Steven Levy

The Paper Chase

Even the supersize Kindle might not be big enough to save publishing.

In February, Amazon CEO JeffBezos unveiled the Kindle 2 at New York City's Morgan Library . By all indications (Amazon has yet to offer an API to its own financials), the update of his electronic reading device defied the recession and sold tons. You would have thought that Bezos would take a rest. But in May he was back in New York, this time at Pace University-with <em em>another Kindle.

He called it the Kindle DX, but it should have been called the Kindle XL because the newcomer is all about size. The original model's e-ink screen m~asured 6 inches diagonally, roughly equivalent to a typical paperback. The DX has a 9.7-inch screen, about the size of a hardcover. That's two and half times more reading area. The real trick is that Amazon has supersized the Kindle without making it bulky-the new guy is still only about a third of an inch thick. It's very easy to hold.

Amazon is marketing the DX, priced at a gulp-inducing $489, to some specific users: college students, professionals who read a lot of documents, and consumers of newspapers and magazines. One ofthe speakers at the May event was <em em>New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who spoke briefly of plans to offer special Kindle subscription deals to people living in places where the paper doesn't deliver. (Aren't those the places where people don't care about <em em>New York Times?) He then retreated to the luxurious new building the Times Company built before the Internet put it on the verge of bankruptcy.

But I'm less interested in subscription models than in presentation. The original Kindlethe first truly connected e-reader~ ade me think these devices would evolve into sleek, inexpensive gadgets that could combine the richness of print with the ability to perform neat tricks of the digital era, like animate graphics and target ads. If you've seen <em em >Minority Report, you know what I mean. You could subscribe to newspapers and magazines on the first Kindle, but the experience was awful, requiring painstaking manipulation of a weird scroll bar to find the article you wanted. For the Kindle 2, Ama -: zon improved the software and upgraded the screen to grayscale so the photoS woulll no longer look like fetal ultrasounds. Butits plodding menu-based interface still made navigating newspapers difficult, and the rich graphic quality that makes magazines such an indulgence is totally missing. Even the flashiest print publication looks like The New England Journal of Medicine. So I was disappointed to discover that the launch version of the DX handles newspapers and magazines exactly the same way its predecessor does.

Here's what we really need to make print publications shine: a Super Kindle, made by Amazon or someone else. It wouldbe an inexpensive (cheap enough to lose), always-on device with deep, hi-res color, e-ink, and a touchscreen. You could browse through lush pages by finger-flipping. You'd be able to point at a story on a carefully choreographed front page to access a gorgeously designed article. Tap an ad and an animated demo would begin.

When I showed the DX to WIRED'S editor in chief, he rotated it to landscape mode to see whether it was wide enough to convey the experience of a magazine spread-it covered less than half the territory. Even the expanded screen could deliver only a shrunken facsimile. But then he took the leather binder that Amazon sells to cover the reader and flipped it open. The folio fit the open pages of WI RED almost precisely. Imagine that binder crammed full of silicon and liquid crystal-that's the form factor of the future periodical.

A device like that is the last best hope paper-based companies have for coping with the reality that paper is doomed. Color e-ink displays and other advances are brewing in the labs. But progress is slow. Is the Super Kindle five years away? Ten? That may be too late for some publications struggling right now. But it might be a ground -up launching Pad for the newspapers of tomorrow.

Burning Question

How do I future-proof my digital media?

You've spent years hoarding digital media, tossing aside those fhmsy tape and plastic prisons after transmuting the information into its purer form. No outdated vessel is going to prevent your endless enjoyment of Its contents, right?

Think again, Highlander.

Digital media IS not Immune to the winds of time. In many ways, it's even more ephemeral than the analog forms it's meant to usurp. Unlike, say, books or photographs -which can be placed on a shelf and enjoyed decades later-the binary codes of today's mOvi'e, photo , and music collections may not be decipherab e on future machines.

"Most people still haven't realized that digital files require software to render them into forms that humans can perceive," says Jeff Rothenberg, a computer scientist at the Rand Corporation and an expert in digital preservation. Making matters worse, that rendering software often becomes obsolete as companies go belly-up or stop supporting file formats.

So how do you keep filling the bit bucket without spilling valuable Is and Os? It's rarely easy. There are already a bazillion methods of compressing and encrypting media, and the number is only increasing. The safe road sticks to open standards and popular formats, Rothenberg says.

For music, your choices are pretty well defined: If you're more concerned about space than fidelity, go with the ubiquitous MP3. If you need to hear every nuance and have the gigs to back your play, WAV (the CD's audio format) is a good bet for lossless audio.

When dealing with images, most archivists recommend a raw format (if you've got terabytes to spare) or TIFF. But both can be tricky. Raw files are the unmolested data captured by a camera's sensor. Each manufacturer has its own version, and you'll need special software to decode it. As long as you keep the program (there's also a Photos hop plugin), you should be OK, and you'll benefit from the best possible image quality. TIFF, on the other hand is a high quality compression scheme that has remained mostly unchanged since 1992. But it's a proprietary Adobe format. If that makes you nervous, use common compressed standards like JPEG or PNG; they'll likely be readable for years, though they can't match raw or TIFF files for quality.

Unfortunately, movies are a bit dicier, as The H.264 standard seems poised to emerge But MPEG-2-the native language of DVDs-is pictures. Either one should buy you peace

digital video is relatively new to the mix. as a universal format, at least for HD video. the undisputed king of standard-defmoving of mind for a few years.

It's tempting to seek out a single magic format that preserves everything forever. You won't find it. The only surefire way to future-proof is to stay current. If that seems like too much work there's another option: Keep, your hard copy photos, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays (plus your old hardware). Have fun re-sorting them on the fly.

BRYAN GARDINER