Gasoline and dead trees
Yesterday we didn’t get a Chicago Tribune newspaper, nor today either. The reason? Gas prices.
I thought it was our delivery person and went up to the mini-mart to buy one. They didn’t have any, either.
“The guy who brings them down from Chicago said he couldn’t bring them because of the gas prices there – six bucks a gallon.”
Interesting. When you think about it, newspapers as we experience them now are a very fuel-intensive way to deliver information. Not just driving them down from Chicago, but to each individual house to deliver just that day’s news. All for fifty cents a copy – a bargain.
Practical wireless newsreaders can’t come soon enough for me. I don’t like balancing a laptop on the breakfast table, it takes too long to boot up, and so forth. But a newsreader could be the size of a clipboard, always-on, and get its feed continuously at a very low data rate from a local radio station’s data sideband. Articles, ads, and comics would feed into its memory, which would hold a typical day’s paper worth. You would navigate by tapping with your fingertips.
Subscription fee? Forget it. What you pay for your newspaper is already nominal and doesn’t begin to cover the cost of printing and distribution. Your friendly newspaper is an advertising-driven enterprise.
I’ve seen sketches and even prototypes of these things. Manufactured in bulk, you’d pay about fifty bucks for a basic model. They’re simple and tough, and weigh about a pound. The ultra-low-power nonvolatile display technology is making its way to market now. All the other needed technologies are already here in various forms.
Of course, the guy who brings the papers from Chicago might have to adjust his lifestyle somewhat. But that appears to be inevitable anyway. MrsDoF, a recovering technophobe, reads the local paper online already.