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.

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.

Danny Westneat’s rave review with reservations and my pal Paul Andrews’s more scathing piece about Amazon’s new e-book device (the latter admittedly written without having seen the machine in person) both refer to the old, tired meme of “The Book.”

This meme, which I’ve bashed before, can be divided into two arguments; both of them, I believe, are specious.

First, Andrews reiterates that chestnut argument I’ve been hearing my entire adult life, that nobody reads anymore (particularly those vidiot kids guilty of not being From The Sixties); thus, The Book, and with it all capacity for rational intelligence, has become the refuge of a small literate elite just like in pre-Renaissance days.

Second, both Andrews and Westneat trot out the notion that there’s something sacred about The Book, something that will never, can never, be equalled by any electronic device imaginable; and even if it could, hardcore “people of the book” (especially the older male ones) are, by nature, proud Luddites, who’d rather be living in some imagined pre-20th-century pastoral Eden.

Andrews cites a recent National Endowment for the Arts study claiming that “reading for pleasure” among adults has dropped bigtime since the mid-’90s. Actually, all “legacy media” have dropped bigtime in popularity, from broadcast TV/radio to newspapers and magazines to movies in theaters. The culprits: DVDs, video/computer games, them danged Interwebs, and more active leisure pursuits such as gyms.

And if book buyers really were such technophobes, Amazon wouldn’t have made its first market niche from them.

Folks “read for pleasure” on screens all the time these days. You’re probably doing so right now.

The catch is that Internet-based reading has, to date, emphasized short-form content, such as that featured in this splendiferous web-column thingy.

The trick has been to devise an environment that facilitates/encourages long-form reading; i.e. single book-length texts.

That’s what all the developers of specialized e-book reader machines have strived for this past decade or so. From what I’ve read about Kindle (I haven’t seen one in person either), they’re still not there yet.

But that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.

I can foresee something a little bigger than the iPhone or a little smaller than a Tablet PC, running open source software or at least non-encrypted file formats, that’s pleasant enough on the eyes for extended reading times, and which enables the total immersive feel of burying oneself in a good tale.

Further updates still: According to the SeaTimes’s Brier Dudley, Amazon didn’t develop the Kindle hardware here but in Silicon Valley. And Amazon indeed ignored the Seattle media at Kindle’s launch, not even inviting anybody from here to its big debut presentation in NYC.

Here’s some more info about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader from my own e-book publishers.

Apparently, I was wrong about a couple of points: Kindle does play MP3 audio files and includes a rudimentary Web browser.

Amazon.com’s first in-house hardware product, the “Kindle” e-book device, isn’t to be officially announced until tomorrow (Monday).

But already, pundits and bloggers are placing virtual bets on the machine’s commercial viability.

Some, including Newsweek’s Steven Levy in a long puff piece, are calling it the future of reading, or at least a stepping stone toward the future of reading.

Others, such as Information Week’s Thomas Claburn, have already proclaimed Kindle a “debacle.” These skeptics note that specialized e-book reading devices have been out in one form or another, from one company or another, for almost a decade now, and nobody’s made turned them into must-have lifestyle accessories.

My take, without having seen the thing (and, as something sold only online, how’s anybody going to see it before buying it?): It’s a $399 tablet that pretty much just plays back texts and limited graphics, in a copy-protected file format. It does have Wi-Fi built in plus a little keyboard, so it can be used for email and for the digital editions of daily newspapers (by paid subscription, natch). But it probably won’t be capable of games or audio-video files or serious computing applications.

For the same price you can get the highly successful iPhone, which has Wi-Fi, displays texts, provides the free online versions of every newspaper that offers one, plays music and movies, runs (or soon will run) third-party Web-based applications, and also makes and receives phone calls.

Or if you want a larger text surface to peruse, there are tablet PCs and laptops.

And while proprietary e-book reader formats have come and gone, e-books themselves have become a real business.

I have the great fortune of contributing to a strong, growing e-book publisher. (Buy my e-book title now and get the next update free!)

This outfit, Take Control Books, uses Adobe’s darn-near-ubiquitous .PDF format. (Yes, I know the phrase “.PDF format” expands into “Portable Document Format format.”) It’s an open standard. It lets you read text at a size big enough for eyes my age or small enough for a small-screened device. (So far, refitting .PDFs for iPhone’s more intimate confines takes some ingenuity, but people are working on that.)

Yes, on-screen reading of long-form text documents (i.e., “books”) is here, and here to stay, no matter what’s Kindle’s market fate.

…of iPhone hype stories this past week, Steve Jobs is quoted as calling “the human finger the most sophisticated navigation device known to mankind.” I’m sure the Babeland ladies would agree.

The vastly larger and more comprehensive second edition of my “e-book” Take Control of Digital TV is now available.

As some of you know, television as we know it ends in 2/09, when the analog broadcast transmitters shut down and everything goes digital. Before then, you’ve got a lot to learn about the new digital TV system and all the software and hardware that goes with it. I humbly believe my e’book’s the best way for you to get up to speed about HDTV, LCD, plasma, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, Apple TV, DVRs, and all the other myriad aspects of the new video universe. Get it now.

I’ll explain this further, in handy online-audio form, on the streaming Net-radio show Tech Night Owl this Thursday evening.

Seattle’s own Little Internet Service Provider That Could, legendarily started out of a cafe in Belltown in 1995, has just been bought out by Best Buy. Spokespeople, natch, promise no changes on the customer-service level; though the hereby-linked press release emphasizes small businesses as the firm’s current target customer, not the home user.

It should be pointed out that, in the post-dot-com-crash hi-tech biz, unloading one’s whole company to a bigger fish is often considered the highest sign of success, rather than any sign of failure.

…save the printed newspaper? They wouldn’t.

…to avoid succumbing to the munchies while playing video games–a 360-degree view screen helmet.