I’ve finally let my Seattle Times subscription lapse, after seven months with SeaTimes and 31 prior years with the now-discontinued print P-I. The only thing I’d still used the print paper for, that couldn’t be done online, was to methodically study how much smaller the SeaTimes was getting.

As a print subscriber, I was hardly supporting the newsroom. Subscription fees barely pay for the manufacture and delivery of the physical product. What I was doing was adding to the aggregate eyeballs the SeaTimes could sell to advertisers. That company’s done a lousy job at selling ads the past several years. Even before the Internet killed want ads and the Great Recession decimated home and car sales, they’d already been losing huge accounts to direct mail.

Supporting “newspaper style journalism,” and transitioning from it to something better, is a topic I’ve long written about.

Online ads earn far less income per reader than print ads. This is unlikely to change any time soon. SeattlePI.com has the potential to become profitable once the general economy improves, but won’t likely ever support anything near the news staff the print P-I had.

I currently see three potential scenarios:

1) Print papers continue to shrink, not to oblivion but to the point that they become vulnerable to startup competitors (who suddenly don’t have to pour in $30 million a year in costs and who can target niche audiences in a way old-line dailies can’t).

2) Print papers continue to shrink, to the point where they’re small enough to become subsidized by their big-business community friends (either through contributions or vanity ads).

3) New ebook-esque consumer devices (the long-rumored Apple tablet?) finally make true online publications with paid subscriptions not only feasible but popular.

Another viewpoint: Doug Morrison sees the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper as an issue affecting the exchange of ideas, the flow of facts, and even the future of democracy itself, and wonders if there could be a political solution.

The Huffington Post just started a books section.

The section’s editor, Amy Hertz, explains she won’t run traditional reviews. Too stale, too one-way, too old-media-paradigm.

Instead, she wants to treat books as a topic of, yep, “conversation with our readers.”

Sounds like Hertz wants to reconstruct the entire book marketing business, a business that could urgently use some new blood and some new ideas.

The ideas she’s choosing to implement are those of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?)—Facebooking, chatting, “buzz” seeding, and the like.

The thing is, these tactics end up looking like hokum when Hollywood movie publicists try to use them. They’ll surely look even more fake when the even less-slick hawkers of books start using them bigtime.

Which will, from the standpoint of online scoffers such as myself, make lots of fun. I can hardly wait.

I was in the downtown library yesterday with my MacBook (which doesn’t get out much anymore, now that I have an iPod Touch).

Some dude I’d never met before came up and started talking to me. At the downtown library, this happens rather often. But this guy wasn’t trying to sell me a bus pass or tell me a long story that would start by asking for directions and end by asking for money.

He just wanted to alert me to something he’d seen on an Apple rumors site. It was another variant of the long-rumored Apple tablet device. “It’s like a MacBook without the keyboard, or a big iPod Touch. It looks great!”

Now I’ve seen one of these new rumor articles. And I must say I like the specs the article mentions. This is almost exactly the device I’d dreamed of earlier this year, when I speculated that the future of the online written word (including journalism) lay in .pdf documents formatted for tablets and netbooks.

(My caveat: While I’m intrigued by the concept of an Apple tablet as a full-page-size iPod Touch, I suspect many users will also want to use it for more traditional home-computer functions, including functions at which the iPhone OS and its available apps are still insufficient.)

Meanwhile, closer to home, other tech rumor sites are spreading an internal Microsoft video, demonstrating the features of what might be that company’s next-gen tablet computer concept, code named “Courier.” Like the rumored Apple device, the rumored MS device wouldn’t run a regular home-computer operating system. Instead, it would operate its own integrated suite of apps, based on the metaphor of an “infinite journal” where the user could clip and paste anything from/to anywhere.

The warning here is that MS has whole teams of “futurists” and conceptual designers working full-time on the personal-tech version of “concept cars”—items that, in their initial iterations, will never see a sales shelf, but which are used to work out ideas that may eventually find their way into real products. Courier might be one of these.

David McCandless has a handy, and well designed, “Hierarchy of Digital Distractions.” One example: “If landline rings while you’re reading Fcebook, Landline wins your attention—at least until a text message arrives.”

…the biggest online-only news organization? Would you believe, AOL? Well, it does, if you count all the assorted AOL-owned content sites as one organization.

Or rather, I’ve visualized it in my head, based on some recent items on tech-rumor sites.

As some of you longtime readers know, I’ve long believed the Web page, as we currently know it, is not the ideal showcase for professional journalism (or several other forms of professionally-made content).

News-biz people will tell you how Web ads just don’t attract nearly as much money per reader as print ads.

They’ll also tell you how the Web’s basic structural metaphor (individual pages, infinite links) works against the notion of a journalistic product combining different stories about different topics into one whole.

And I’ll tell you that Web-based typography and layout, despite many clever workarounds, still leave a lot to be desired.

And it’s damn difficult to charge for content on the Web, as you may have heard. Even some commercial porn sites are having trouble.

Meanwhile, two or three big new platforms have emerged with great possibilities for content-based profits:

• Netbooks (Windows and Linux PCs in less-than-laptop sizes) have become such mass-market items that wireless providers are giving them away with new contracts. (This entry is the “or three” of this list, because these devices are still tied to the traditional Web.)
• Dedicated ebook reading devices have finally taken off, in the form of the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. New competitors are promised over the next few years. These platforms were designed from the ground up for commercial content, but are so far crippled by graphics and design limitations.
• Then there’s the beloved Apple iPhone, and its limited-feature-set cousin the iPod Touch, with their highly successful App Store.It’s revolutionized the whole consumer software business with its inexpensive, do-one-thing-well applications. It’s revolutionized the digital content business as a single mobile hardware platform for audio, video, games, and texts. (Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble now sell ebooks for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform, as do several smaller vendors.)

In the New Yorker, novelist and print-media historian Nicholson Baker lauds the iPhone/iPod Touch platform as a more satisfying e-reading environment than Kindle or Sony Reader. He likes that the iPhone’s screen offers sharper resolution and full color. He likes its (slightly) greater typographical diversity.

I agree, except for the size of the thing.

Yeah, I’ve got 52-year-old eyeballs and prefer larger-sized type.

But I also want the juxtaposition of word and image you get on a well-designed print page. I want the visual sensation of ordered confusion a good newspaper page can express. I want the “splash” of a good magazine spread. I want the visual sequential narrative of a well-curated photo essay.

Yet I’d like that in a handy, go-anywhere device. Something where you just turn it on and it works; no complex interface to fuss over, no confusing setup and maintenance issues, no frustrations. (Hint: This means I don’t want a Windows tablet.)

What I want is the iPhone/iPod Touch, only in a bigger, splashier, more useful size.

And that’s apparently what we’re going to get, sometime in early to mid-2010, if you believe the current industry rumors.

Some of the rumor articles call the gadget a “Mac tablet,” and claim it would run a stripped down version of Mac OS X.

But that’s not what I want it to be.

I want it to be an iPod Touch with more, not a Mac computer with less. I don’t want something that runs MS Office really slowly; I want something that delivers documents and media really well.

I truly believe such a device, or the second or third versions of it, could be the breakthrough product we need to truly replace print.

I’m no Photoshop whiz or demo designer, so let me verbally display what I’m imagining.

In my vision, individual newspaper and magazine articles would still be available as Web pages for free access. What readers would (quite willingly) pay for, in one-shot buys and subscriptions, is a whole package of carefully-chosen and carefully-designed words and pictures, in on-the-go tablet reader form.

Each “issue” would be a complete, self-contained document, including any embedded audio or video files. No additional downloading would be required. The reader could receive it at home in the morning, then access it on his/her iPod Tablet whenever and wherever, with or without a cell or WiFi connection.

They’d have full use of modern digital typography, not merely Microsoft’s ten “Web-safe” fonts or Flash-based font substitution schticks. PDF-like rendering would overcome HTML’s severe typesetting limitations. Justified columns, smart hyphenation, kerning, footnotes, superscripts and subscripts, indentations, drop caps, charts and graphs—these e-mags would look and read like professionally made works. (Technical manuals and scientific textbooks could go treeless and keep the typographical tricks they need.)

Like Zinio’s electronic editions of magazines, they’d have clickable headlines and table-of-contents listings, zoomable text, and intuitive navigation including animated “page turning.” Unlike them, they’d be designed for on-screen reading from the ground up, not merely digital replications of print layouts.

On the software end, this is all doable. The pieces and programming tools exist. So do the e-commerce platforms, such as Apple’s App Store.

Now, at last, the user-end hardware is almost here.

If my suspicion’s right, near-future historians will see the mid-to-late aughts as a tough but necessary transition period from print to ebooks and emags.

What will far-future historians will have seen ebooks and emags evolve into?

That’s a topic for another day.

…an African American cultural activist gets in a Twitter exchange with a white actress who says Af-Ams are “more free and fun and light hearted”? A lot more than 140 characters, that’s what happens.

…has been blocked by Indian authorities, who cited a “national security” law authorizing the restriction of material that could damage the nation’s cultural integrity or some such. But not to worry: The site’s safely based in the UK; and, as an Indian columnist notes, “there are ways of getting around the ban by using proxy, anonymiser websites that cover your tracks.”

(Hardcore photo and video Web sites can still be viewed in India without restriction.)

I’m going to remake the entire site, not just the front page. It’ll take as long as it takes.

My first task: Shop for a server provider. Send any recommendations to this handy email addy.

At first, the concept of a true Microsoft rival brings to mind the early days of the Web, when Netscape (remember them?) speculated out loud that web browsers could become the “platform” of all personal computing, not replacing Windows but displacing Windows’ status as the foundation upon which the entire computer-using experience stands.

Specifically, Google’s announced (but not yet released) Chrome OS would be a combined OS and browser, intended initially for smaller notebook and netbook machines. Instead of “shrinkwrap” software, it would mostly act as a portal to online applications, including (but not limited to) Google Apps.

This begs the musical question, what would you do when you’re not connected?

Call me a relic of the floppy-disc era (which I am), but the term “personal computer” once meant a wholly functional device of one’s very own, not a mere “dumb terminal” that couldn’t work without a central network to plug into.

As the laptop concept emerged in the early 1990s, the principle of freedom from the office joined that of freedom from the mainframe.

But today, “wired” has given way to “wireless,” and the notion of the Big Brother central mainframe has given way to Internet server farms.

With cell-phone company data service, one can go anywhere (within the more populated zones of North America, that is) and be always “plugged in,” for a price.

For the rest of us, there’s WiFi, when and where we can find it. (Hint: If you’re buying a latte every weekday to get coffeehouse WiFi access, you’re not saving much over a phone company’s $60/month data plan.)

Still, my data (writing, pictures, music, work info, etc.) is my data. I want to have it, not just have access to it for a monthly fee.

Maybe I’m being “PC” about this instead of being “net-centric.”

Or maybe I’m just possessive.

I don’t care. I still want to have my backed-up hard drives, my digital “stuff.” And I want to be able to work and/or play with it whenever (even when there’s not a good wireless connection) and wherever (even on buses and planes).