An exercise in readability.

For me, readability should be the number one concern, but we often get lost in all the buzzwords and current ideologies that many times run interference with great, easily understood communication. We need our visuals to be clear in order to understand graphic communication but the message is seldom as clear as it could be.

Although we seem to have a good grasp of the printing process, display technology is still advancing at a rather fast rate. Considering that the technology industry is investing billions of dollars into in enhanced displays to help people more easily comprehend what is on a device why are content providers obfuscating their content? Although my personal attention span is high, even I have a difficult time reading on a display because of all the distractions. Technologically speaking; pixel density, improved colour accuracy and greater contrast ratios aren’t necessarily helping me understand anyone’s message any better, in fact I would almost argue that if we went back to CGA resolutions I would be less distracted.

Fortunately there are some initiatives right now that take readability very seriously. Basically both serve up platform and resolution independent content that can be easily read without distraction. The two companies I am referring to are Treesaver and Readability.

Treesaver

Treesaver is an open source JavaScript framework and platform independent technology based on HTML5, which allows for the fluid reformatting of text, images and video. I think the best thing about this technology is that it automatically reformats gracefully for various screen sizes:

Obviously one of the benefits of this technology is that it encourages great design because the designer can place more emphasis and time on a single layout. And instead of wondering what the next ‘killer product’ will be, e.g., the iPad, one no longer has to be boxed in by a single technology standard.

In the end, the reading experience is great for all concerned: there is minimal distraction for the reader and more attention can be secured by the designers into original content design that better uses the native screen real estate. I must close by saying that my old boss and mentor Roger Black is a partner in this endeavour.

Readability

This is another very simple but effective technology play. Readability is an application that functions as a browser add-on, which allows for the unobstructed reading of saved articles. Once one saves the article they can then read it at their leisure on any device at a more convenient time. As a bonus this technology also allows one to share their reading lists.

I have only one wish for this application: I hope it becomes an open source project to allow people the option of distributing their content freely.

Both of these technologies cater to the content providers or writers by allowing for monetary benefit. I encourage all readers to go to both sites, learn more and play around.

Although both these initiatives are designed to benefit article content, I think the message is clear that we as readers want and need better experiences when it comes to the delivery of content on display devices. Both of these companies are taking grand steps towards achieving this and both seem to be very flexible with their delivery methods. I am sure that in the near future we will all benefit.

Welcome to BoockCamp Toronto 2010

When I arrived at Robarts I wrote myself a name badge, gathered a schedule and walked over to the main auditorium for a welcome speech by Hugh McGuire. All around me was chatter but the one conversation I picked up on was a person explaining why his iPad was not such a good thing. He was upset at Apple’s closed ecosystem and limited standards.

Hugh started to speak. He explained that all the sessions were to be one hour in length. The first 15 minutes being an intro of the topic by the guest speaker and the final 45 minutes being a participatory discussion which would include everyone in the room.

Note: these are my thoughts on each session that I sat in on. I believe I’ve accurately paraphrased what was said in these groups but I am sure that others interpreted the sessions differently. I sat in on a total of six sessions.

Session One: The Shifting Role of Design in Publishing

Ingrid Paulson of Ingrid Paulson Design

Ingrid had the following thoughts on the state of the industry:

• eBooks are poorly designed, reasons are many including poor technology, and a limited number of typefaces
• Book jackets are a big question for the eBook’s digital future
• How are publishers going to build an electronic brand without an actually physical presence (i.e. a pBook is a physical object)
• The ePub format is currently really limited, it compares well to early web browsers
• Designers are not involved in a proper manner. Most publishers are trying to mass convert pBooks but the technology is not quite there and ePub books are full of errors and not well designed.
• Too often publishers are thinking of the size of the files and the formats for their eBooks and that restricts creativity
• On the plus side there are no physical page restrictions with eBooks
• Customers will not need so much shelf space for their book collection as their eBook reader will contain hundreds of books represented by only a small icon referred to as a pseudo cover

The audience wondered if:

• the future book cover will be more informational or more akin to artwork
• designers will become less valued

After writing my synopsis of the day’s events I finally made it to Ingrid’s website. Her work is wonderful and unlike other people who claim to be designers or care about good design, she does care and is a damn good designer. Please visit her site to understand what the difference between design and ‘technologists with templates’ is all about.

Ironically the shifting role of design in publishing was shifting all day.

Session Two: Digital Workflow

Sharon Balley of Anansi, and John Maxwell of SFU

Sharon started this talk and John, who was a last minute pairing, chimed in occasionally but tried to keep his dialogue separate from that of his presentation later in the day. Immediately questions were raised becuase print production has been the same for decades with only minor differences and evolutionary steps due to technology. But how would that change with the advent of electronic publishing?

• Where does the epublishing fit into the traditional publishing workflow?
• How does this added responsibility affect the traditional editorial and production workflow?
• How will the roles of designers, marketers, editors, sales, distributers, etc., and other departments change with electronic publishers?

Sharon’s company, Anansi, converts printed books to ePub documents using Oxygen as a tool for ePub conversion and they have learned a few things along the way (John also participated):

1. Third party converters make unfortunate judgment calls and the indexing is spotty
2. MSWord to printer doesn’t work well at all. (note: MSWord was roundly criticized as a helper production tool but no one seemed to realize that authors like to use it for writing because it is the most robust tool and that they are already comfortable with it) In fact they believe that they have to get a printer ready document into an in-house style guide slightly before the print version because it usually takes about 4-5 weeks for a print book and 2-3 weeks for ePub version.
3. Agile work flow allows for both print and electronic versions at the same time and perhaps it is best to create PDF, XML and ePub formats specifically for flexibility and mass print conversions

Issues affecting conversions are that publishers have to notify authors if a conversion is going to be made due to the growing authorship/copyright legalities. And for the moment retailers are signing only short term agreements for electronic publishing because the landscape is changing so fast.

Some of the technology used is:

• Adobe’s PDFXML Inspector is best used to edit the ePub format
• oXygen is best used as a pure XML editor
• Sigil is good for only tweaking ePub in XML files

Other thoughts on Agile publishing:

• It starts with the Web and then gets passed to Adobe InDesign
• After changing the extension of the ePub to ZIP and then separating the necessary information, one can import an unzipped ePub format into InDesign
• IDML in InDesign is useful publishing cross format
• One might want to produce templates in WordPress first the move to the pBook format

Of course with the ever changing landscape of publishing tools I would take most of this advice with a grain of salt. As various technologies evolve, the answers to the publishing workflow will change with them. John Maxwell’s session later in the day would prove to be only a temporary solution for specific instances of workflow only.

Session Three: Print-on-Demand Workshop

Rob Clements of Lightning Source Inc.

I didn’t know what to expect in this session, but I figured it might be a little marketing heavy and I was correct but never-the-less intrigued by Rob’s proposal. Rob works for Lightning Source which is wholly owned by Ingram, the largest book distributer in North America. Rob juxtaposed the way LSI uses digital printing to its advantage over the traditional way publishers currently print books.

• Traditional Method (front loaded, many books printed): Many copies after the initial print run stay at the publisher’s warehouse then these books get delivered to the retailer and finally to the customer.
• Print on Demand Method (8 hours to 3 days for a limited run of 1+): Publisher receives a request of (x) amount of books through an online web store, the publisher then requests the print on demand (POD) company for those books and for them to be delivered to the client of the web store. The POD printer holds the electronic files which consist of the PDF for printing, the printing rights, the native currency amount, the type of paper, the spine width, etc. And then sends them directly to the end client.

Someone in the discussion noted that currently the law states that a Canadian publisher/distributer must be sourced from a Canadian vendor but that this law may be changing. So this brought up the next question as to how Canadians protect our own interests? Is it more important to print the book in Canada or allow the book to become freely available to the world through digital publishing mechanisms? If we primarily choose the latter many of the existing POD companies have multiple print houses around the world.

Other interesting tidbits of information that came to light were:

• 5 publishers own about 50% of the total market and another 16000-20000 own the rest
• For books to be printed at many POD companies the author/publisher needs to get them an ISBN number

I found this session interesting because it’s tone and much of its content was self-serving but I still learned a lot. But for next year I hope that people who do directly represent companies give more holistic talks about their industry in general.

Session Four: eBooks: From Structure to Typography

Scott Boms (designer) and Joe Clark (author)

I really liked this session. I thought that although at times it was pessimistic it really encouraged the audience to see past the present day technology and tools and ask the tough questions that make us all want more from the electronic publishing world.

The point was made that we currently have web standards that can be used to create books online but that there is a conceptual shift from design to structure with eBooks that is going unanswered. Sometimes a complete restructuring of a pBook is required to place it in its electronic form, but at other times the book only needs to be repurposed. Knowing which one to choose is the challenge in front of us.

Currently regular linear prose books are the standard for eBooks on line and that they are the first of their kind to be reproduced without proper typography in mind. Many of these eBooks are getting mass converted and the quality of those conversions is poor without any human interaction whether it be from an editor or designer.

Some of the questions asked:

• What then is the designer’s role for ePub eBooks?
• What does a designer do when moving previously well known graphic type books to an eBook format?
• How do the dimensions of the pBook, the colour reproduction, the type selection, the layout of singles vs. spreads and text within images affect the transition of the electronic version?

It is already apparent that although web standards can separate structure (HTML) and presentation (CSS) the ePub format still has lousy mechanisms for typography, pagination, etc. What is worse is that web standards today dictate that the user has the control over the display of their information, therefore reading devices dictate what a page looks like which is not necessarily in the best interest of the book’s brand.

Joe mentioned that we should all be using DAISY instead of ePub for the design of eBooks for “… any E-book that includes a reading of itself, as DAISY allows us to avoid reinventing the wheel.” DAISY has the added advantages in that it contains structural markup, it is speech capable, printed page numbers are preserved and the speech can be linked to specific sections within the eBook.

Towards the end of the session the big question was asked: What are the choices for heavily designed books that we want to translate into an electronic format? And the answers given were:

1. Give up
2. Use ePub
3. Make them applications

After leaving this session I came up with one more answer which I think is the right one: Just don’t copy the original, instead make it an entirely new entity that challenges the reader on its own merits. But alas there is always the other plausible answer that not all books are meant to go digital.

Session Five: The sBook – OCAD initiative

Bob Logan and James Caldwell (I was filling in for Greg Van Alstyne)

sBook can be best described as a cross platform for reading, writing and publishing. The goals of the sBook project are to develop a unifying information architectural framework for readers, writers and publishers that ties together emerging standards; and to invent new forms of functionality and interoperability to achieve our design vision. The name “sBook” refers to the qualities of the intended experience:

Simple: the pleasure and beauty of human readable pages
This would be an open format container which includes not only the book format, but also the information for it being printed anywhere in the world into any format with the book’s and its owner’s rights firmly adhered to.

Social: developing context and community through social media tools
Meaning that the author or authors could build a community around their published work, complete with granular commenting.

Searchable: the power and practicality of electronic text
For all images and text contained within or any other content that may arise.

Smart: intelligent recommendations both within and beyond the work
Capability to jump to other published works that are pertinent to the present work.

Sustainable: effective use of material and energy throughout the lifecycle
One open format that can be updated or change with graceful degradation.

Synchronized: can be updated by author and publisher
Editions and versions of author and publisher can be fully tracked.

Scalable: open platform supporting new products, services, experiences
Open and extensible format to ensure that the format of the sBook will be around as long as the traditional pBook. To the point, whatever the open format is, it needs to be open sourced and headed by a public governing body.

I won’t say much more here because I was directly involved. However I would like to criticize our use of ‘The sBook’ as the title in the session schedule. I thought it actually looked like a miss print because there was no further description given. We will have to change that for the next time because the points that we are trying to make are far more important to think about than what the title entailed.

Session Six: The Book of Mpub (An Agile Process)

John Maxwell (SFU)

A team of University students and their professor from Simon Fraser, John Maxwell decided to publish a book. At the outset they understood part of the problem but found that they wouldn’t understand all the issues until the end of the process.

To get started they used an Agile process adapted from Agile software development to create their pBook because it allowed them

• Cheap fast prototyping
• A cyclical, iterative and lightweight processes

John believes that the ‘Agile Process’ is how the web came to be and so his team moved from the traditional qualities of pBook publishing with linear change to an internet structure. He rightly understands that although books haven’t changed, the media sphere has and therefore the book has a different function starting in this decade.

Recounting the Mpub book he says that it was:

• Born on the web and developed there
• First started in WordPress and still exists there
• Initially developed as a blog for the belief that the web is the best starting point for ePublishing
• Collaboratively built
• Produced with simple open web technologies like XHTML
• Mechanically very simple to produce a pBook from the XSL translation from web to Adobe InDesign
• Created with workflows that were cyclical
• Engineered so that they could make editorial changes up to the last minute

During their process both the editing and production overlapped and even now there is no ‘final’ state to their book but it exists in multiple formats simultaneously that were all produced on a magazine type schedule. For marketing help they received feedback from various people on the web and these contributions helped a great deal during and after the launch. They allowed open permissions to those who wanted to contribute more and used InCopy within InDesign to edit the document at a more granular level when it came time to print the book on paper. Towards the end of the project they made print proofs at their in-house Espresso Book Machine.

John mentioned that the most difficult aspect of the process was the inventing and discovery curve.

To sum it all up

It was a long day, full of interesting people with great insight and thoughts about the publishing industry. At the end of the day Hugh McGuire thanked all the contributors, the volunteers and the audience for attending. There was definitely more detail this year and more specifics. The industry is moving quickly whether or not we have proper standards or not and whether or not anyone even agrees on what should be happening. The hype and forward momentum seems to have caught most people in a frenzy but because we are in the early years of electronic publishing there are still formats to be ironed out and procedures and process to be developed that will satisfy everyone’s needs.

I hope this event is held again next year, as I believe it is necessary to bring the community together.

Lastly I will say that I learned something very important today: my personal electronic publishing process could use a little reworking. Next time I will take my laptop to an event like this because transferring my notes from paper to final electronic form took way too long.

LG Philips LCD e-Ink Flexible Paper

Throughout this last year I have been fixated on the technology, media and publishing news that never seems to rest. Major shifts in technology and their acceptance are happening so quickly that even as the writers in traditionally established publishing houses publish their articles, their scribing becomes nothing more than the thoughts of mere pundits. The following are some of those article titles taken from two months in early 2010.

Headlines of the ebook’s relentless digital march

January 08
The Gurdian | CES 2010: The ebook revolution

January 9
NYT | A Deluge of Devices for Reading and Surfing

January 10
NYT | Optimism Takes Charge at Consumer Electronics Show. From Print to Phone to Web. And a Sale?

January 11
Wattpad Release | Wattpad Closes Funding Round

January 13
All Things Digital | Sony’s E-Reader Opens New Chapter in Kindle Rivalry

January 25
The Millions | Confessions of a Book Pirate

January 26
Technology Review | Amazon Expands the Kindle with Apps

January 27
NPR | Will An Apple Tablet Heat Up E-Book War?
NPR | In An Era Of Immediacy, Why Fear The E-Book?

January 28
PCWorld | Apple’s iPad Ready to Challenge the Kindle
Neowin | Is the iPad Apple’s iFail?
The Economist | The book of Jobs
The Economist | Steve Jobs and the tablet of hope
Daring Fireball | Various and Assorted Thoughts and Observations Regarding the Just-Announced iPad
NYT| Despite Changes, Many Still Oppose Google Books Deal

January 29
Itbusiness | Apple iPad — 5 setbacks and two show stoppers
The Guardian | Palms, Kindles, Nooks, iPads – none are as cool as Gutenberg’s gadget
WSJ Blogs – DIGITS | E-Readers Fall Short for News, Study Says
The Journal | Measuring the iPad’s Potential for Education
Learning Solutions Magazine | Apple’s iPad: What does it offer for e-Learning?

January 30
TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home | Apple’s iPad DRM uncertainties make the Financial Times: ePub gummed up

Jan 31
Mediaweek | The iPad: Great Type Hope? Optimists see iPad’s promise, but where’s the video?

Feb02
NYT | Rosensweig Lands at Textbook Renter Chegg.com

Feb 03
Mashable | Amazon Buys Touchscreen Company for Its Kindle Division
PC World | Five Reasons Why the iPad Won’t Change Higher Education

Feb 04
All Things Digital | PBS’s “Frontline” Considers the “Digital Nation”–A Lot of Handwringing Over the Inevitable, but Watch It Anyway

Feb 05
Wired | Panacea or Poison Pill: Who Gets to Decide About $10 E-Books?

February 07
Guardian | As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing. Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work
The Sunday Times | British Library to offer free ebook downloads Jane Austen: Originals cost £250

February 8
NYT | Kindle Books in Snack Sizes
NYT | Publishers Win a Bout in E-Book Price Fight

February 10
Inside Higher Ed | E-Library Economics
NYT | E-Book Price Increase May Stir Readers’ Passions
NYT | Do School Libraries Need Books?

February 12
NYT | Do E-Readers Cause Eye Strain?

February 15
The Guardian | Why I’m an ebook convert
L.A. Times | Apple to wrap digital books in FairPlay copy protection [Clarified]

February 16
The Australian | Don’t resist e-books, Carr warns

February 21
NYT | Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally

February 22
The Phoenix | Holy Scrollers! The future of e-publishing can be found in one of the world’s oldest books.

Feb 24
Inside Higher Ed | A Win For Publishers

Feb 28
NYT | Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book

March 01
The Independent | Here’s to the small print: The past and future of compact literature

March 02
Gigaom.com | Books Now Outnumber Games on the iPhone

March 4
The Globe and Mail | A lament for the bookshelf
Publishers Weekly | Barnes & Noble to Test Bundling e-Books, p-Books

There were approximately 26 lectures that one could attend during the day, each of which lasted for a little less than an hour. Of course, for some, it could be difficult to choose between the different lectures going on at the same time. Fortunately for me, my choices were easy and without scheduling conflicts. I chose the following lectures:

The lectures

Kindle, Shmindle: future directions for ebooks

Speaker: Evan Leibovitch
Topics discussed: Different electronic formats such as ePub and PDF, varying eBook readers that are proprietary and non-proprietary, organizations such as IDPF, Adobe, Amazon, Google and others that are either working with the consumer or for their own interests (I will let you decide who is who). Also technologies such as embedded linux, webkit, PDF and ePub standards used for ebook readers.
Of Interest: There was an outcry from the audience concerning DRM, a topic another speaker was actually covering in a different session. Evan declined to comment on this except from the point of view that there are alternatives to DRM that are used within the programming realm that do not annoy consumers. The audience agreed to disagree in the heated debate that followed, primarily to protect their own interests . If it is any indication of the trouble the industry may be in, I do not remember one person who voiced a concern about their intended audience.

When Every Book is Connected to Everyone

Speaker: Peter Brantley
Topics discussed: Publishers’ and authors’ responsibilities and changing roles in the future, DRM, innovation and perception of what the market believes a book is worth, the simple idea that a book is a place where data aggregates, the misunderstanding that publishers only warehouse and distribute books, the death of the traditional book as we know it, the future printed book will be a gift item but people will engage literature by reading eBooks as the norm and many other threads of discussion.
Of Interest: This talk had one of the more lively discussions that followed. The audience really took sides; trying to explain what they did well but at the same time worrying about their future roles. None more so than the publishers who seemed completely confused by the present audience market and were upset at the larger brands such as Amazon pricing them out of business. My take on all this was that everyone needs to sit down in their respective fields and determine their best opportunity for future viability and come up with sustainable, growth-oriented business plans, instead of being blind followers who split their people and money resources, all the while lowering their quality.

The Evolving Ecology of the Book

Speaker: Carlos A. Scolari, Steph Troeth
Topics discussed: This one started out with a discussion of the book interface, its evolution, past, future, and fusion of combinations of form. The image below sums up the talk.

Ecology blackboard brainstorming

Of Interest: We learned that the original columns used in publishing date back to early clay tablets, a major evolution took place when papyrus scrolls developed into book pages as we understand them today. Also discussed was that in the future we will no longer be using page numbers in eBooks because of a ubiquitous search functionality and the problems with pagination as related in different electronic resolutions and formats. A technologist, Liza Daly, also gave a short demo of her new project ‘Zen Garden’ that aims to help publishers create more varied and flexible eBook formats that are visually appealing.

Toward the sBook: simple, searchable, smart, social, sustainable, scalable

Speaker: Greg Van Alstyne et al (Disclosure: I am also a part of this initiative)
Topics discussed: The lecture was quite simply the future of the book format and the way in which people will interact with it. The extension of the printed book to an electronic form, different initial markets that would benefit from the public format, the relationship created between the reader and writer, and the transition of an eBook into a sBook.

sBook blackboard brainstorming

Of Interest: Interestingly enough the audience seemed confused about the sBook initiative. I think that may have had to do with visuals that were shown to explain the path of information and the connection between the traditional paper copy and electronic copy. However the people who did understand the community involvement angle quickly pointed out that the academic field would be ripe for such a book. Ironically and perhaps tellingly, this is the first target area we had already thought of. This group also was concerned about the persistence of information in the digital age (format death) and deep linking and how both can be taken advantage of.

Open Source Publishing

Speaker: Evan Leibovitvh
Topics discussed: Open Source software, Free Open Source Software (FOSS), FOSS software alternatives for publishing, business models for making money from FOSS and alternatives to DRM.
Of Interest: Evan took some time to explain the different levels of how “free”’ open source software was to distribute, (public domain -> public domain with product name posted -> scenarios that mandate programmers give back all enhancements to code -> GPL: which forces all programmers to make all additions they write to remain free). Watermarking alternatives that are more flexible than DRM, but still have similar protection assurance that one can use the law if their rights are abused.

The wrap up

The aforementioned list was only a small representation of the lectures for the day. And within the lectures, people from the casual participant to the ‘expert’ met and talked about the ideas or problems that most interested them. But the topic of books, especially as related to publishing, is changing or evolving so rapidly, even the experts would have to admit that, at best, their “facts” are merely opinions of what may happen.

Unfortunately big business was not in any of the rooms that I participated in, and although there were many intellectuals and entrepreneurs, I got no sense of a true direction. The publishers were generally in upheaval and confused with the new markets, the writers/authors were worried about their product, the designers were worried about the direction of book readability and visual quality, the technologists as usual said they had all the answers (but were only helpful in their area of expertise) and the readers were most interested in getting the least expensive copy of a piece of literature in the best, most readable format.

I admittedly came away exhausted after a full day of information overload and listening to opposing opinions. And I know many people sounded disparaged but the bottom line is that the industry is changing, and everyone is going to have to play catch up each time the publication direction changes. However, there were many of us in these lectures that thought there is opportunity to be had and lots of it to share. I think the very fact that this event was such a success is proof that excitement is again building in the industry — along with fear — and that, as a whole, this change is good for the industry.

Who knows if your next book will be in electronic format and sell for five dollars, or will be on paper for twenty? Either way, you as the reader will get this choice for the foreseeable future, and you will dictate the direction.

For the love of news on paper

We started the conversation via an old-fashioned session of show and tell. Gary laid out some vintage newspapers for me as well as some other, more contemporary ones from around the world. I then proceeded to take a quick tour through time and technology as I went from very early British newspapers that were imperfect yet perfectly personal to today’s modern computer generated crisp and exacting layouts. Of course what I was missing were the papers from the future but I guess I will have to wait for those.

‘Hot off the press’ will be forever known as ‘hot off the wire’. Newspapers must evolve to meet the demands of a new generation.

During the conversation I found myself defending the newspaper industry on several issues while also chastising it for their lack of vision. The positive issues focused on content and value from journalistic integrity and professionalism, the negative issues focused around their business models and their confusion as to what to do now and next.

The traditional positives

• Newspapers don’t generally hire hacks; they hire people who have a love of and have been trained with a journalistic focus. These people understand their greater role in public information dissemination and actively try to write articles that increase their personal value with in-depth, interesting, and compelling stories.
• There is a community of editors and other talent such as photographers, other writers, information graphicists, librarians, etc., which creates a wealth of support for each article written.
• There is a comprehensive understanding of one’s subject matter that is built up with years of practice. Multiply this by a hundred or so professionals each with a different speciality and the newspaper becomes a wonderful and lively knowledge base. The employees are able to bounce ideas off each other and then contibute their articles to produce a newspaper that delivers news ranging from world politics to local ‘feel good’ stories.
• Newspapers arguably have the best format for displaying mass amounts of complex information or great amounts of content on a particular subject matter that can easily be read.
• There are, of course, more positives about the paper medium itself but I want to talk a little now about the negatives.

The old and new negatives

• Newspapers no longer deliver the most timely news, that is now the realm of the internet. But this is a big problem, by the time your local newspaper is ‘hot off the press’ the information it carries has already been delivered.
• As the internet has grown so have community interest groups which are regularly supported by large numbers of people which allow them to network which in turn leads them to feel personally important. Even if a story is not written well or authoritative, some people relish the idea of being able to speak their mind or shout their opinions even more.
• Similarly people are not necessarily interested in the range of editorial that a large newspaper is able to give them. Many people prefer targeting multiple internet information sites to get the news in a timely manner that they are interested in.
• It may just be a matter of habit or the intrinsic warmth that one gets from a paper product, but unlike the new generation who are much more comfortable with online content, the older generation (I span both of these) sees or rather doesn’t see online content as readable. This ongoing event is not going to get better. Younger people have phones, PDAs and computers to read on and they are already used to it.

The present combination of traditional and online

Some newspapers are cannibalizing their traditional content when they produce their web property. They are not branding them or using the different mediums for advantageous purposes. In the worse case scenarios newspapers are even marginalizing their opportunities for advertising by seeding both their traditional and online properties with the exact same articles.

In a race to be current, they are not keeping ahead of the trends but are playing catch up with ‘me too’ ideas that may or may not be beneficial to them. They are generally confused with the technology and still trying to figure out how best to align their editorial departments in both on and offline offices. Because there are two distinct mediums that newspapers must pay attention to, they now have the problem of a divided focus which pools from basically the same revenue. In addition the talent pool is producing two different but similar products which raises the questions of internal organization and communication structural changes. There are also legalities of compensation and copyrights considering that newspapers are fleeting dailies whereas online information is searchable and has longevity for articles, photos and graphics.

The future of the newspaper

I believe the newspaper is not dying but evolving, not necessarily because it wants to but because it has to. But this evolution is not a bad thing. If newspapers continue to deliver authoritative in-depth content the younger generation will continue to subscribe (I use this term loosely).

Newspapers have almost lost their brand focus and they need to reiterate it for their target audience. It is said that the newspaper one reads says something about that person’s character and education level. One subscribes to a certain newspaper because they feel it is more appropriate to their identity than others would be. That newspaper’s brand becomes part of an individual’s identity. A similar relation will have to be formed with upcoming generations.

So what is the future? Well the distribution model will change from expensive and time consuming print to electronic dissemination over the ether. The subscription model will still be in place just as the ads will be but newspapers will be able to deliver their content to a range of devices in a timely manner. The articles will be searchable, contain interactive content and develop community followings like they do presently in the online world.

So my hypothetical children may one day sit in their chair eating their pancakes on Saturday morning reading their own personalized funnies that were automatically downloaded to their very thin and flexible but durable electronic paper page that I received when I bought my yearly subscription. They will even flip the pages with the same old finger swipe gesture. The only thing I will miss is recycling all the old newsprint or lining the kitty litter box with it.