Media managers from 18 countries met in Paris to discuss e-readers as a platform for news.
Here are some of the conclusions from the 2nd European E-reading conference.
Amazon’s Kindle has turned e-reader devices into a mass market product. New devices are launched every month and many observers believe 2010 will be the year in which this technology has its big breakthrough.
However, whether e-reader devices will be a good platform for newspapers is yet to be proven. Personally I am rather optimistic, but there is no lack of experts predicting that the e-ink technology will fail.
WAN-IFRA (World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers) had invited representatives from several newspapers to share their experiences producing a product for e-readers.
This is a summary of some of the presentations at the conference:
Stig Nordqvist, who is the director for emerging digital platforms and business development at WAN-IFRA, made the point that the typical users of e-reading devices will be the “text savvy” rather than the “tech savvy”. He argued that a common mistake is to put too much emphasis on the technical aspects of new devices instead of trying to understand the underlying user behavior. Yes, e-readers offer hardly any interactivity and no color screens. But for reading they do the job much better than any other device. And they offer great convenience in that the content is available in any situation, even when you are off-line.
Nordqvist strongly believed people will end up having many devices, each for a different purpose. Even if you can read books and articles on iPhone, for instance, people will still choose other devices when they really want to concentrate on the content. For publishers the challenge is to present their content in the best way on each of the different devices people will use.
Mobile e-reading is not about one device, but many devices
Users will also require that a lot of content is available on their devices – forcing publishers to cooperate if they are to succeed. And the content must not be locked in on the device, Nordqvist argued.
Charles Lansu, marketing manager at NRC Handelsblad in the Netherlands, and Olivier Delteil, business developer at Les Echos in Paris, shared their experiences in pioneering e-reader products for newspapers.
Both are offering e-reader versions of their newspaper as a subscription service. NRC Handelsblad now has 2500 e-reader subscribers, of which 30 % are new readers. The product was made specifically for the Irex Iliad reader, which is being sold by a Dutch company as well.
Les Echos has around 1000 subscribers to the e-reader product, who pay 365 euro per year. Originally the newspaper bundled the product with the Irex Iliad e-readers, but eventually decided to discontinue this.
We are not in the hardware business.
Both NRC Handelsblad and Les Echos wanted to have a device independent strategy. They recommended to focus on the content and to make sure it was produced in a way that can easily be adjusted to any device.
Especially Les Echos has done a lot of work with its content structure – merging the content from the newspaper CMS and the website CMS into one XML feed with a well-planned structure. Defining the structure had been a major task, but is now paying off as it is much quicker to launch new products based on the same feed.
One such innovative product was presented at the conference: In cooperation with Konica users will be able to print a version of Les Echos directly from their web connected copy machine.
Also worth noticing was NRC Handelsblad’s motto for making new products:
Digitalize journalism, not the newspaper. It is not about the newspaper, but your content and journalism
A number of other speakers also gave very interesting presentations at the conference, including Lauren Picard of Bookeen, who predicted what’s next for e-readers in 2010.
Some overall conclusions
- Publishers should prepare a device agnostic strategy. Content is king, not the particular device. The best way is to use standard formats for presenting the content. For e-readers epub seems to be gaining ground over PDF. Also: You must get your content structure in order!
- No publisher can succeed alone. The users will require lots of content on their devices. Competitors should cooperate to present the widest possible selection for the users.
- Don’t underestimate how important it is for users that devices are easy to use.
- E-reader devices are first of all great for reading. More than other technologies they offer users a chance to really concentrate on the content.
- Get started early — and then build on your experiences. That way you are positioned when the market takes off.
- Watch out for the mobile operators! They may very well offer bundled packages of devices and 3G connection which leave
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