Time Inc. said earlier this year it wasn't planning to join the rush of old-media companies like News Corp. and Hearst who are developing their own e-readers. But now, according to documents obtained by NBC Bay Area, the company has plans to rush out a prototype by the end of this year, possibly in cooperation with a hardware partner:

"Whoever defines the interface wins," [an internal Time Inc.] slide concludes. A slide labeled "Key components to the winning model" includes... "product design" including "tools for research, design innovation and manufacturing," which suggests plans for a physical gadget; and a "consumer-facing brand" — a name for the device and service akin to Amazon's Kindle.

The company is also exploring a joint venture with Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst, according to the documents.

It's easy to understand how an e-reader project would appeal to beleaguered magazine executives. While their industry is crumbling , analysts have estimated sales of 800,000 or more Amazon Kindle e-readers, and there is some evidence that device has goosed book sales.

But Amazon opened up a new market, taking books once available only physically and offering them via instant electronic purchase. Magazines are already available on the Web in a format superior to the e-book, complete with comments, videos and these things called hyperlinks. If Time Inc. wants a financially healthy future, it should focus on growing in that medium, which it already has some experience with, rather than on a brand-new hardware device far outside its core competency.

Grand gestures, in other words, are no substitute for the grinding work of real change; one would think a company owned by Time Warner, of all entities, would know that by now.

UPDATE: Peter Kafka at AllThingsD hears from Time Warner sources that the company does not want to get into the hardware business.

(Pic by Angel Leon)

Asked about digital piracy, King emailed Motoko Rich of the New York Times:

The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys. And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.

Or reading novels by Cory Doctorow, the Boing Boing blogger with a little-known sideline in fiction. Doctorow doesn't mind if you copy his books — in fact, he gives them away. To guys living in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.

Did we say "kindled"? Amazon's Kindle, the e-book reader, has indeed sparked fever dreams among the ailing lords of print. The New York Times has paused from chronicling its own doom to contemplate its salvation — a large-format Kindle, better suited to displaying newspaper-like pages. Hearst, News Corp., and other print-media concerns are pushing their own devices, loath to grant Amazon so much power over their future — but they are fumbling, while Amazon may introduce its newspaper-friendly device as soon as Wednesday.

What a petty concern to worry about, rather than asking if that future even exists!

The argument for e-readers goes like this: Newspapers and magazines will once again be able to charge for subscriptions to support the cost of production, while shedding the expense of printing presses. Readers will pay for the convenience of getting the news delivered to a device.

That prediction fundamentally misunderstands the lessons of the Kindle, which made books available in a convenient digital format, on an appealing device, for the first time. Downloading five books for the beach is vastly more appealing than packing them.

What are the publishers really proposing? Taking a product available for free on the Web, dumbing it down, and then charging for it. News without links, comments, or video, in black and white, updated once a day? In an age when print media ought to be learning to do more with less, they are instead fixated on getting customers to pay more for less.

There is one prospective market for this: The old, who may be so attached to printed media that they will accept an electronic substitute. Hearst digital chieftain Phil Bronstein, the former San Francisco Chronicle editor, told Maureen Dowd that the industry's best hope was that people would live longer, so those trained to read newspapers will stick to the habit.

The obvious converse of Bronstein's feeble hope: The young will never learn to read newspapers and magazines again, having grown up reading online. Why would they switch to a product like the Kindle?

Like the libertarian wingnuts who would rather flee to science-fiction cities on the sea, escape to outer space, or cosset themselves in an online fantasy world rather than live in reality, the addled lords of print like Bronstein would rather dream of a technological rescue than face the hard work of survival.

What newspapers and magazines need to do is obvious: Build appealing websites, and sell them better. But that would require changing.

Television has been distracting people from the written word long before the Internet came along. And while the Internet has been good for reading, it's mostly encourage the consumption of short-form writing.

Print is a much better way to read long chunks of text — fewer distractions, easier on the eyes, portable from room to room, etc. — and to the extent the Kindle replicates these technological advantages, it is basically a crippled laptop.

But Granger imagines an e-reader that advances beyond the "crude" Kindle. He thinks better technology will do the trick:

... as electronic readers improve, as they add graphics and design and, eventually, color, even more people will opt for the more sustained, contemplative experiences more often. And all will be well with the world.

What he forgets: The Kindle has a built-in Web browser, though few people use it because the Web is not particularly attractive in black-and-white. If it adds color, won't people inevitably use it to read websites, and thus fewer books, just like they do on PCs? There goes Granger's theory out the window.

We suspect he has another reason for touting the Kindle, though. Hearst, the owner of Esquire is working on its own e-reader. By paying the Kindle such a backhanded compliment — right idea, wrong device — Granger is carrying water for his publisher's business interests. And not for the first time.

Hearst has invested in E Ink, a Cambridge startup whose low-power screen technology is used in both the Kindle and Hearst's planned reader. E Ink appeared on a splashy, Granger-praised Esquire cover last year. Perhaps this E Ink-stained wretch has even handled the product he envisions killing the Kindle? If so, it's too bad Granger won't tell his readers how much he loves that, too.

Hearst's e-reader will be larger than the Kindle — more like an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. And it will use technology from E Ink, a Cambridge, Mass. startup Hearst backed more than a decade ago. Hearst hopes to distribute electronic versions of its magazines and newspapers on the device, which a Hearst executive told Fortune will be out later this year.

It's like a terminal cancer patient putting faith in some herbalist's shark-bone treatment.

"The question now is, will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?" asks Fortune. Uh, no. The question is whether people will give up their iPhones and netbooks for these new readers. Cheap laptops and smartphones are an irreversible trend. Factories in Japan, China, and Korea thunder out the mass-produced parts for these devices, which make their economics compelling. And a PC has the virtue of not being designed by a publisher more interested in protecting an old way of doing a business than serving readers.

Hearst has exercised its E Ink fetish before, when Esquire used it for an expensive, pointless cover. But the fact that Hearst owns a stake in E Ink is the silliest possible reason to champion the technology. Economists would call that a sunk cost: It's money already spent.

Newspaper and magazine publishers seem desperate to find some new trick to preserve the scarcity on which they used to profit. In a world overflowing with media, that is impossible. And editors and publishers are not clever technological tricksters. The E Ink reader will start out black-and-white. Wait, aren't the glossy photos and gorgeous layouts why we pick up magazine sin the first place?

What they ought to be doing is fixing their websites: Adding comments everywhere, publicly displaying the comments and pageviews stories garner, and — crucially — adjusting the story mix in light of that information. It's unlikely to happen. The makers of magazines are so used to dreaming up story ideas in their skyscraper aeries. It will never occur to them that their readers might actually be smarter than they are.

Smart enough, at any rate, not to buy a gadget designed by a magazine guy.

(Image via Gizmodo)

They say Amazon executives told them "high-end estimates on Kindle sales reported by TechCrunch and a Citigroup analyst are not reasonable." Writes one of the McAdams Wright Ragen analysts: "[Amazon execs] told us that the Kindle is definitely selling very well, but they also said the analysts and reporters giving out these extremely high estimates 'did not run them by company. Since we've never seen a Kindle in person, we're inclined to believe the Amazon executives when they say the Kindle isn't quite such a huge hit. But the suits might also be trying to keep expectations low enough to be easily surpassed.

If you didn't buy Amazon,com's e-book reader — shown above in a CNET video — you're far, far from alone. A CrunchGear rumor report says Amazon will try again for this year's holiday shopping season. Kindle 2.0, says "an insider," will be bigger, less fussy to use, and thank God Almighty they're going to get rid of the original model's retro 1983 IBM PC sickly off-white plastic case color. Even Zune Brown would be an improvement. The key points from CrunchGear's report:

An insider let slip that two new Amazon Kindle models will hit stores this holiday season, with the first coming as early as October.

The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface. The source told us that Amazon has “skipped three or four generations,” comparing the old Kindle to the 1st gen iPod and the new version to something like the sexy iPod Mini.

The second new model, which is shaped like an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, is considerably bigger than the current model and should be available next year.

Both models should come in multiple colors and may be aimed at younger readers.

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore.

1. Facebook stays independent and private, strikes a meaningful deal that legitimizes its business plan, and buys a startup.
2. Born out of the writers' strike, at least one "Funny or Die" style site gets big buzz and maybe even gets bought, but it fails to produce any videos near the quality of FoD or Super Deluxe.
3. Google releases some limited version of voice search beyond GOOG 411. During the year, the company's stock tops $800.
4. Digg sells to a major media company for at least $200 million, and founder Kevin Rose starts a non-web-based company.
5. YouTube announces it's adding HD video, but the feature doesn't arrive until 2009.
6. Gawker Media, publisher of this site, starts a men's site and a Web show.
7. Yahoo suffers major layoffs, leading the press to dub it the next AOL.
8. Yet AOL is spun off and reframes itself. At the end of 2008, the company's future is still uncertain.
9. Apple releases a second-generation iPhone, and at least one New York Times article tries to draw a "middle class/rich" line between those who upgrade and those who stick with the first generation.
10. A new videoblogger emerges as the go-to example for slick independent daily vlogging, following Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank.
11. Tumblr, the pared down blogging service, enjoys the popularity that 2007 brought Twitter.
12. Twitter remains independent and spins off a new service.
13. The Internet again fails to drive one presidential candidate to success. So does Chuck Norris.
14. Jason Calacanis, still running his online directory Mahalo, starts another project.
15. A new meme started in a geeky part of the web infiltrates the "normal" population even more deeply than LOLcats.
16. Yet another e-book reader comes out and no one cares.
17. Blog search engine Technorati collapses after failing to get enough funding to stay afloat.
18. The Wall Street Journal announces it will soon be free online.
19. Blog platform maker Six Apart, having spun off LiveJournal and rearranged its exec staff, gets bought.
20. Dell screws up the good will it won in 2007 with another customer-service or bad-parts scandal.
21. Net Neutrality takes another hit from a telco-friendly Congressional bill.
22. Second Life plods along.
23. The TechCrunch blog network lands a regular TV appearance, if not a show.
24. The country tires of the last round of famous-for-being-famous celebs, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton's TV show gets cancelled.
25. A minor medical incident renews the "can Apple survive without Steve Jobs" argument.