Do you remember the old days when the paper boy would deliver your newspaper? On the train or bus commuters would open their arms wide to turn the pages of broadsheets. Today you're just as likely to see people reading their phones or PDA. What are they reading? Many are reading a personal selection of electronic newspapers and blogs.
With all the talk of whether e-books sales will grow now that e-ink based readers are on the market, we'are overlooking an area where electronic reading has already hit the market hard - the newspaper industry. In August the Economist Magazine had a special report on the newspaper industry. In the article More Media, less news, they examined the changes in the newspaper industry:
For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year.
Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices.
In another article Who killed the newspaper? they say,
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline.
Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
I must say living in Paraguay having newspapers move online over the last few years has been wonderful. I can read quality newspapers from my PC. I particularly enjoy the New York Times (excellent tech news) and the Guardian (great investigative journalism). Of course blogs are now an essential part of that daily news addiction (palmaddiction goes without saying!).
Then last year I discovered Sunrise, joy of joys, I could read these internet news sources on my Palm. Sunrise XP is an excellent program. I really suggest all PDA and smartphone owners should use it - it provides off-line reading of sites plucked off the web and supports rss feeds - which most newspaper sites now provide. With a little Sunrise tweeking you can get all the news you want very quickly and for free. Smartphone uses might argue they can read newspaper sites on-line, but many newspapers online offer a paid subscription service for mobile devices and rss feeds link to articles with lots of graphics. Sunrise allows link filtering and rewriting to get on-line the text content just right for your device.
So, do you read newspapers on your device? let us know in the forum.
I think the next 6 to 12 months will be one of the most interesting in this history of Palm. It's time to do a little crystal ball gazing, or palm reading you could say.
One of the great things about Palmaddicts is hearing the interesting uses everyone has for their devices. I have SmartList to Go and I can see from playing around with it that it's a powerful program. I don't use it day to day however.
Skype is an absolute God send. Back home in Northern Ireland there is a major health problem for our family to deal with and we feel very far away in Paraguay. We have used Skype to ring people and talk things over. It has been so much better than emails.
I've been looking for a great RSS reader and the other day I installed