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E-Readers won't save newspapers

A newspaper expert has claimed that new technology like the Kindle and the iPad won't regenerate lost revenues for the print media industry.

Chairman-elect of the Newspaper Association of America Mark Contreras said that the hand-held devices, which can store tens of thousands of books digitally, couldn’t replace the income lost by papers since the dawn of the internet.

Speaking to Forbes, Contreras admitted that the industry was working on a project that would enable Apple to offer multi-newspaper services on the iPad but said that most struggling newspapers would have things like iPhone applications already and were still losing huge sums of money. He also called Amazon's Kindle, which as been marketed as an e-book and digital media reader, “very unfavourable” to the industry, revealing that Amazon currently receive 70% of Kindle subscriber revenues while publishers get the leftovers. 

The newspaper industry has lost millions of pounds since people began to access stories for free online. For the past three consecutive years newspaper revenues have fallen and there are no signs of this halting in 2010. Contreras said that the industry was changing and the ‘citizen journalism’ was now on the rise.  However, he claimed that there would always be a need for skilled, well-paid journalists to provide news to populate papers and websites.

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