“Electronic books may transform publishing industry” read the title on MarketWatch.com and the tag-line was, “Executives discuss impact of e-books at Frankfurt Books Fair.”

By Polya Lesova, MarketWatch

FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — Electronic books may transform not only the publishing industry, but the very definition of what constitutes a book. E-books — whether read on an iPhone, a Kindle or a laptop — are a hot topic at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

“Books are just devices. Wikipedia is the new Britannica,” said Ronald Schild, managing director of Germany-based MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH.

“Digital content is superior in many ways,” Schild said Thursday at a panel discussion on electronic books at the fair. “Reading today is solitary process, but there are many other ways of reading. [In the future,] it may become more of a conversation.”

While electronic books still account for only a small part of global publishing, their popularity is growing. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ) , which sells the electronic-book reader Kindle, is facing growing competition from other e-reader producers. In addition, many users are reading electronic content on their laptops, PCs and multi-functional mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s (AAPL 189.91, -1.39, -0.72%) iPhone.  Read more... (692 words, estimated 2:46 mins reading time)

Gary George, a long-time FlightCheck Professional user, now turned industry consultant, has what I think is a great idea… Newspapers printed on-demand via kiosks! FlightCheck is a preflight tool for desktop application files and is beneficial to a printer digital or non-digital. Check out his blog post on this brainstorm:

On-Demand Newspaper Kiosks

“Here I am again gassing away about an idea that I shared with some people I know (Andy Frazer & Andrzej Wojtowicz) on our Linkedin Tunicca Premedia Lounge, the idea focused about a kiosk for newspapers that provided user focused content that was printed on demand.

Originally I was thinking this was a bit of a dumb idea, but through email discussions with the guys it would appear that actually we could actually be on a winner here….. let’s look at what it would be and why it might actually work!”
Source: http://tunicca.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/a-possible-future-for-news-print/

Yes, it surely might work! I remember seeing, oh about 10-years ago, a digitally printed, special edition of a German newspaper on their ICE high-speed train service. Today with the World Wide Web, personalization, quality of digital printing and relative size of a decent digital press, makes this idea almost certainly a winner. Gary dreams up more on this:  Read more... (378 words, 1 image, estimated 1:31 mins reading time)