Seth Lilly

This morning, I was thinking about today’s imminent announcement of the Apple tablet and the content partnerships that are sure to come with it. Particularly, I was thinking about newspapers. A subscription-based service, even for the same price as home delivery, could be very appealing to some users. The New York Times is already taking steps toward a subscription model for online reading, and it makes sense that other newspapers would follow suit in order to abate their hemorrhaging print subscriptions.

Certainly, the tablet environment could provide interactive experiences such as ads and movie trailers. It’s also environmentally friendly as there’s no printing involved. Additionally, a tablet with a moderate storage capacity (or, say, the ability to sync to iTunes) could store many copies in very little space – keep the days you like, delete the ones you don’t.

It’s a technology curve. I get it. But if we don’t attempt as a society to find acceptable ways to evolve media, we’re going to reach an impasse that will find our ability to communicate being unnecessarily limited.

So, my question: if, for instance, USA Today decided to offer a tablet-capable subscription version (which would likely contain all sorts of bells and whistles, like interactive ads) for the same price as a home-delivery subscription, would you bite?