all talk and no action

There's an interesting interview on The Washington Post site with Russ Wilcox, chief executive of E Ink Corporation, where Wilcox says that electronic paper could be publicly available by 2015. And it will be free:

"It's going to be free and the reason is that newspapers are spending $150 per year per reader on making the paper. (Figuring in cost of newsprint.) Within two or three years you've built up $300 to $500 of budget per reader so you can give it away for free because the device itself will cost less than $300."

This is my thinking, too. It makes perfect sense to give away an e-paper device to everyone who takes out, say, a year's subscription. The subscriber can then create their own personalised magazine: rather than paying a fiver for a 100-page magazine about mobile phones when they know they're only going to read the odd review, they can opt for the lead review from that title, a couple of news spreads from a PC mag, a tutorial from a web design mag, an opinion column from another mag and the crossword from their favourite newspaper. So for their five pounds they get a magazine that's entirely tailored to their interests.

That could push the quality of writing up: once it becomes possible for editors to track which articles and writers are popular they can change their commissioning accordingly. A scary thought for writers, though: perhaps they'll start to find themselves paid not per word, but per download.

[via cyberjournalist.net]

At the risk of being pessimistic, it could equally send writing standards downwards with publishers racing each other to find the lowest common denominator. Expect in-depth PHP tutorials illustrated with pictures of breasts.

Bring it on!

Seriously, though, that happens to some extent already. I guess more so with cable and satellite TV. I think we'd have to be careful: in the same way that TV networks axe programmes because of poor initial viewing figures, editors who choose to commission purely based on download statistics are going to have to make a call on whether the writer/subject is likely to grow in popularity. I can see some, er, 'discussions' taking place between editors and publishers on this front, where an editor has to justify why they are commissioning copy that's not being widely downloaded.