The trouble with E-newspaper editions

Slate's Jack Shafer says electronic versions of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times "induce claustrophobia" and are "as comfortable as a fat man trapped in an iron suit designed by a boa constrictor?"

In case you don't get the point, he adds, "For a sense of how poorly the facsimile of a broadsheet newspaper translates onto a computer screen, imagine reading a newspaper through a six-pane colonial window in which five of the panes have been blacked out."

And you know what, he's dead on. And his advice is also smart:

"As long as publishers expect e-readers to pay top dollar, they should deliver something the e-reader can't get in print or on the vanilla Web. Start with something that's as legible as a PDF but that fits a monitor's outlines. Don't go crazy with multimedia (though when used intelligently, audio and video can help some stories). Adopt more natural navigation. Publishers shouldn't be frightened of cannibalizing the current print readership -- they need to get there before the competition does."

May 07, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)

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