W prototype demonstrated on May 27th at the International Society for Information Display's trade show in Seattle. (High resolution photos of this prototype are here.) the February edition of Nature, detailed how these flexible displays use active-matrix organic transistors, have video capabilities, and can be rolled to a radius of one centimeter (4/10ths of an inch) without significant loss in performance. In September, I'd published an illustration of Cambridge Technologies' e-paper 6-by-4 inch color prototype that rolls up into a pen and other technologies demonstrated at the Seybold Future of Print conference in San Francisco.

What is driving manufacturers' adoption of these technologies isn't any desires to serve markets of people who want to read electronic newspaper or magazines, but the technological fact that e-paper displays consume 1/50th to 1/100th. That means a PDA, or mobile phone, tablet device, or rollable screen that utilized e-paper display technologies will much, much more battery life that an equivalent device equipped with current LCD displays.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Jack Shafer of Slate.com has a solid analysis of the digital editions produced by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and other American newspapers. His conclusion is that "these electronic editions [are] as comfortable as a fat man trapped in an iron suit designed by a boa constrictor." I've long lamented (here's a recent example) how printed newspapers must convert from broadsheet to tabloid format and how their digital editions must lose unnecessary bulk. Shafer nicely encapsulates how these problems result in lousy circulation for even the best newspapers' digital editons:

… more people attend home games of the [Salisbury, Maryland] Class A Delmarva Shorebirds (3,460) than subscribe to The New York Times e-editions (daily, 3,331; Sunday, 2,780)."

Digital editions show great promise, but not the way that newspaper publishers are using them today.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We agree with the favorable review by Kieren McCathy in The Register of the beta versions from The Guardian and The Observer of London. A consumer doesn't first need to download any software. Each page of the newspaper appears on the screen in its original printed colors and format. Clicking your mouse on a story opens a popup box with an enlargement of the story. As McCathy notes, "The navigation is surprisingly easy."

Like McCathy, we're particularly impressed that Guardian Limited on its own created the system — without using digital edition middleware vendors such as NewsStand, Inc., Olive Software, NewspaperDirect, MHS, or others. We think this application is as sophisticated as anything produced by those vendors but without those vendors' disadvantages for the newspapers' publishers. There are still a few bugs (these are of course beta editions) and some photos are missing due to unresolved issues of copyright.

The current beta test of the editions is free. However, Simon Waldman, the newspapers' director of digital publishing, says thes digital editions will eventually costs £99 per year or £10 a month. That rate is competitive with the the digital editions from The Times (£90 per year) and the Telegraph (£149 if three consecutive three-month subscriptions are purchased).

Waldman this week told us that the digital editions are still someone of a niché experiment for these newspapers, but that he has high hopes. (Look too for some interesting comments from him in a story we're writing this month about the linked fate of print and Web editions.)

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 09:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

USA TODAY joins The New York Times as the two newspapers whose digital editions are being offered free to travelers in more than 700 American hotels, airports, and restaurants. The airports are Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle-Tacoma, San Jose, Austin, Oakland, and Buffalo. The Four Seasons, Loews, Wyndham, Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, Doubletree, and Embassy Suites hotel chains are participating, as are 110 McDonald that participate in a Wi-Fi access test project with Wayport, a company which offers wireless or wired Internet access in all those places. Travelers can receive three days of the newspapers' digital editions for free. If afterwards they purchase a 26 or 52 week digital subscription, they'll also receive a free $25 prepaid Waypoint connection card. These offers are cross-promotional deals among Wayport, NewsStand, Inc., which produces the digital editions, and each the newspapers' publisher. NewsStand, which last month announced the NYT deal, today announced the USA TODAY deal.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw reviews digital editions and likes what he sees. He prefers them over reading newspapers' Web sites.

I miss the serendipity of coming unexpectedly upon an interesting story I would never have thought to look for. Most of all, I miss the context — seeing the size of the headline, the placement of the story on the page and in the paper, the juxtaposition of the various elements that make up a daily newspaper: stories and headlines and photographs and charts and graphs and even, at times, the ads.

Shaw examines the services offered by digital edition aggregators NewsStand.com and NewspaperDirect.com (90 major dailies on NewsStand.com's service and 160 on NewspaperDirect.com's new PressDisplay service). He likes how PressDisplay requires no user software and its subscription pricing allows a user to read multiple newspapers, although he prefers NewsStand.com's navigation tools.

Shaw headlines his column, Newspapers on the Web get closer to the real thing, and ends it with:

All three of these services are a big step in the right direction, though. And they sure beat the alternatives when I'm out of town and want to see the closest approximation possible to the "real" L.A. Times — or when I'm here, in Los Angeles, and want to see the closest approximation possible to any number of out-of-town or foreign newspapers.

Those are generally fighting words to newspaper Web edition producers, who characteristically reply 'Yes, but digital editions aren't as interactive as Web sites!' Yet after 10 years of Web publishing, the comparative numbers of people who have online access but who prefer to read newspapers in print or digital editions versus those who prefer to read newspapers on the Web tells the real story: Reading Web editions isn't as satisfying as is reading a printed or digital edition.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Wayport, a company that provides Wi-Fi wireless and wired Internet access in hotels, airports and McDonald’s restaurants, will offer free downloads of The New York Times' digital editions.

Wayport provides Wi-Fi (802.11b) wireless and broadband wired Internet access in 680 U.S. hotels (including those of the Four Seasons, Loews, Wyndham, Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, Doubletree and Embassy Suites); Wi-Fi in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle-Tacoma, San Jose, Austin, Oakland and Buffalo airports; and has a pilot program to delivery Wi-Fi access inside approximately 100 McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. Wayport says it has recorded more than 3 million customer connections.

Wayport said that free downloads of the NYT's digital edition will be offered at all those locations. The offer is a cross-promotional program among Wayport, the NYT, and NewsStand, Inc. (which the NYT partially owns). Consumers who like the digital edition and purchase a subscription to it via the network will receive a free $25 Wayport prepaid connection card.

Wayport says that business travelers prefer to receive news and information on the road in the same familiar format as print editions. “Full-content digital media such as major newspapers like The New York Times are a great benefit for busy, time-pressed travelers,” said Dan Lowden, vice president of marketing for Wayport.

We think this deal is progress towards high-speed wireless delivery of newspapers directly to consumers — a necessity if newspapers are to survive during this century. Although this particular deal use only the short-range WiFi technologies and the relatively huge NewsStand digital edition files, it's certainly a step in the right direction.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:16 PM | Permalink

For several years, we've been advocating that 'convergence' isn't media companies combining their print and broadcast newsrooms — that's multimedia, not convergence.

True convergence is the convergence of print and of online into a single product. Not multiple products (newsprint, Web, broadcast, etc.), but a single product output.

This is happening. The two vector lines of convergence respectively began in 1993 and 1996.

In 1993, the Internet was opened from public and commercial use. That effectively ended the era of proprietary online services (CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi, and Interchange, although AOL still very popularly lingers) and so allowed any publisher directly to serve consumers without any middlemen. Since then, almost every major newspaper, magazines, and broadcaster has begun publishing Web sites.

Meanwhile in 1996, Scitex of Israel, a company that was the publishing industry's major source of pre-press imaging technologies, spun off a subsidiary that let publishers utilize their publications' pre-press images for other purposes. That subsidiary became PressPoint of New York City, whose technologies allowed newspapers to transmit their publications' digital images to remote printing facilities around the world. PressPoint became a private company in 1998, lead by former New York Times Company President Lance Primus and venture funded by Warburg, Pincus. By 2000, it was delivering digital images of 55 major newspapers worldwide to printing facilities worldwide. Attracted to that market, a competitor, NewspaperDirect, also of New York City, was formed and began serving even more newspapers. Although Warburg, Pincus closed PressPoint during the Internet bust of 2000, NewspaperDirect continues to operate and now delivers same-day editions of 180 major newspapers into 66 countries worldwide.

However, PressPoint and NewspaperDirect didn't deliver those editions directly to consumers; local newsstands, hotels, resorts, and corporations did that. Since 2000, several new companies have been formed to deliver these digital editions that last step. NewspaperDirect also is moving in direction. The first of the new companies was SatelliteNewspapers (former PEPC PressPoint) of The Hague, which has invented and is deploying newspaper vending machines that can print same-day editions of 130 newspapers on-demand. Another company is Newsstand.com of Austin, which delivers digital editions of 80 newspapers online. Another company is Olive Software of Denver, originally a digital archiving company, that now also provides newspapers with software that presents a multimedia digital edition online in lieu of a Web site.

Web sites and digital editions each many complementary advantages & disadvantages. Web sites offer hyperlinks, multimedia, and unlimited content space but without the graphical layout capabilities and convenience of paper and without the economic ability to sell advertising space as a valuable scarcity. Digital editions offer superior graphical layout capabilities, scarce (and therefore valuable) ad sales space, but didn't have capabilities for multimedia and hyperlinks and suffered weighty files sizes.

However, these two electronic modes of publishing content are beginning to converge. Most digital editions are built using Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Files (PDF) and the last two versions of Acrobat allow hyperlinking and embedded multimedia. Olive Software in particular has pioneered these capabilities in digital editions that integrate Web site content.

Much development still needs to be done with digital editions:

Should a newspaper be allowed to include its Web site's paying subscribers among its count of print circulation?

In a remarkably wimpy decision earlier this week, the U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulation has allowed The Wall Street Journal to do exactly that. The ABC let the WSJ add 290,412 paying subscribers of WSJ.com to its count of 1,800,650 print subscribers. This auditing sleight of hand boosts the WSJ's ABC circulation to 2,091,062 'daily'.

The Problem: Most of those 290,412 WSJ.com subscribers don't actually get it daily. For example, the average WSJ.com subscriber visited that site only 5.41 times during July, according to Nielsen/Netratings. That's equal to a visit once every six days. By contrast, the 1,800,650 print edition subscribers get it daily.

When a reader purchases a single printed copy only once per week at a newsstand, the ABC doesn't count that weekly reader as a daily reader. So, why is the ABC trying to count weekly online readers as daily print subscribers?

Because the ABC for the past five years has been bending over backwards to please newspapers that increasingly want to bend its auditing rules. Ironically, a WSJ spokesman stated the following only four years ago:

"No one is disputing the accuracy of the counts or of ABC's audits.

"It's just that the lines keep shifting at ABC about what's being counted as paid circulation, and how what's being counted gets presented.

"The rules have gotten more and more complicated, and made intentionally more subject to manipulation by those papers that have a high percentage of free or highly discounted issues."

Yes, or newspapers that want to boost their circulation figures. Without those 290,412 WSJ.com subcribers, the WSJ's ABC circulation would have shown no growth during the past year. But by including them, the WSJ now is the fastest-growing newspaper in America, up 16.1 percent.

There is some specious logic to counting paying online users as paying print users no matter how infrequently they access content online: After all, not every print subscribers reads his print edition daily. However, the Readership Institute at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism last year found that 65 percent of the average newspaper's subscribers read their print editions daily. In a 31-day month (such as July), that's equal to 20.15 usages per month — nearly quadruple WSJ.com's usage.

The ABC has now allowed those 290,412 approximately weekly online reader to be counted as daily subscribers. Why didn't it include all 686,000 paying subscribers of WSJ.com? Because 395,588 of them already subscribe to the WSJ in print and the ABC didn't want to count those folks twice as subscribers. So, it counted only the remaining 290,412 WSJ.com subscribers who don't subcribe to the WSJ in print.

The ABC this week bent a rule to do so. Five years ago, it instituted a rule that digital edition subscribers who pay at least 25 percent of the print edition's price could be counted as print circulation. This was known as the 'Presspoint Rule' and was meant to count paying subcribers of PDF-based digital editions (which the now-defunct Presspoint pioneered). Digital editions are electronically delivered daily to their subscribers, unlike Web site editions, which rely upon subscribers remembering to visit the newspaper's site and electronically retrieve a copy — which they do in this case only 5.41 times per month.

So, the ABC once again has bent its rules to please a major newspaper.

Our recommendations: The ABC should count newspaper's Web site subscribers and print circulation on separate lines in its auditing report.

But if the ABC must conflate print subscribers and Web site subscribers, then it should take the number of Web site paying subscribers who also don't subscribe in print, divide that by their average daily visitation frequency, and add that arithmetic result to the count of print circulation.

Thus if the average among 290,412 paying online subscribers was 5.41 visits during July, then that's a total of 1,571,129 visits during that 31-day month or 50,682 daily users. The WSJ's new ABC circulation would thus be 1,851,332 (up 3 percent this year), not 2,091,062.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Barnes & Noble today announced plans to pay US$115 million for the 25 percent of BarnesAndNoble.com that it doesn't already own and to turn that publicly held online operation into a private subsidiary. That news might be perceived due to failures in BN.com's online sales, e-books or printing on-demand technologies, but the real answer is behind the scenes.

BN.com was launched in 1997 as a publicly-held company of which Barnes & Noble and Bertelsmann owned the majority of shares. Much of that launch was in reaction to the rise of Amazon.com. BN.com sold books, magazine subscriptions, e-books, CDs, DVDs and software and had developed equipment to print paperback books on-demand in Barnes & Noble stores, which would have greatly reduced those stores inventory costs.

BN.com has never seen a profitable quarter. Last year, it closed its book on-demand printing operation, despite successful tests of that technology. In July, Barnes & Noble bought Bertelsmann's shares for US $164 million. And, in September, BN.com stopped selling e-books, citing poor sales and limited technology.

Outside observers might perceive those moves as somehow due to failures in BN.com's online sales, e-book or printing on-demand technologies. But, as we wrote in September when BN.com stopped selling e-books, the closure was mainly due to BN.com's never having reached Barnes & Noble's overarching, Internet Boom era sales targets for it.

In actuality, the brothers Leonard and Stephen Riggio, who respectively are chairman and vice chairman of Barnes & Noble, are also respectively the chairman and and vice chairman of BN.com, its largest individual investors, and control most of BN.com's shares. They'd initially launched BN.com as a public company as a means to enrich themselves via their equity holdings. Profitability was a secondary goal; their primary goal was as an equity play. By owning the largest portion of the shares and selling those bit by bit when the stock went stratospheric, the Riggio brothers planned to become billionaires, the way that Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com has.

Unfortunately for the Riggios, they launched BN.com a bit late. Although their holdings briefly made them billionaires, the Internet Boom busted not long after their launch. With BN.com shares now worth a fraction of the old value, their plan for an equity play has evaporated.

As the controlling managers of the Barnes & Noble 'brick & mortar' bookstores, they don't now foresee any immediate threat to their stores from e-books or on-demand printing by competitors, so they stopped spending on further development of those technologies. They'll keep BN.com operating as a continuing defensive measure against Amazon.com. But they no longer have any motive to share ownership of that with anyone else. So, they've bought up the other owners' shares for fractions of the previous value and are making BN.com privately theirs.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we earlier this month mentioned, a U.S. television network has asked us to review for accuracy some of the facts it plans to report in a forthcoming program on digital newspaper editions. One problem the producer is having is that one of the vendors says that it has 152 newspapers as digital edition clients, but the vendor won't disclose what newspapers. The producer (and anyone) can see that the vendor has only launched about a dozen newspapers' digital editions. Should the producer believe the vendor's claim.

While we're sympathetic to the vendor's confidentiality concerns, any company may claim to have many clients but claim confidentiality prevents listing who. The problem with that is the claimed number of clients might be true or false. As the English expression goes, 'the proof is in the pudding.' How many clients you actually have is how many you've actually launched or, at most, are willing to disclose. All other claims are merely public relations.

The situation reminds us of how in the mid-1980s, after he had launched the Macintosh to wild success, Steve Jobs was beseiged by people who claimed to be developing the next 'New Thing' for his consideration. 'My new idea is genius!' said one. 'No, my idea is genius!' said another. In response, Jobs simply and incisively remarked, 'True genius ships'.

His point was that anyone can claim to have ingenious but undeveloped ideas, great products unlaunched, or many clients in secret development, but true genius resides in bringing things to verifiable fruition. A vendor might claim that it has secret contracts with 152 newspaper clients, but if the vendor has brought only a dozen newspapers' digital editions to fruition (and isn't willing to disclose more that might be in development), then objectively that vendor has only a dozen newspaper clients. Sorry, but all else are merely secret paperwork and unverifiable public relations. The TV producer should air just the number brought to fruition or that can be verified.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

We received an e-mailed press release from Newsstand.com this morning, suggesting that, "When searching for the perfect gift for friends, family and business associates this holiday season, NewsStand Inc. suggests purchasing digital edition subscriptions of newspapers and magazines." That's not a bad idea, although your friends, family, and business associates best have broadband Internet connections.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newsstand.com has begun distributing a digital edition of New Scientist magazines. That's a bit of a coup for two reasons.

"This is a great leap forward for New Scientist. It will bring the magazine to a whole new audience, many of whom wouldn't have access to the print copy," said Natasha Ward, publisher of New Scientist. "I think it's quite fitting for the title that it should be one of the first in the U.K. to publish using this technology."

As she mentions, the first reason why it's a coup is that New Scientist is the first UK magazine digital edition that Newsstand.com has begun to distribute. The second reason is simply that New Scientist is a distinguished magazines. Established in 1956, owned by Reed Business Information, and published in print editions weekly to 650,000 readers worldwide, New Scientist is one of the world's leading magazines about science.

Its digital edition version from Newsstand.com will cost USD51 for an annual subscription or USD4.95 afor a single copy. It's odd that Newsstand.com isn't yet accepting funds in Pounds Sterling for digital editions of British publications.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Public Broadcasting Corporation's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, is preparing a story about newspapers' digital editions, mainly those retailed through Newsstand.com or Olive Software. This US news program, known for its thoughtful and in-depth reporting, has been working on this story for a few months. We've been pleased to help them with it. Its producers don't yet have a broadcast date for the story.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yomiuri Shimbun, the world's largest circulation daily newspaper (weekday: 14,242,000 copies) has begun wholesaling a digital edition. According to Nihon Shinbun Kyokai
(Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association) Yomiuri will sends its PDF files to NewspaperDirect of Canada and Konica Business Machines of Tokyo, who will partner to printout copies that they will distribute to hotels, bookstores, newsstands, and other sites in 55. Printed copies of Yomiuri had been available outside Japan only by airfreight that could delivered copies up to a day late.

Yomiuri's new digital edition will be A3-sized, with 28-pages B&W pages containing the major stories from the newsprint edition, in addition to special pages from its satellite-transmitted edition for overseas subscribers. The retail price will vary worlwide, but will be two dollars in the US.

One of Yomiuri's competitor, Mainichi Shimbun (the world's third largest circulation daily, 5,635,000 weekday copies) is already wholesaling a digital edition through NewspaperDirect.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Navigating in New Media is much like flying an airplane. Unless you're experienced with these media's vagarities and business cycles, you tend to overreact and make problems worse. Porpoising is what pilots call those overreactions, which aim too high or too low, rather than a steady course. When the Internet Bubble burst, too many fickle executives of media corporates overreacted by either cutting their New Media operations too much or cutting their own overreaching expectations too little.

Barnes&Noble.com was one of the latter. Last week, we mentioned that B&N.com had hyperbolic eBook sales expectations during the Internet Bubble and hadn't adjusted its expectations in light of post-Bubble realities. The result was B&N.com's eBook sales never reached its own hyperbolic expectations, so B&N last week further overreacted by quitting the eBook business.

Too bad for B&N.com. Publishers Weekly reports that eBook sales from other vendors are up 30 percent this year. The Open eBook Forum (OeBF) — a trade group that includes Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley & Sons, AOL TimeWarner Books, McGraw-Hill, Random House, Simon & Shuster, and B&N.com itself — reports a 40 percentincrease. The OeBF reports that 660,991 e-books were sold in the first half of 2003 and that revenues during that time were $5 million. The OeBF predicts sales of more than $10 million for the full year 2003.

An industry that's growing at 30 to 40 percent annually, particularly during a severe recession, is a healthy business. Too bad that B&N.com had set expectations far more extreme, then overreacted. Many pundits who've never examined the actual sales figures think that B&N.com no longer selling eBook is a sign that the eBook market has failed. Don't place them at the controls of your New Media business plan.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)