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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: saukriver who wrote (29902)	8/20/2000 9:28:09 PM
From: erickerickson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

GMST and general e-book ramblings Just thought I'd add a bit to the disucssion. I've thought for some years that an e-book like thingy would be interesting to newspapers. Imagine a continually wirelessly updated e-book from the newspaper. It could be set up to have, for instance, three levels. One level could be important headlines. Another level could be all the articles that a particular editor thought were important. Yet to a third level could be all of the articles of particular interest. The driver for the newspaper industry is production costs. As I remember for a major newspaper like the Chicago Tribune, the raw cost of newsprint was 40% of the cost of producing the newspaper. Now my memory isn't what it used to be so that number could possibly include the cost of the printing plant etc. When thought of from the perspective the publishers of any printed media could realize extraordinary savings by not having to actually do the printing. The problem currently with e-books is the "form factor". That is a screen simply does not "look the same" as the printed page and is arguably harder to read. Well, they are already prototyping "electronic ink". It apparently works analogously to those signs that are black on one side and, say, yellow on the other. This allows the page to be erased and rewritten. I can imagine the e-book paradigm of wireless continual updating working with "electronic ink", thus overcoming the problem with "form factor". Someone mentioned that the e-book concept could allow what amounted to local censorship. This both excites and worries me. I'm the one hand I can imagine self appointed sensors changing textbooks to suit of their own narrow beliefs (of whatever stripe). On the other hand the current economics of producing, say, high school textbooks insurers they contain watered down versions of controversial topics so they will be acceptable to the widest audience. Yet another application of the e-book concept is "non-establishment" printing. Again the economics of setting up for printing a book insurer that someone acts as the "gatekeeper" who decides what books should be printed. It seems like and is possible to distribute in the e-book format from, say, my personal Web site. This could be a boon for "struggling young writers". Anyway, that's enough for now. Best Erick