Will News Tablets Finally Come Down from the Mountaintop?

With buzz growing over the Kindle 2 and its potential as a newspaper- and magazine-reading device, as well as a bookreader, it's worth remembering that the idea of an electronic tablet for reading news has a long and so far unsuccessful history.

More than 15 years ago, Knight-Ridder's Roger Fidler was famously advocating the creation of a tablet-like device as a way of distributing newspapers electronically. He's still at it, in fact, even though a lot of his vision of an electronic news future was overtaken, first by the Web and then by increasingly portable devices ranging from laptops to iPhones. (When I started out in new media in 1992, I heard regularly that no one would ever be able to read a newspaper on a computer while sitting on the john. Well, the iPhone has pretty much killed that argument!)

One of the problems with Fidler's vision was the notion that the newspaper-reader device had to come from a newspaper company. Needless to say, publishers aren't exactly technological wizzes (CueCat, anyone? Anyone?), and such development is probably better left to the Apples of the world. And now Amazon, whose Kindle offers a glimpse of what a portable electronic news reader might look like. 

Undaunted by Knight-Ridder and Fidler's experiences, however, Hearst is trying to develop its own electronic reader, in partnership with E Ink, the company that supplies the core screen technology to Kindle. It's better to let somebody else spend the big development bucks on hardware and then take advantage of their success, rather than to try to develop a specialized product that others publishers may (or more likely may not) also choose to adopt. 

While Kindle has gotten good buzz, it's hardly a ubiquitous product; indeed, it seems to be mostly beloved by journalists and a certain class of upscale book readers, and its sales–said to be in the hundreds of thousands–are a fraction of more successful devices like the iPhone.

My guess is that the Kindle is a steppingstone, transitional product, one that points the way toward the portable electronic news reader of the future, but not a big success itself. Apple is rumored to be working on a large-format version of the iPhone that will out-Kindle the Kindle and do many more things; doubtless there are other devices still in the R&D labs–including thin, flexible, roll-up screens–that will provide even better portability and quality. Devices that do much more than just present text on a screen also are likely to be more successful (again, see the Swiss Army knife-like iPhone). 

What Roger Fidler dreamed of two decades ago, and Amazon is dreaming of today, still isn't here yet. But it's probably coming, in one form or another. Just not from a publisher.

Comments

[Last Honest Man]

Uh, you say you began in "new media" in 1992. What new media, exactly, were you doing in 1992? Blogging before blogging was invented? Doing websites before the web actually appeared? Podcasting?

This sounds like a crock, if you ask me.

[Mark Potts]

Well, Last Honest Man, there really was new media before blogging, and even before Web sites. I built an electronic prototype of The Washington Post in 1992 and then worked on the Post's development of a variety of online products over the next few years, including cofounding the paper's digital division in 1993. And I worked peripherally with Roger Fidler's tablet efforts as part of an informal Post-Knight-Ridder relationship in that era. Some of us--including Fidler, Jeff Jarvis, Rob Doctor and others--have been working on this stuff for a long time.