Fixing Obsolete Newspaper Circulation

Here's one idea how electronic newspaper might work
Publishing 2.0
Newspapers must combine their collective wealth and energies and focus on getting ELECTRONIC paper to end users ASAP! Call up Xerox, call up HP, call up Fuji..but make Electronic paper - broadsheet size a reality. I am not talking something small like an amazon kindle. I am talking a sheet of e-paper that you’d plug into your computer and get instant updates. Reusable for many months and certainly much cheaper than delivering dead trees every day. You’d read off this “paper” and if an article grabbed your attention, you’d be able to bookmark it and it would be emailed and/or saved on your computer. Who would pay for this epaper? Why not have it presented by the very advertisers who are in the paper? And drill it down locally… This edition of the NY Times presented by Long Island Honda. Of course, getting this technology up to where newspapers want it will take a huge amount of investment. BUT, I feel it is necessary. The electronic paper could be left at home, folded onto the subway, unfolded at work…refreshed before going back home…the possibilities are endless. And another thing, get me the Electronic Paper and I’d be willing to pay at least 98 cents a week! Probably more.
From the same comment thread
I’d like to echo Michael’s idea for an electronic paper. New tech innovations are a dime-a-dozen, but our industry needs a radical act of defibrillation if it is to survive. I’m thinking of the wireless phone model: You sell people a device at a major discount along with a years’s subscription, billed monthly. The device would need to be easy to flip open and read anywhere, but maybe bigger than a smart phone to reduce the squint factor. You could upload from your computer or maybe even make it wireless with some sort of agreement with wireless carriers. I’m ready to embrace anything that might pay for professional newsgathering, and am perfectly fine with someone trashing my silly idea. What can say with some level of expertise, however, is that when I moved to my current town two years ago, a week’s worth of my big local paper would completely fill the paper side of my dual recycling bin. No room for junk mail. It was that simple. I work for a newspaper and can’t support the industry because I can’t get rid of all that paper. Not to mention, I can’t see the point in deforestation when we can get all this information electronically. And in a perverse comparison to wood pulp, content generation is even less unsustainable under the old scheme of newsgathering.