Vista to take newspapers into digital age with reader

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 03 May 2006 19:10

Your IT - Home IT

It has been said that on the internet content is king and there are no greater content providers than the news media outlets. Thus, in the changing paradigm of the advertising driven online news medium, it should come as no surprise that Microsoft wants a piece of the action.

However, as Bill Gates assured a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Seattle, he is not interested in the revenue generated by online newspapers. What Gates wants is for all online newspapers to be read on the Vista operating system’s new digital reader which is specially optimised for online newspapers.

A prototype of the Times Reader system, being developed in partnership with the New York Times, was demonstrated on stage at the Seattle conference by Gates and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger. What it intends to do is translate the newspaper reading experience onto super portable computers such as the Samsung Origami.

Instead scrolling pages you will be able to flip them by tapping the screen, pictures and stories automatically resized to fit the screen and so on. The idea is to down the paper from the web and then read it offline on the train, on the sofa, in bed, on the toilet, in a café or wherever. It’s not a bad thought, although there are a couple caveats.

Firstly, an Origami sized screen will not do it for a lot of people who already have trouble reading off anything less than a 17 inch monitor these days. Those long feature pieces may be a little hard on the eyes, unless you’re reading them off a big screen at home or work.

The second issue is the price of  a portable reader, including the Vista operating system. The latest Samsung Q1 costs $1099. No doubt there will be cheaper readers on the market and some people will buy them. However, the ordinary worker who is used to paying a few cents for a paper on the way to work, may not want to shell out several hundred dollars for the privilege of reading the news in newspaper format.

That said, as prices come down and yuppies grow up, the digital newspaper reader may become as much an accessory as a mobile phone. Although one still wonders why anyone would want to saddle themselves with a device that is too big to fit in your pocket and too expensive to leave laying around unattended.

Perhaps I’m missing something that Bill Gates and Arthur Sulzberger know, but TV, the internet and radio already give me more news than I can handle. I sometimes pick up a free newspaper when I’m having a coffee in a café. I’m now used to scrolling pages and clicking on hyperlinks. The idea of trying to translate the print media into an electronic clone with sequential pages on an expensive undersized just does not seem to appeal and would seem to be rather pointless.