The era of printing words on dead trees might be coming to an end, but that doesn't mean people aren't reading or writing anymore. When e-readers/e-books/tablets finally take over, it should be no surprise that the volume of reading material produced will be much, much greater than there ever was when the latest technology was just the printing press. Here are just a few projects that journalists are playing around with so they can adapt to an all digital future.

• The New York Times has started experimenting with some software projects that might help spread its news. Beta620 is supposed to be "a place for anyone to suggest and collaborate on new ideas and products" -- and maybe it's time for the NYT to split up its online/paper businesses into Netflix/Qwikster-like entities....[url]
• Middle school journalists published their writing online via the Living Textbook project. These 7th graders created a blog -- is this the future of journalism? [url]
• Writing printed textbooks about journalism isn't an easy job. People write them for love or reputation. But even in the ever-changing field of journalism, there are still some truisms like: "know your audience and know how to reach them." [url]
• To discover more interesting journalism-related content, check out what's being reported on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

A few weeks back, we linked to the NY Times' Ethicist, Randy Cohen, explaining why it's not unethical to download a digital copy of a book, if you'd bought a hard copy of the book -- even though it probably violates copyright law. That created quite a lot of anger from folks who felt that it was clearly an ethical violation as well. Mitch Wagner, apparently missed that kerfuffle, as he's written up a short blog post for Computerworld asking people their thoughts on the ethics of downloading media that you purchased legally:

I recently got a hankering to re-read some of my favorite books. I already own them, in hardcover and paperback. But I'd like to re-read them as e-books. Do I need to buy the e-book versions, or can I download a pirated copy of the e-book for free?

The argument that says it's wrong is pretty simple, and clear-cut: When I bought the books, I bought individual copies of the books. All I own is that one copy. If I lost the copy, I wouldn't be entitled to a free replacement. It wouldn't be right for me to shoplift the book from the local Barnes & Noble. I'd have an obligation to buy a new copy, or borrow one legitimately, before re-reading the book.

On the other hand: I already paid for these books legitimately. They're my books. The shoplifting analogy is specious, because in that case, I'm depriving the rightful owner -- the owner of the bookstore -- of their copy of the book. If I download a copy of the e-book, nobody else is deprived of their copy.

However, he goes on to make another point that also deserves some scrutiny:

Every couple of years, TiVo hiccups and fails to record a favorite TV show. In that case, I have to decide whether to wait for the show to come out on DVD, or just download the episode from the BitTorrents.

Now there will be people who will claim that, due to the fact that it likely infringes on copyright to do so, it's automatically unethical. But morality isn't determined by the law. In general, I've always argued that if the economics increase the overall market and opportunity, then there's no moral issue to speak of -- and it's hard to see how someone downloading an episode their TiVo missed would harm the overall economy in any way. But, I'm guessing that some folks here will disagree...

Engadget is reporting that someone has "hacked" the Kindle. But that's a little misleading: it doesn't mean someone has figured out how to crack the copy-protection on Kindle-formatted e-books. Rather, someone has figured out how to convert protected books in MobiPocket format (which Amazon owns) to the closely-related Kindle format. That means that if you've purchased protected Mobipocket books, you now have the option to play them on your Kindle. That's good news, but it's not exactly a major crack in the Kindle's DRM scheme. It's more reminiscent of Real's Harmony software, which allowed Real's DRMed music to be played on iPods. Still, it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to crack Kindle's DRM wide open. My guess is that so far no one has bothered because there aren't enough Kindles around for anyone to care.

I agree almost entirely with Tim Lee's assessment of the Kindle e-book reader, posted Monday on these pages, but as a wireless and telecom analyst, there are aspects of the device that are interesting and important - unfortunately for Amazon, they aren't going to help make the Kindle a success. The most interesting factor is that Amazon is basically launching an MVNO, called Whispernet that will use the Sprint EV-DO network. It certainly won't be the first MVNO on Sprint, and it won't be the first mobile device maker to brand the wireless service as their own (think Palm VII's Palm.net, or Blackberry.net when they both resold Mobitex service). But the Kindle is one the first mainstream consumer electronics device we've seen that is not a computer and not a phone but which still connects to a mobile broadband network.

This portends a future (that Sprint has been talking up a lot lately with WiMAX) where myriad consumer electronics devices like cameras, GPS devices, sensors, signs, etc. all connect to the "cloud" and have service either bundled in retail prices, or into some other service fee like Amazon is charging for content. This kind of device is a break from the normally carrier-controlled handsets we usually see, and is interesting for that reason alone. It's also a break from the $80 rule, where non-phones can only connect to cellular data for $80/mo. Since the Kindle device has limited Internet functionality, Amazon can predict average monthly EV-DO throughput per device, and negotiate a much better wholesale data rate from Sprint than $80, and can then afford to bundle that into content pricing. Don't get me wrong -- I don't agree with the content pricing on the Kindle. But the launch of an "Open Access" consumer electronics device with wide area network access bundled in has got me excited. Imagine now a GPS device from Garmin or TomTom that comes with a cellular radio for traffic updates, local fuel prices, etc, and the data plan is bundled into the retail price. Wow! Consumer electronics devices that could work right out of the box with full mobile connectivity, and a carrier that is willing to wholesale reasonably for that network connection! The times are finally changing.

On Friday, I expressed skepticism that e-book technology has reached the point where it will overtake the paper book. Now Amazon's PR blitz has begun, and so we're getting more details about the Kindle's features and pricing. I'm not impressed. First, there's the obvious point that the device's DRM will make a lot of customers wary of getting locked into Amazon's proprietary platform. But the even bigger flaw is the pricing model. Apparently, Amazon will charge you $1.99 for public domain books like Bleak House. Kindle also provides you with access to blogs, but only 250 of them (including Techdirt), and you have to pay at least a dollar a month for the privilege of reading what you can see here for free. And you can subscribe to the New York Times, but you have to pay $13.99 per month for that. This really seems like a strange pricing strategy. A lot of consumers will balk at paying for blog content they've always gotten for free online. Likewise, giving away public domain books would be a good way to spur adoption of the device at very low cost to Amazon. And it's weird to charge so much for a digital newspaper at the same time newspapers are dropping their paywalls online. Even the price for new books, $9.99, seems too expensive. Publishers don't have to print, ship, and stock e-books, so their costs are obviously a lot lower. On top of that, the demand for a lot of books is likely to be quite elastic—cut the price in half and you could easily double the number of sales.

The one undeniably innovative thing about the Kindle is the free wireless EVDO access. The limits on access to Internet content may be an attempt to keep the bandwidth consumption down. But in a world where you can get an unlimited data plan for your iPhone for $20 per month, they should at least have an option for a flat rate "all you can eat" data plan, which would allow you to access Internet content and subscribe to an unlimited number of blogs, newspapers, and public domain books. Bezos obviously wants this to be the iPod of the printed word. But one of the crucial factors behind the iPod's success is that it gives you free access to content in open formats. You can rip your CDs and listen to them on an iPod. You can subscribe to an unlimited number of podcasts. With the Kindle, in contrast, Amazon apparently expects customers to buy an unfamiliar proprietary device, and then pay a premium to read content like blogs and public domain books that's available for free on the Internet. Somehow I don't think that very many people are going to go for that.

On Monday, Amazon plans to unveil the latest stab at a successful e-book reader with Kindle, a $400, a WiFi and EVDO-equipped tablet PC that's rumored to have 256 MB of memory and an 800 X 600 electrophoretic display. It will be a direct competitor to Sony's PRS-505 Reader. The technology here looks kind of neat, but I don't understand why they expect anyone other than die-hard gadget enthusiasts would jump on board. Books are durable, flexible, cheap, light, boast an extremely high contrast ratio, and never malfunction or run out of power. It's going to be awfully difficult to design an e-book reader that can compete on all of those dimensions. Plus, people have developed life-long habits around paper books, and would have to learn a new set of habits to get comfortable reading e-books. So e-books will have to offer some pretty compelling advantages to overcome all of those considerations. Yet the only real advantage of an e-book is that it saves some space. If you buy Amazon's reader, you can pack a few dozen e-books in the space in your suitcase that used to be occupied by a single paper book. But nobody reads dozens of books on one trip, so it's not obvious why that's valuable. And when they get home, a lot of people actually like putting their books on bookshelves in their living room where they'll impress their friends. So saving space isn't necessarily a big advantage there either.

Amazon seems to be trying to address that issue by tacking on some other features, most notably the ability to load up content from a variety of newspapers. But reading a newspaper is a much different experience than reading a book. People flip through newspapers a lot faster than they flip through books, and because of the way electrophoretic displays work, that's likely to run down their batteries pretty quickly. Most of Amazon's target customers likely already have a laptop and/or a smartphone, either of which offer color, a more responsive display, and more powerful browsing software. It seems more likely that people would just read the day's news on one of those devices and leave the e-book reader at home.

The fundamental issue here is that people don't adopt new technologies — especially ones that cost hundreds of dollars — unless they provide compelling advantages over the products already on the market. Merely achieving parity with paper books (and it's not clear they've even achieved that) isn't going to cut it, because people don't like to change their established routine. For e-books to catch on, then, they have to be better than paper in a really compelling way. So far, nobody has figured out how to make e-books do something really useful that they can't do with the paper books and laptops they already have.