With the digital revolution evolving and improving things everyday, you have to wonder what will change next. With books becoming a thing of the past and E-readers rapidly taking their place, it makes you think about what might happen to newspapers. Well with E-readers hurting book sales, it’s actually opening up a new market for E-readers that are made solely for the use of newspapers.
With print media suffering due to the economy and the affects of the Internet, Amazon is said to be creating a larger version of their kindle manufactured specifically to accommodate newspapers and magazines. This wireless device is due in next year and will present a screen that is around the same size as a sheet of paper, even perhaps accommodating the use of textbooks.
The switch from print to an E-reader would save publishers millions of dollars. Newspaper and magazine industries wouldn’t have to worry about spending money on the cost of printing and distributing their publications. In a New York Times article, John Ridding, the chief executive of salmon-colored British newspaper The Financial Times said,
“We are looking at this with a great deal of interest, the severe double whammy of the recession and the structural shift to the Internet has created an urgency that has rightly focused attention on these devices.”
This new E-reading device would allow publishers the opportunity to support their articles with advertisements and to gain new subscribers. Although the switch from the hard copy of a newspaper to a digital device might be a tricky one, it’s one that would save newspaper and magazine industries and allow them to rebuild their companies.
In a similar article found on New York Times entitled, New E-Newspaper Reader Echoes Look of the paper, the company Plastic Logic is also looking to create a device specially designed for important documents and newspapers. Kenneth A. Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media, said,
“We are hopeful that we will be able to distribute our newspaper content on a new generation of larger devices sometime next year. We have a very strong interest in e-newspapers. We’re very anxious to get involved.”