The News Corp has acquired Hearst Corp’s Skiff – the e-reading platform designed to deliver premium journalism to tablets, smartphones, e- readers and netbooks. However, it’s being discussed that the News Corp didn’t acquire the Skiff ereader. It is reported that “the deal includes an associated download service for delivering paid content to the Skiff itself, or other devices ranging from smartphones to netbooks”. Separately, News Corp said today that it had also made significant investment in Online Journalism LLC, a start-up vanture working to unleash online revenue from newspapers, magazines and other online-only publishers of content. Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corporation said
Today’s developments underscore News Corporation’s ongoing commitment to create strong business models that support journalism at a time of great change in our industry. Both Skiff and Journalism Online serve as key building blocks in our strategy to transform the publishing industry and ensure consumers will have continued access to the highest quality journalism.
It’s not clear what does this mean for the Skiff reader which didn’t debut in the market yet. Hearst was interested in Skiff reader to deliver the newspaper and magazine content in good-looking format on its 11.5″ screen. The lack of any device in the market for such content delivery stirred up people in the media when Hearst announced the reader. Apparently they have shown tow different prototypes – both share the eInk display, but one is back and white and the other is color. However, after the release of iPad by Apple things have changed. Now people are much more skeptical about such device.
However, I still feel that iPad can’t save the newspapers or magazines with such a big price tag. For mass adoption of a device that can display such content the price should be minimal or free, and content providers should only charge for content, not both. Moreover, how many devices people will carry for content. People are already carrying mobile phones. Some people carry Laptop with them. Amazon and B&N want us to carry their devices to read ebooks. Apple wants us to carry iPad for multiple media. It seems that all such devices are not replacing any other devices, or making some devices obsolete.
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I really hope, that the skiff reader is still alive and will be available soon. To me it seemed to be the most promising piece of hardware. It’s a pitty that the launch of the iPad (which abilities as an ereader are by far not as good as Eink-devices) has stopped skiffs market debute.
Who cares about ipad, we need decent big screen ereader with good battery life, ipad wont last few hours and personally I dont like reading on LCD as its hurting eyes in longer period of time and i have enough watching LCD from my work already.
I want the Skiff. The I-pad is not the way to read books. Remember those things we curl up with? I don’t want the I-pad, the Irex is dead and everyone else’s small screens are killing my eyes. Either release the Skiff or make a Sony with an 11 inch screen. This thing could debut at $1,000 and the Generation Y Academics would buy 100,000 of these units inside of a month.
Musicians want the Skiff, or any full size screen. I would like to be able to carry my four 3″ binders of music in a “notebook” that I can put on a stand and play with. I can’t use the tiny little e-readers, nor can I use devices that scroll back and forth. I need the entire page, right there, and big enough to be 3 feet away with my instrument.
Seriously!
I was so excited to see a larger format e-reader, only to see that it seems to have been cancelled by shortsighted folks afraid of the mostly irrelevant “competition” of Apple’s iPAD? They are nothing like each other.
Skiff product managers, get some confidence and produce this wonderful looking product!
I was much more attracted to Skiff than iPad the first time i saw it. I’m sad to see that it isn’t going to be out now.
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