Although some people see a reason to buy a device just to read a book, I don’t. Some have said that Amazon’s Kindle is the savior of the e-book market. I don’t believe it. Others say that e-book readers will kill the book-publishing industry and bring it into the 21st century. I think that’s rubbish. The fact of the matter is e-book readers will never have commercial relevance.
Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.
Last year was a “banner year” for U.S. newspaper Web sites, an industry association announced in a recent press release, headlined, “Online Newspaper Viewership Reaches Record in 2007.” The Newspaper Association of America also noted that the fourth quarter set a record for any quarter since the group started tracking online audience, in 2004, and October set a monthly record. But placed in the context of an overall increase in Americans’ online usage, newspapers’ electronic march forward looks a lot slower. More people are spending more time loading more Web pages, lifting the boats of lots of online categories.
I understand the economic pressures on newspapers. And though I fled the profession a decade ago for the fleshpots of television, I’ve heard tell of the horrors of department-store consolidation and the decline in advertising, of Craigslist and Google and Yahoo. I understand the vagaries of Wall Street, the fealty to the media-chain stockholders, the primacy of the price-per-share. What I don’t understand is this: Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium–isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity?
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