The evolution of wood-pulp media

I think a way out of the crisis for paper media could be Amazon’s Kindle, only slightly improved. I don’t know for sure whether it can sync with a PC over Bluetooth right now, but that would be useful.

Say I want to read Wired on my Kindle. I sub­scribe to the sec­tions I’m inter­ested in, by RSS, for example. And Google, being a cutting-edge com­pany, has by then improved Google Reader so that it can sync with the Kindle.

Now one more impor­tant detail. The draw­back of paper media com­pared with elec­tronic media is that they give the reader infor­ma­tion in dis­crete por­tions (a new issue comes out on Mondays, say), while blogs pub­lish within a few hours of the event that made the news, not to men­tion microblogs that broad­cast infor­ma­tion in real time. Everything is head­ing toward infor­ma­tion moving faster and faster, and the print­ing press is too slow, a relic of the 1.0 era.

On the other hand, there’s the need for qual­ity reflec­tion on events, which blogs often (so far) can’t pro­vide, and that’s what tra­di­tional media should hold on to. Nothing new, really :)