The Lytro camera

Until this weekend, when I came across Rob Walker’s brief article about it in the December Atlantic, I had figured the new Lytro camera was more cool gimmick than serious game changer. You’ve probably heard about the technology already. Rather than focusing when you take the picture, you let others focus it later, when they view the image, by clicking on the area they want to see clearly. (Confused? See Lytro’s examples.)

This effect is made possible by capturing far more data than a typical camera. One way to achieve it, Walker writes, is to use “hundreds of cameras to capture all the visual information in a scene,” then use a computer to process the results “into a many-layered digital object.” Another is what the Lytro does: squeeze “hundreds of micro lenses into a single device.”

As technological advances go it’s impressive. But to a photographer, it’s not a big deal. Autofocus usually works just fine.

But Walker’s article made me realize who really benefits from the Lytro: not the photographer, but the viewer. The technology takes part of the artistic decision away from the artist and gives it to the audience. Likewise in journalism, the technology may help shift control of content from the producer to the consumer, as UC Berkeley new-media professor Richard Koci Hernandez told Walker:

Imagine, he suggests, a photojournalist covering a presidential speech whose audience includes a clutch of protesters. Using a traditional camera, he says, “I could easily set my controls so that what’s in focus is just the president, with the background blurred. Or I could do the opposite, and focus on the protesters.” A Lytro capture, by contrast, will include both focal points, and many others. Distribute that image, he continues, and “the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.”

I’m still not convinced that the Lytro technology by itself is, as Walker says, revolutionary. But it is yet another development that hands more power to the consumers of journalism by giving them more data.

Journalism, of course, has always involved data. Even when you tell a story about an event, as in narrative journalism or photojournalism, you’re presenting the viewer with data. But those data are limited and selective, in the service of a particular point of view about the reality you’re describing. If you choose to focus on the president, that’s what your audience sees. With the Lytro, however, you give them access to far more data; now they, not you, choose what to focus on.

If you don’t think data journalism is going to be a big deal, consider the Lytro and the trend it represents. Technology will not stop here. As it evolves, it will enable everyone to capture and distribute increasingly large amounts of data. And in response, journalism’s role will correspondingly shift from telling stories to giving its audience the data they need to tell their own.

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3. Should Journalism Schools Rethink Magazines? (Or Even Journalism Itself?)

That prompted a response from a practicing trade journalist and former colleague, who asked “I can see why knowing things like HTML and CSS can be helpful but do most journos need more than that?”

His question wasn’t one I could answer easily on Twitter, because for me, at least, there’s no clear and simple answer. Does a typical mid-career editor on a print publication today need to learn software programming? From that perspective, it’s hard to come up with a compelling argument for it, though I’ve certainly tried.

Waite’s blog post, however, wasn’t about veteran editors but about the journalists of the future. Those journalists, he says, must be able to “construct, manipulate, and advance digital distribution of content and information.” If they don’t have a positive, can-do attitude towards programming, they won’t succeed.

Does this mean that most journalists will need to be experts in one or more specific programming languages? I don’t think so. My guess is that while the ranks of programmer-journalists like Jonathan Stray, Michelle Minkoff, and Lisa Williams will continue to swell, most journalists won’t become similarly hyphenated. There will always be some degree of specialization in journalism. But in the new-media era, to be a good journalist, to master your craft, you must at the very least learn enough about programming to understand it.

As my former colleague implied, even for veteran journalists there’s a benefit to understanding code like HTML and CSS if they do any work online. There’s nothing new about needing to comprehend the means of your production in order to perfect your message.

As an analog example, consider how easily in the traditional print world you can lose control of your editorial content if you don’t understand at least the basics of what your art director and your production manager do. The decisions they make can strongly influence your content, and if you don’t know what to ask for and to explain why you’re asking, your content will suffer.

Likewise, in the digital medium, studying what’s under the hood gives you greater flexibility in presenting and distributing your content. If you work with web developers and programmers, you’ll have a better idea of what to ask for, and better chances of getting it. And if it’s just you and WordPress, you’ll be better able to customize the code yourself to get the result you want.

But there’s another reason that journalists of the future should want to get their hands dirty in code. The value of learning how to program is not just in better understanding their jobs, but also in better understanding the world they write about. As Roland Legrand puts it,

“Every year, the digital universe around us becomes deeper and more complex. Companies, governments, organizations and individuals are constantly putting more data online: Text, videos, audio files, animations, statistics, news reports, chatter on social networks. . . . Can professional communicators such as journalists really do their job without learning how the digital world works?”

This trend toward digitization in all human endeavors has given rise to another journalistic specialty, computer-assisted reporting or data journalism. Though it may never account for the bulk of what most journalists do, knowing how to extract, manipulate, and present data will be an increasingly valuable skill. Even today, it’s possible that you’re sitting on a rich lode of data that, if you just knew a little programming, you could help mine.

If you are well advanced in your career as a journalist, maybe you don’t need to learn anything about programming. You’re set, right? But that’s probably what the crew thought as they swabbed the decks and polished the brightwork of the Titanic.

Why not play it safe? Your job as a journalist may not require you to have any familiarity with programming today. But one day, perhaps sooner than you think, it will. Why not prepare yourself by finding out more about data journalism,  by learning some programming basics at as site like Codecademy, or by joining a cross-disciplinary group like Hacks/Hackers?

As I’ve noted recently on this blog, some journalists are worried that their role will one day be eclipsed by software. If you don’t want to become an algorithm’s slave, you have only one choice. You must become its master.

Related posts:

1. Should Journalists Learn to Code?
2. What B2B Can Learn from Jeff Jarvis

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” —Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005

Steve Jobs and I were classmates at Reed College—we both matriculated in September 1972. I didn’t know him: he lived across the campus in the Old Dorm Block, while I was in one of the newer and more institutional cross-canyon dorms (later wisely demolished).

If you were to poll Reedies from that era, how many could honestly say they remember Steve? Probably just a few. Even then, it seems, Steve was a private person, not even submitting his photo for the freshman directory.

Yet we must have crossed paths at some point in his short career at Reed (he dropped out after six months, but crashed in spare dorm rooms and audited classes for the next year and a half). It’s a small college—just a thousand students or so then—and a compact campus. Did I share a table with him in the campus dining hall? Or take him on in a game of pool in the Reed rec room? In his 1991 convocation speech at Reed he mentioned taking a Shakespeare class from Professor Svitavsky. So did I. Was it the same one?

I can only speculate. Most likely, I will never be able to connect those particular dots. Yet even so, I feel a powerful connection with Steve.

That connection first clicked into place a decade or so later, assisted by another Reed classmate.

When I entered college, computers were still huge, whirring, alien, and, to me at least, slightly terrifying devices. In my ill-advised chemistry course, when we had the choice of solving a particularly complex series of computations by either going to the computer lab or sticking with our slide rules, I chose the slide rule. I bollixed up the calculations, but avoided the computer. It would be nearly 10 years before I touched one.

By 1982, I was a fifth-year graduate student in English at Cornell University. When the department announced that it had acquired a minicomputer for the use of dissertation writers like myself, I was once again faced with a choice between old and new technologies. Computer or typewriter? This time, despite the ungainly 8-inch floppy disks and the unfriendly green glow of the CRT, I chose the computer.

Though less menacing, the computer was still alien. My involvement with computers was a relationship of convenience for me, I felt, not a long-term affair.

But then one day, Joe, a Reed classmate who had recently entered Cornell’s MFA program, changed my view.  He walked into our computer lab (actually a small, dark closet in the upper reaches of Goldwin Smith Hall) hefting a box the size of a carry-on suitcase. As he snapped it open, he explained that it was a personal computer, an Osborne 1.

It was an epochal moment for me. The idea that someone like me could actually own and use a computer had never before occurred to me. But suddenly I realized that I not only could own a computer, but probably should.

Though he had in fact known Steve at Reed, Joe had chosen the Osborne over an Apple II. After some research, I likewise spurned Apple, buying a Kaypro II instead. Not until Steve’s second act at Apple and the introduction of the iMac would I begin my transformation into a full-blown Apple fanboy.

But make no mistake. The only reason Joe and I ended up owning computers, the only way that artsy, literary types like us would consider it advisable, was that Steve Jobs made it possible. It was he who made computers personal.

That may be why nearly 40 years later, as I connect the dots from him through his brilliant products to me, his death seems so personal as well. Like so many others, I will miss him, the friend I never quite met.

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They are not going away. After a flurry of attention last year, we hadn’t heard too much in the interim about the robots that were going to displace humans as content creators. Then last month, Steve Lohr of the New York Times revived the issue. Although the natural reaction of writers and editors might be fear, I think that’s the wrong reaction. The robots aren’t going to replace us, they’re going to free us.

Both Lohr’s article and a more recent series by Farhad Manjoo in Slate, “Will Robots Steal Your Job,” examine the efforts of IT startups to develop software that performs skilled, creative work such as writing. Two of those companies, Narrative Science and Automated Insights, are developing programs that churn through computerized data about sports and other topics and spit out news stories. Though I suspect it’s partly for entertainingly hyperbolic effect, Manjoo claims to be “terrified” that his livelihood as a writer is in peril.

In her reflections on the topic yesterday, and despite an opening feint at the “scary” job-threatening Internet, freelance writer Tam Harbert took a more optimistic approach than Manjoo. She’s skeptical of claims that software can win Pulitzers or successfully mimic the human element in journalism. Moreover, she sees some benefit in using software to replace those deadwood journalists who “don’t add any value” through their work:

“Writers, for example, who simply gather information, get a few comments from people and then regurgitate it onto the page, should probably start looking for another profession. As James W. Michaels, former editor of Forbes, was known to bellow: That is ‘not reporting, it’s stenography!’”

Though Harbert might not go this far, I’d put it this way: Computer-generated journalism is not terrifying, it’s liberating.

This is especially true in the world of trade journalism, where much of the work entry-level journalists are asked to do could be handled just as well by an algorithm. It doesn’t take very long for rewriting new-product press releases to evolve from informative introduction to an industry to stultifying drudgery. The fact that trade publisher Hanley Wood is one of the companies working with Narrative Science is, to me at least, encouraging.

The way forward for journalists is not commodity content but uniquely personal content. You can already see this direction developing in the field. Though it wasn’t her intent, Stefanie Botelho stated as much last month in a Folio: article on “The New ‘I’ in Journalism.”

Botelho’s aim was to critique journalists who let their subjects be overshadowed by their own self-regard. But “ego preening,” as she put it, is a problem in all walks of life, not just journalism. That doesn’t mean journalism shouldn’t be conversational or personal. Why would we want to avoid the one thing that computers can’t convincingly do? That’s one reason, I’d guess, that Manjoo’s articles about robot job thieves are written so relentlessly in the first-person, and rely so extensively on himself and his family for his examples.

As Harbert argues, what gives the journalist’s work true value is the human, personal perspective. Without the I, there’s no you. Without the I, there’s no conversation, no meaningful interaction. Without the I, journalism is just an exchange of data.

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The default Paper.li view (click to enlarge)

When I first saw the details on the Flipboard iPad app (via Rexblog, I believe), I figured my days of using NetNewsWire on a daily basis were numbered. By creating a newspaper out of the Twitter users you follow, Flipboard offers an incredibly convenient way of reading what they recommend. But since I’ve been holding out for gen 2 of the iPad, the death of my RSS habit was strictly theoretical.

Now that I’ve seen Paper.li, a new Web-based product similar to Flipboard, I think I can hear the nail being firmly hammered into NNW’s coffin. (Yes, I know that the underlying technology of RSS is alive and well; I’m just talking about my use of an RSS reader.)

By drawing its content from a Twitter feed, Paper.li applies a personally meaningful filter to my reading. Rather than subscribing to unmoderated streams of content from sites that only sometimes have articles that interest me, I can now directly read what the Twitter users I follow write or recommend.

The site does a reasonably good job of categorizing the Twittered recommendations into content-based buckets (technology, education, arts & entertainment, business) and types of media (video, stories). It also picks up hashtags like #prodmgmt, adding an invitation to read a paper based on that tag. Since hashtags are, for me, hit or miss, I’m not too impressed—but that could change.

The Paper.li list view (click to enlarge)

Wisely, the site also allows you to view all your articles in a list format, which looks less interesting but offers quicker access to linked content. I have a feeling I’ll tend to favor this view over the default one.

You don’t even need a Twitter account to use Paper.li. You can enter the user name of your favorite Twitterer, like Jeff Jarvis or Mark Schaeffer, to see a newspaper based on their feeds.

The site is supported by Google display ads, which to my eye fit in fairly well with the content. In theory, the ads should be related to content, but my particular Twitterfeed seems to be too ill-defined to produce ads I might actually click on (although I wonder if it is just coincidence that the EasyCloset ad showed up a day after I visited the site).

Since this is my first look at Paper.li (I only learned of it today as I listened to Net@Night while treadmilling), it may turn out to be one of those flash-in-the-pan nice ideas that I quickly abandon. But for the moment, it looks like the real thing.

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The examples Kessler cites span the range of content creation, from automatically generated sports news to the use of algorithms to identify news topics. There’s obvious value to automated content creation, and as Jeff Jarvis has declared, “Data is (are) journalism.” But we should be careful not to confuse computed content with communication.

Computed content is a set of data; communication is the expression of an attitude toward, or perspective on, those data. Without a point of view, content is just an audience speaking to itself.

Using Web analytics from a test period to automatically choose between two headlines, as we’re told the Huffington Post does for its stories, can make sense—if both versions are true to the content. If you balance crowd-sourced feedback with the content creator’s point of view, you’ll have a productive conversation. But if the crowd takes precedence, it may simply replace content’s individual vitality with the bland mean.

Take, for instance, the English title for Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It may not have been crowd sourced, but it certainly plays to a corporate idea of the crowd. Is it really better than the literally translated original title, Men Who Hate Women? (That’s a rhetorical question. The original title nails the book’s central concern; the English version just wraps it in a pulp-fiction cover.)

Even in content marketing, where knowing what people want is critical to the content provider’s success, a one-sided conversation dominated by the audience won’t fly. For a conversation to work, there must be differences between the participants. The power of new media is the way it enables the audience to challenge the creator. That doesn’t mean, though, that the creator should stop challenging the audience.

This balance seems to be what Yahoo VP of Media Jimmy Pitaro is after in the company’s news blog, The Upshot. In her interview with him last week on All Things D, Kara Swisher noted that while some see computational journalism as a “‘democratizing’ of the news, others are more concerned about relying on algorithms to determine the best coverage and the implications for a society guided by its own searches.”

But as Pitaro noted in his video interview, “data and audience insights” constitute just one component of the content. In addition, Yahoo uses the “old-school” methods of “manually identifying topics” through its team of editors and writers.

Similarly, as Kessler mentioned in Mashable and as Claire Cain Miller explored at greater length in yesterday’s New York Times, the tech-news site Techmeme uses both algorithms and editors to produce its content. Why? Because “humans do things software cannot, like grouping subtly related stories, taking into account sarcasm or skepticism, or posting important stories that just broke.”

If readers didn’t care about such things, algorithms alone might be enough. But they do care. The same audience whose searches drive the algorithms also want the human touch in their content.  Until computers can pass the Turing Test, it isn’t likely that they will replace people in content creation.

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Personally, I don’t need convincing. I’ve shared this view since the late 1990s, and have a shelf of Perl, PHP, and MySQL books to prove it. That’s not to say I ever developed much expertise in these languages, but that’s not the point. As Legrand says, the goal is not to “do a lot of the programming and data structuring yourself.” The benefit of learning some programming is in understanding the medium you’re working in, and in being able to converse with and, more importantly, influence the technical staff that manage it.

Journalists back in the dark ages (the 1980s and earlier) were expected to learn about spec’ing type, doing layouts and pasteup, and other technical details of the print medium. Why should we expect less of journalists who work online?

But though Legrand’s argument makes perfect sense to me, I wonder if it’s a realistic prescription for most current B2B journalists. A reading of the recent ASBPE-Medill Survey on Digital Skills and Strategies suggests some of the challenges.

It’s clear from the comments in that survey that there are still a few of  Paul Conley’s untrainable “print guys” that haven’t yet been introduced to his baseball bat. But it’s just as clear that most of the respondents recognize their need for training, but despair of getting it.

Efforts like ASBPE’s webinar tomorrow can help, but, as I’ve argued before, real progress requires disruptive change, in one of two forms.

The first requires the employer to make digital expertise mandatory. Only then will the time be made for the employees to learn the skills they need.

If that doesn’t happen, the only option is to write off your employer and seek training on your own. The sacrifice this option requires—giving up your free time or even your job—makes it unpalatable for many.

In contrast to a few years ago, I think most journalists today would agree with Legrand’s advice. The challenge now is not understanding it, but acting on it.

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Seckler’s post appears to arise from a traditionalist print-publisher view of the Internet as a refuge for thieves and brigands, who “easily grab and reuse your content.” So the obvious solution is to “take away the free content” on the Web and make sure that “there is only one place for people to turn for your brand’s expert content.”

Seckler doesn’t share his views without trepidation. “I know that sounds a little crazy,” he says. “OK, a lot crazy.”

No, Donald, not crazy. Just dumb. A lot dumb.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, let’s quickly review a few key precepts of the new-media reality:

1. The economics of scarcity no longer applies to publishing. Before the Internet, when it cost a bundle to print and distribute information, publishers could control access to that information. But as Kevin Kelly has observed, “plenitude, not scarcity, governs the network economy.”  Attempts to create an artificial scarcity by limiting distribution, locking down content with DRM, or erecting pay walls simply won’t work. This leads to point 2.

2. The reader, not the publisher, is in control. When you have lots of choices for where to find content, you’re in the driver’s seat, not the content producer. Jeff Jarvis puts it this way:

The days of doing business by telling customers what they cannot do are nearing an end. If your customers want to watch your shows, listen to your songs, read your news, or play your games, can you still get away with telling them they cannot unless they come to you and use your devices, pay your fees, and follow your rules? That could work in a scarcity economy in which you owned all the stuff and the means to get it. But no more. Business isn’t about control any more.

3. Consumers demand content when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. When the readers are in control, publishers make money by giving them what they want, not by trying to limit their choices. Many readers will want to read their magazines on the iPad, and publishers should offer that choice. But the same readers, at other times and in other circumstances, may also want to access the same content on the Web or in print. Publishers who want to survive will give them those options as well.

In support of his argument, Seckler says that “Apple has already shown with music and apps that people will pay for content they want.” But the iPod and iTunes didn’t succeed by limiting availability or attempting to create scarcity. They succeeded by offering a convenient option for downloading and playing music. Every song on iTunes is available for free somewhere else, legally or not. But users prefer the greater convenience and ease of Apple’s system, and are willing to pay for it.

Products like the iPad will give magazine publishers and readers an exciting and valuable new way to experience magazine content, one many readers will gladly pay for. But it should be another way, not the only way. The salvation of the magazine business won’t lie in rejecting one medium of distribution in favor of another, but in embracing them all.

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Ihnatko: Apple tablet will spark digital publishing revolution

Of all the predictions for 2010 I’ve read—or hope to read (Paul Conley, how about  B2B predictions as lullaby lyrics?)—the one that has me most excited is that Apple will come out with a tablet computer. This isn’t just because I’m a serious technophile, but also because an Apple tablet will have the potential to remake magazine publishing.Until earlier this week, I entertained only idle thoughts about Apple’s rumored tablet in development, mostly when experiencing one frustration or another with my Kindle. But after hearing tech journalist Andy Ihnatko talk about the tablet on the Macbreak Weekly podcast yesterday, I’m persuaded not only that the “iPad” is real, but also that it will be revolutionary.

Ihnatko was responding to news reports that an Oppenheimer analyst expects a March or April launch of the tablet and that it will squarely target the Kindle.

While Ihnatko doubted that Apple’s tablet would “own the e-book marketplace,” he did agree that the device would transform it.  “The amount of excitement that it’s going to generate just for e-publishing in general is already phenomenal.” As he noted in his Chicago Sun-Times article last week on a rival tablet computer, the erstwhile “CrunchPad,” computer makers are all preparing for “what happens after Apple releases the Tablet.” He compared their state of mind to that in a year before a world war: “No, it hasn’t been announced, it hasn’t been scheduled, but everybody’s anticipating that the world will be fundamentally different this time next year. They are making arrangements to make sure they are in the best position to survive and thrive in that new landscape.”

Likewise, publishers are making plans “for how they’re going to deal with the fact that there are going to be these really cool, inexpensive color touchscreen tablets to publish things onto.” Next year, he continued, will be “one of the most exciting years in technology, period. I think we’ll look back . . . and say that’s one of those years where everything changed after that.”

Ihnatko bases his expectations for Apple’s tablet on both its likely technology and the probable distribution model Apple will follow.

Most predictions for the tablet foresee, as he puts it in his Sun-Times article, “a color tablet with a large screen, a great video chipset, and a multitouch interface.” These, of course, are precisely the capabilities assumed by Hearst’s Skiff project, the Sports Illustrated concept demo, and the digital magazine consortium. It will be, he said, “a phenomenally cool device, but it’s also going to create the environment in which every single magazine, newspaper, and book publisher is going to be that much more compelled to say ‘we’re going to have a comprehensive digital publishing plan.’ . . . It will create the environment in which everyone starts thinking about publishing everything digitally now.”

Sports Illustrated Tablet Demo from Jared Cocken on Vimeo.

But just as important as technology is the distribution opportunity Apple would offer. It would presumably use iTunes or a similar platform, and charge considerably less than Kindle for nonexclusive distribution of paid content. The potential for a revolution in magazine distribution like the one Apple sparked in music is clear. And in contrast to the proprietary and limiting format that music companies initially forced on iTunes, the speculation is that Apple—and more importantly, publishers—will welcome the ePub standard. (Here’s how Ihnatko describes the format in his Sun Times article: “It is an ambitiously flexible ebook format that can act as a standard ‘wrapper’ for just about any type of content you’ve got going. It’s just as good for unlocked public-domain books as it is for current best-sellers controlled by DRM, and ePub can conceivably even support aggressive multimedia, such as interactive audio and video.”)

How would this distribution model work for the predominantly controlled-circulation (i.e., free) magazines from trade publishers? Probably just fine. Since the ePub is an open standard, digital publications could be distributed by a variety of methods for all kinds of devices, not just Apple’s. And if Apple follows the iTunes model of distributing free content like podcasts, it should happily host digital trade pubs. In addition, according to Electronista, Apple would not “preclude advertising, which to date hasn’t been allowed for the Kindle even with magazines and newspapers.”

Before we get too excited about this scenario, it’s important to remember that the Apple tablet rumor is still just that—a rumor. The iPad may never see the light of day. But the signs that it will are increasingly credible, and sufficient to make me believe that 2010 will be a very interesting year indeed.

UPDATE: A couple of items I missed before hitting the publish button: 1. Rex Hammock’s persuasive rant that the iPad (not the “tablet,” blockhead!) should not be reduced to a mere tool for “reading content presented via a magazine-metaphor interface.” Fair point. But I still want to read on it! 2. A New York Times article pointed out by Hammock about magazine publishers preparing to publish on those cringe-inducing tablets. Both worth reading.

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For me, the answers to these questions came from an unexpected source. Regular readers of B2B Memes will know that I have mixed feelings about digital magazines.  Likewise, my feelings are mixed about the one blog on the subject that I follow, from digital magazine producer Nxtbook Media. Like many corporate blogs, it’s a mix of lightweight stories about company activities, tales of customer success, and criticisms of anyone that doesn’t like their product. Last week, though, I remembered why I follow it: Sometimes it offers some excellent insights.

It’s unfortunate that the PR bulldog instinct came over the author, Marcus Grimm, in headlining last week’s post “Lies, Half-Truths and Other Innuendos About Digital Magazines.”  The inflammatory choice of words made me suspect it would be a hack job, but in fact it was a well-reasoned and sensible discussion of the consortium’s effort. (I suppose it’s too late now, but why not use a key phrase from the post as the title: “Top Five Things You Need to Know About the Forthcoming Digital Magazine Consortium”?)

If you’re interested in the topic, you should read the entire post. But here I will cite three key points Grimm makes in casting doubt on the relevance of the consortium.

First, as Grimm notes, “there’s no reason to believe this will be a solution for trade publishers.” The consortium is all about charging for content, not growing an audience. Hence, he says, “if you’re interested in the latter, there’s nothing here to indicate a better future for you, or even a different future.”

Second, he argues against the strategy of producing a dedicated device for digital magazines: “We DON’T agree that you should make readers choose a format. Instead, let them choose the content and have the format adapt to the device [they’re] on.”

Third, he points out the silliness of the magazine industry trying to build a tablet: “The fact that the consortium is working on an eReader device is further proof to me that they don’t fully get what industry they’re in. Hint: it’s not hardware.”

Now, I suppose there may be some behind-the-scenes politics or unspoken resentments at work here I don’t know about, and as a Nxtbook employee, Grimm is certainly not an objective observer. But he’s persuaded me that the consortium is not likely to hit a home run.

Personally, I hope someone is successful at forging a viable, widely-accepted approach to porting digital versions of B2B magazines to portable readers. For me, no matter how cool the technology, digital magazines on a computer just don’t cut it. But put them on my Kindle, add some color and better performance to the device, and I could be sold on digital magazines at last.

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