While I was staying at a hotel over the holidays, I had the unusual experience of reading a newspaper. I normally read all my news on my laptop, along with feeds from blogs, forums, and other sources of content. And boy, it felt nice to read a newspaper again.
It's not that I have some weird nostalgia for getting newsprint on my fingers again, or some quixotic desire to help save major newspapers from impending doom (brought on themselves, to a great degree). Here's what I liked about the newspaper:
- Encapsulation. Printed publications create boundaries of content. In this issue, you will read the following stories, and then you're done. In contrast, my normal way of reading the news is boundless. There's always one more news item that I could read, which might actually lead me, in some topic areas, to read fewer news items, instead of more of them. If there's always a huge number of things I might read, the sense of completeness in reading a day's news items could end at any time.
- Prioritization. You might argue with the primacy that newspapers grant some stories by putting them on the front page, but at least there's some prioritization. The "dump all the news stories on a floor and find what you like" approach, as exemplified by sites like Salon.com, create a sense that nothing is more important than anything else. My own sense of what's important won't change, but the publisher's certainly does. If it's worth putting on the front page, it's worth doing a little more fact checking, and adding a little more content than you might not afford in a lesser story.
- Presentation. I get tired of looking at the same laptop screen all day. I want something that isn't backlight, requires a power supply, and can present something that looks like the average size of a book page. Again, it's not a question of nostalgia for printed things, but simple efficiency. I don't like having to click Page Down too often.
Having said all that, you might think that I've already bought an e-reader like the Kindle. Nope, haven't taken the plunge yet. I share some of the same anxieties that Farhad Manjoo discussed in Slate, such as high price and freaky DRM rules. If it's not as functional a netbook, I don't want to pay more than the cost of a netbook. I just want something that I can load up with a permanent collection of PDFs and downloaded feed items and read on the couch, or in a hammock, or on a plane.
All of which presents an interesting challenge to product managers and product marketers working on e-reader technology. The people designing and marketing MP3 players had a relatively easier time, since the use case they created was nothing like past alternatives. Not only would your shelves of CDs disappear, but you could listen to your entire library anywhere you went, using a device that you could slip into your pocket.
The e-reader use case is a little more familiar. You can't bring your high-end stereo system on the subway, but you can still bring a book or newspaper. The file format for music files is a non-issue for users, but e-readers are forcing consumers to make bets on which e-book format will persist and which will die.
For the moment, e-readers face serious adoption challenges. Overcoming them will be one of the most challenging tests of ingenuity for PMs in the tech industry.