I’ve recently been on holiday in Australia and had a chat to a family member about the future of newspapers.

It was a conversation that may be familiar to many people, and has probably played out thousands of times all over the world.

His position was that he had no interest in reading his news on a screen, and that he preferred a newspaper and was prepared to continue buying and reading them.

My perspective was that newspapers were a terribly inefficient way to consume news – it makes no sense to me to spend time designing and laying out newspaper pages, printing them, driving the papers around in trucks, selling them in shops and in the street, and then reading them and throwing them away.
And for all this effort, the news is a day old when you get to read it.

It struck me that we were talking about very different things, simply because we were confusing the distribution mechanism with the consumption mechanism for our news.
When reading newspapers, they are connected simply because in order to read your content in a broadsheet, printed format, it’s necessary to print and distribute the paper.

When content is distributed digitally, it can be consumed on a laptop, in an internet café, on a mobile phone, or on a reader like the Kindle using an e-Ink display. The distribution mechanism is not linked to how the content is consumed in a digital world in the same way reading a newspaper dictates the distribution mechanism in traditional publishing.

So the crux of our argument was really about how he preferred a particular way of reading his news, while I preferred a particular way of my news being distributed. And I was prepared to put up with an inferior reading experience.

It’s particularly interesting to me that Amazon has released a Kindle reader for iPhone. What this says is that their distribution mechanism and content catalog is so compelling that people are willing to read long-form content on a tiny backlit screen. The cost saving (no Kindle reader to buy) and utility (read your books any time you have your phone with you) make it worth putting up with the limitations of the iPhone as a reading device.
It suggests to me that if the content is compelling, the price is fair, the quality of the reading experience improves, and the devices become cheaper we should see much greater take-up of digital distribution for content that is currently still on paper.

The other area in which the Kindle is succeeding is slightly counter-intuitive… I’ve picked up from numerous comments online that the Kindle is being used by old people with poor vision, and by people who suffer from arthritis.

They find that the Kindle is much easier to read for them than traditional books because of the light weight of the device, the fact that they don’t need to be held open, and because the text can be enlarged to a size that is comfortable for them to read.

If the young folk and the old folk are both prepared to give up paper when the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, we’re looking at a compelling shift in the chosen method of consumption and the associated distribution.

What are your thoughts on how this will play out? Can you see a day when you no longer read long-form material like books, newspapers and magazines on paper?

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Big news on Wednesday and Thursday was that Amazon acquired specialist online retailer Zappos for about $850 million in an all-stock transaction.
In characteristically open style, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has posted a letter to all employees today on his blog.

Here are a couple of snippets from the letter:

A big part of the reason why Amazon is interested in us is because they recognize the value of our culture, our people, and our brand. Their desire is for us to continue to grow and develop our culture (and perhaps even a little bit of our culture may rub off on them).
……
Several months ago, they reached out to us and said they wanted to join forces with us so that we could accelerate the growth of our business, our brand, and our culture. When they said they wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand (as opposed to folding us into Amazon), we decided it was worth exploring what a partnership would look like.
….
We learned that they truly wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand and continue to build the Zappos culture in our own unique way. I think “unique” was their way of saying “fun and a little weird.”
Amazon realized that it really was the case that our culture is the platform that enables us to deliver the Zappos experience to our customers. Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) made it clear that he had a great deal of respect for our culture and that Amazon would look to protect it.

The amazingly great thing about this deal is to see how a technical giant like Amazon can recognise the incredible brand value and customer loyalty built up by Zappos and choose to support them in their unique approach to business.

Too often companies are valued based on their balance sheet, assets, turnover, and a crude “goodwill” value placed on brands and other intangible value. Rarely is a corporate culture given such high value and explicitly recognised as a valuable asset to be nurtured and retained after acquisition.
Too often the priority after acquisition is integration and “rationalisation”.

I hope we see more of these kinds of deals, where customer-obsessed companies are valued this highly.
Zappos believes that “Your relationships are your brand”

Take a look at this great post about Zappos on Mashable from a couple of months back going into some detail regarding their customer-focus and use of social media tools.

Updated: As usual Brendan McNulty was on this one, and blogged about Zappos back in May and again this week

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