media = features + content

Lost in all the talk of Free, failing newspapers, piracy, e-readers, e-learning is the aspect of media and features. But when leather bound books are romanticized and the daily crossword is praised, features are being discussed. Aggregation is one new media feature that has gotten much discussion relevant to newspapers.

There's too much focus on "content". Content is important, journalists are needed to produce stories, musicians to create music. But content isn't published without features that allow access to the content, and ignoring them is limiting.

I used to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in print. I still subscribe online. I dumped the print subscription because they couldn't deliver consistently on time-- many days I didn't get my copy until after work. It's not that the content was lousy, it's that a primary newspaper feature, being delivered at home early in the morning, failed repeatedly year after year.

So I have an online account and I get the paper directly to my iPhone. I've traded some important features, a large display area with easy visual scanning (the large format newsprint pages). Some features are similar, both clarity and portability are negligibly different in practice. But what I have gained from the online edition is for me a critical feature: Timely delivery direct to (ho)me.

The limiting nature of too great a focus on content is also why I think current e-readers are lame. The creators looked at print books, confused the entire package as content only, and then carried both the actual content, the words and other assets, and its format to the Kindle, the Nook. These devices add less features than they remove, and the features they offer are slavish to print. E-readers (Kindle, nook) add 2 features: instant delivery and scale in portability. I can buy books quickly with both Nook and Kindle. And I can easily carry what would in print literally be a ton of books.

But I lose color print and fine imaging. My sharing features are heavily restricted in the case of the Kindle. I lose aspects of legal status-- witness the ironically Orwellian recapture of 1984 by Amazon. Professional guilds forced audio reading out.

This is because e-reader makers and thought leaders aren't thinking about features, they are thinking only of content. If you focus only on content, sure e-readers are a bit more interesting. They're books but electronic!

But the time is past for e-anything. Just taking existing products and adding a plug to them is over. I want features. I don't want just color, I want multi-media. I don't want an e-book. I want content augmented with features. I'm not carrying a ton of books around. But I need audio books during my 2 hour commute.

I want new media.

By the way, this affects "Free" too. It may be Free to copy content once digitized. But it's not free to add new features-- you need hardware to stream audio and video, and all this deserves a price.

But content rehashed, what we called "shovelware" in the '90's, should be Free. Why pay for what wasn't worked on? This is why piracy takes off-- "stealing music" (be honest, have you bought _all_ your mp3s?) isn't as offensive to the pirate compared to being forced to buy the same song on LP then cassette then CD then digitally remastered CD then MP3... It never ends and it never gets better.

But you know what I happily paid for? Downloads of Metallica's show at Madison Square Garden last Saturday. It was music I already have, but with an important value-add, it was a nostalgia piece and souvenir, it was live, it was easy to get, it was legally obtainable.

Add features and Free won't be your problem. Shovel content into a new wrapper, and you deserve Free being your problem. Fail to understand that the wrapper is a feature set, and you deserve a fading industry.