What magazine publishers should do about e-paper

Digital paper, e-paper, electronic paper, call it what you will. It's been long in coming, and won't be here any time soon. I saw an actual example last year at the Seybold conference in San Francisco, and the "screen" was small and monochromatic (black and white). Yet it's a start. The technology won't be relevant to magazine publishers until the screens become 9x11, high-resolution color and flexible.

However, one day that will come. And when it does, watch out--this is the ultimate disruptive technology.

What if you could drop your printing, paper and postage costs from your bottom line? Yes, early on, that was the conventional wisdom about the first generation of Web sites, but a Web site is NOT a satisfactory replacement for a magazine.

But an e-paper magazine is.

Finally, publishers are starting to formally study the impact of e-paper on the publishing business. Industry veteran Bob Sacks, who leads the study, was quoted in the Folio: article above as saying:

“I am convinced that we are in a critical technological moment for our industry,” says Sacks. “I've talked about the publishers, whose only real franchise is content. I've talked about an international wireless infrastructure. I've talked about digital magazines and the reprocessing of material over multiple platforms—e-paper will empower all of the above and more.”

Studying the technology is a good first start. But I've long felt that publishers need to do far more than sit back and wait for it to mature.

What if periodical publishers of all stripes--consumer and B2B, magazine and newspapers--formed a huge consortium to massively fund the development of the technology? If all publishers globally banded together and put resources into this technology, we could accelerate the day when we no longer must pay for printing, paper and postage.

Equally as important, Adobe or Quark (or both) should start working with such a consortium to evolve a new sort of page description language--the function that HTML does on the Web or that Postscript does in print--that would become the defacto electronic output format. That has huge implications in and of itself--imagine, the same person who designs your print publication would also design your e-publication. No new tools to learn.

I'm not sure how many years off this development is, or whether it will even occur in my lifetime.

That said--I don't believe paper-and-ink publishing will ever go away, even when this e-paper nirvana arrives. Electronic publishing is inherently a pull medium rather than a push. Users must opt in to your content. Printers, paper companies and postal services have nothing to worry about. Publishers will still need to supplement their opt-in circ numbers with physical distribution. Said another way--if you find that a big enough chunk of your readers isn't reading your issue each month (and you'll certainly know!) on their e-paper gizmatron 5000 devices, you will still want to print up hardcopy versions and mail it to them to make sure they see it--and so you can count it in your total audience number.

Of course, print-on-demand periodical publishing is here to help with that too.