The Internet's Paper Chase

There's something about dead wood. I don't mean the HBO series; I mean paper.

This column never graces a single sheet of paper. We produce and edit it with computers and publish it on the Internet. In contrast to a daily newsroom, the process is organized, streamlined and clean.

Sitting next to me is a copy of today's Washington Post. I thumbed through some of the sections when I came in this morning, checked out the business briefs and the horoscope. (Don't laugh, you do it too.) As a result, my keyboard keys have turned a light shade of gray. I could have looked at my own Web site instead, but there's just something about dead wood.

I started doing online journalism in 1996. We produced a paper-based newsletter, but started getting more subscribers who wanted it delivered through e-mail. This spurred my friends to ask me whether I thought that people would stop reading print news and just get it online. I said I didn't know, but we agreed that there was no substitute for ink-stained fingers or discovering the secret origami pattern that could let us read an article on the subway or, better yet, do the crossword.

This is a timely topic for the news business. Many of you know this, but many more don't. As more people start looking at newspapers' Web sites, circulation drops for the printed product. Newspapers suffer additional harm as classified sites such as Craiglist.org become more attractive to advertisers. Some people say that most newspapers will die off, leaving behind a few boutique publications catering to a high-end audience.

Ironically enough, I was scouting the Internet for news over the weekend and I found a weblog by Masood Mortazavi. He works at Sun Microsystems, so he knows from tech. What struck me in one of his postings was an essay on the value of paper. Maybe he was being sarcastic, but I don't think so.

He wrote: "Let's face it. Paper as a 'technology' works really well. When I unfold my paper copies of The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times every morning (if I have time to do so), they are about twice as big as the largest desk-top flat-screen around, and I don't even need to remind the reader how much lighter and easier to carry a paper edition is to the hand. Talk about mobility! Most astonishingly, paper editions offer us an extremely flexible viewing and reading environment. I can fold my paper editions (or some sections of them) to almost any useful size for reading, down to the size of the viewing area offered by a typical PDA, in a matter of seconds."

One of Sun Microsystems's neighbors in Santa Clara, Calif., is E-Book Systems, a company that is trying to bring us the best of both worlds. The San Jose Mercury News ran a story about the company today: "Digital print is unlike the run-of-the-Internet, HTML-based Web sites used by many publications. The three-dimensional format has the pizazz-plus of newsstand magazines. It allows editors and advertisers to incorporate video and audio into pages. It also can provide instant interaction with readers, who virtually turn pages on an image that looks like a physical magazine, book or catalog."

"What we are trying to achieve is the combination of the traditional way of reading with advanced digital technology," Kyu Kim, the company's manager of enterprise solutions, told the Mercury News.

The article also focused on San Francisco-based Zinio, which counts the International Space Station as a customer for its digitized magazine service. The astronauts want Motor Trend, PC World, Jane's Defence Weekly and MIT Technology Review, the Merc says. (What? No Utne Reader? No Playboy?)

Zinio and E-Book Systems are part of an effort to bridge the gap for people who want to take advantage of the Internet without breaking from the comfort of print. Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin told the Mercury News, quite rightly, that magazines and other print publications need to make moves like this if they want to be in business tomorrow.

I still hope, however, that the perks of paper technology -- the way it bends, folds, creases and feels -- will remain a part of our lives. It might be messy and disorganized, but it is something that we can touch and manipulate easily. Maybe E-Book Systems (or some unknown kid in a garage somewhere) is experimenting with a new technology that will truly bring us the best of both worlds. Count me as a customer when that happens.

Is This Technology Fishy?

USC law professor Jennifer Urban is sharing on the edge. As the Los Angeles Times reported today, she is one of the people who uses a new file-sharing program called "Grouper." This is a new technology that allows people to share digital files, but unlike the programs under assault by the entertainment industry for making it easy for millions of people to pirate music and movies, it restricts the sharing circle to 30 contacts.

More from the L.A. Times: "Grouper Network Inc.'s founders, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel, say the built-in limits of their peer-to-peer software make it a poor substitute for more controversial file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Grokster, which are hotbeds for piracy. In addition to limiting the size and accessibility of groups, they say, their program requires songs to be streamed -- that is, played through the Internet -- not downloaded."

Grouper is intended to help people get access to digital files that might be too large for e-mail -- like high-resolution digital photos -- or in Urban's case, DVDs and videos recorded in Europe's PAL format instead of America's preferred NTSC. No surprise -- some copyright experts say that the technology could skirt the borderline of what is legal, however. "There's no family-and-friends exception in copyright law," attorney Robert Schwartz of O'Melveny & Myers told the L.A. Times.

Revenge of the RIAA

Kids, take note: "RIAA News Teleconference to Announce Major New Enforcement Initiative Against Emerging Piracy Threat on College Campuses." That's the subject of a press release that I received this morning from the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA won't let us tell you the nature of this beast until 12:30 p.m. ET today, but I can tell you this: When releases like this hit the wires, it's invariably bad for people who illegally share digital music files on the Internet.

My advice? If you've been here before, you already know. You can justify your activity however you want, but it's still wrong. Stop sharing.

Larry Wilco

File this under the "nothing you haven't heard before" department, though that's not to say it wasn't interesting. The New York Times carried a story last Saturday on a copyright colloquy at the New York Public Library. The headliners were Stanford law professor and all-around Internet smart-guy Lawrence Lessig, along with Jeff Tweedy, the Wilco frontman who threw open the doors to his music online and actually made money.

Judging by the Times's writeup, the discussion was heady and carried its share of prog-rock bombast. Note these gems from Tweedy:

* "To me, the only people who are complaining are people who are so rich they never deserve to be paid again."

* "Once you create something, it doesn't exist in the consciousness of the creator."

* Tweedy also suggested that downloading was an act of rightful "civil disobedience," the Times said.

I propose that we collar Tweedy and Elvis Costello, that other prophet of doom for the entertainment industry, and get them to expound on this topic in a special celebrity edition of Random Access. Anyone have their phone numbers?

Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.