Electronic Publishing Or Traditional Publishing

1. Newspapers and book publishers should convert to electronic publishing over paper publishing as their primary product.

I think this would be a true statement if it were made a few years from now. Although, the Internet is the fastest growing medium from everything from shopping to dating, it has not reached enough people nor has the technology matured enough to warrant ousting paper newspapers and books as the primary delivery format. There are millions of consumers that do not have Internet access, let alone high-speed access typically needed to view such data. The industry has not matured in that a standard delivery mechanism has not been established. Some online viewers get their news, for example, from a computer, some from a phone, still some from a web-based PDA; all of which utilize different technologies and languages to view multimedia content.

I believe that digital ink will eventually replace paper as a primary delivery mechanism, but not anytime soon. Traditional newspapers and publishers need to address the digital marketplace by offering paper and digital versions of their products to reach the broadest audience. People still like to curl up on the couch to read books and sip their coffee while reading the paper. Those same people may also want to get their news from digital means as well, but until the digital world looks and feel like the paper world, publishers should keep to what gets in the hands of most consumers.

There are companies that are developing digital ink whereby a consumer can hold a digital paper (newspaper or novel size) and have their content downloaded from the Internet. Imagine waking up, placing your digital paper in a docking station and having today's news downloaded. That would be a technology that would cause the digital world to oust the paper world.

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