Newspaper circulation is falling in Europe by about 1 percent a year, mirroring a similar decline unfolding in the U.S.
While technology is often touted as the reason why, that's just one side of the problem for print. It's your hardware, not the industry's, that's the key to understanding the change. The portability and ubiquity of readers will mean that the online experience will be, in fact, similar to the experience of reading "offline."
Even now, a small laptop isn't all that different, form factor-wise, to a fat book, and even some magazines are now coming with gimmicky binding materials that make their weight comparable to an ultraportable tablet.
Forget electronic ink or e-paper, though they might one day be a factor, and instead think of small, half-inch thick, mobile broadband-equipped notebook PCs.
But your gear is just the horse. What's riding in on it? A smaller, neater, business model with thin margins.
Publishing is a labor- and capital-intensive trade that guzzles ink and eats though tons of expensive paper. It's popular to see it as the hapless victim of new technology, but it's not true: editors were among the first to get email addresses after generals and professors. The AP has been running its RRSS (Really Really Simple Syndication) feed for 150 years. It's technologically easier for newspapers to produce an online edition than a standard newspaper, and they know it.
The problem for them, is in dealing with a market stripped of much of its money-making potential. Newspapers are being forced to pose themselves nasty Catch-22s questions like, "Do we give away our classifeds for free, or let Craigslist give our classifieds away for free?"
N.Y. Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger pointed out that you'll always have to pay for the N.Y. Times, online or off. But he also said he doesn't care if they're still printing at all in five years, now having 1.5 million online subscribers to 1.1 million for the print edition.
