Kindle DX, Newspapers, & Clouds

i have been heads down on a writing project that we hope to be able to announce soon, but every once in awhile I’ll pop my head up (sort of Punxsutawney Phil style, but that may be insulting the groundhog) and look around …

I’ll admit to not being much of a Kindle fan, in either it’s first or second iterations. Probably because I just like books. There – I’ll admit it. I like books. Physical books. Paper, stuff like that. Yes, an inordinate amount of my house is devoted to books … books on shelves, books in piles, books strewn here and there … (I’m going to mercifully spare you the Dr. Suess allusion!).

Having said that, my biggest heartburn with the first two Kindles has been the ratio of useful (viewable) screen to other stuff – be it the sort of Soviet-style industrial “design” in the first edition, or the as yet sizable, though clearly better looking case in the second.

So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m warming up with the Kindle DX. Yes it’s pricey, I’m still concerned about the seizure-inducing etch-o-sketch erase flashes, and I still like physical books. Still, I am intrigued, somewhat for the device itself but probably more for the implications for electronic distribution of even more content.

Check out this short video that covers some of both of these points:

This video is from of an interesting startup called Newsy.com, which produces short video reports combining multiple perspectives into a single burst. It’s one of the new forms of journalism that I like, but more on that later.

What Happened to Newspapers?
Most of us in the geek world long ago shifted to getting most of our news via the net in one for or another. That trend has clearly spread out to a much broader percentage of the population, enough that newspapers are really struggling.

Not struggling as in trim here, trim there, invest a bit and everything will be ok, but struggling as in mortally wounded, say your goodbyes, and if you work there start thinking about what’s next.

This happened for a fairly simple reason – advances in computing technology made it possible.

Some of it was the basic stuff (servers, decent storage, and all that), some of it was ubiquitous net-based distribution, some of it was more usable devices (I do love doing the web on my well-used, not so much better for the wear iphone), and some of it was what people did with it (blogging, aggregation sites, and the like).

Yes a few of the newspapers will make a transition to digital in a form that’ll be sort of recognizable, but not too many. The reasons are really complex and outside the bounds of this post (or my expertise, really), but in essence too many of them for too long have thought that they were in a technology-enabled distribution business (typewriters, printing presses, newsprint, kids on bicycles), while in reality they were in the content business (think Clark Kent).

Clouds Enable the Next Big Bang
The funny thing is all of that shifting has been mostly before cloud computing. Most of what has happened to date in the newspaper business has been because the distribution technology shifted, and the new distribution model enabled a bunch of new competitors. It also opened up a bunch of new customers, but that’s been harder to realize.

But with the basics of distribution in place over the net, and with devices like the iPhone, Kindle DX & competitors, netbooks and more that make the physical presentation of content better and more ubiquitous, the big race will be on to slice and dice the content that’s available in better and better ways.

All of this sifting and sorting and searching is going to take far more computing, storage, and network capacity than anything our industry has done to date.

And I know a perfect platform for all that cool stuff.

By happy circumstance I had an opportunity to speak on a panel this week at the Reynolds Institute of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The panel was focused on entrepreneurial opportunities, particularly those revolving around content. These guys get that the rules of their business are changing, and are definitely doing some cool stuff.