Telegraph: Click and Carry
September 12th, 2006 by Hugh
I mentioned recently that Britain’s Daily Telegraph has designed its new office for the multi-media age. Now it’s launched its new evening paper in down-loadable PDF format. It calls the concept “Click and Carry” and it’s designed to print out on A4 so that you can run it off on the office printer and read it on the train home. If you are reading it online, you will find video and audio options, including an audio / video slideshow. Telegraph pm is published at 4pm each day. Look for it in the right column of the Telegraph’s sleek website.
The Telegraph has perfectly combined the advantages of both of digital and paper – but it does so in the reverse fashion to Exbiblio. Under the Exbiblio vision, you buy the paper version, you take out your scanner pen on the train, capture some signature text, dictate some notes into the pen, and then later, when you sit down at your computer, your scanner pen takes you to the digital version. When you live in a Telegraph world, you go to the computer first, and then if you want to read it on the train, you print off a copy. You underline anything that you want to note for later with your ball-point pen. So we have two visions, each a perfect inverse of the other. Which is seeing the world the right way round? I have to admit that the Telegraph’s logic has a lot to be said for it. It’s the way we behave now. Many of us graze articles on the the Internet, but print longer pieces that we might want to read in depth or notate. Exbiblio is asking people to change their behaviour. Your views please….
Posted in All | 3 Comments » | Other posts by Hugh
September 12th, 2006 at 9:24 am
They may be inverses of each other, but taking notes on the Telegraph would still be a perfect application for the Exbiblio pen. One of the limitations of the Exbiblio solution is that for many of the features to work the full text must be available from your computer. By printing out the paper yourself you guarantee that the original source will be available when you arrive home and sync your pen with your desktop computer.
September 12th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Before I was with Exbiblio, I build a document management system and thought a lot about the issue of the paper / digital divide (and gave presentations on the issue) so I’ve had these types of issues in my head for several years now.
I think the fundamental challenge is that paper has certain advantages (print it out to take it on the bus) and digital has certain advantages (use comments to discuss a blog with other readers). What you want is to seamlessly integrate paper and digital technologies so that you can use each technology to its full advantage. This is not as easy as it would seem at first glance.
Full integration requires a round trip from digital to paper and back to digital. For example, you read an interesting headline on the Telegraph and print it out to read it on the bus. You notice someone reading over your shoulder so you give them the article when you are done… Now the new reader wants to see the multimedia slideshow associated with the article and subscribe to the paper. How do they do that as they are sitting on the bus?
In my opinion, Exbiblio is one piece of the puzzle, but an important piece which is how to you easily get from paper to related information and actions that are better suited for the digital world.
The piece that the Telegraph is focussed on is another important (and compatible) piece. That is, generating interesting multimedia content around text documents and allowing for easy digital to print conversion.
People want the digital divide to close, and more than one technology / company will be required to provide a full user experience. E-Books, digital newspapers, scanner pens, printers, camera phones, on-line book archives, authors, publishers, etc… It’s exciting seeing all the action related to document technologies in the recent news.
September 12th, 2006 at 11:45 am
Time of day may have something to do with it. The Telegraph’s PDF is published at 4pm when office workers are sitting in front of a computer – hence the digital to paper move. The morning edition is less likely to be downloaded before rushing off for the bus or train. In the morning, you are more likley to go from paper to digital.