[mechanical_fish]

It's not that they are not trying to innovate. It's that they are trying to navigate a rapidly changing environment in a big battleship that is slowly sinking.

The hell of being the NYT is that you're too big to pivot all the time, so you need to pick a plan and stick with it. And if, ten years from now, it turns out you picked the wrong plan, you will feel awful because you lost the New York Times, for gods sake, when all you had to do was follow the soon-to-be-obvious-in-hindsight Plan X.

What is happening here seems clear: the Times is freaking out about iOS apps. Apple has cleverly offered the dead-trees publishers something that looks like the model they know, where they control the experience and the design and, not incidentally, the ad placement. And now the Times gets confused. Do they buy Apple's offer? The way the music publishers did? If they do, will their glass look half-empty in five years, or half-full? Or should they continue the earlier plan and try to compete on the open web where the mass of people are? And can either of these models support anything that resembles the existing staff and properties of the Times?

[iamdave]

You bring up a good paradigm, here and it's one that distresses me when looking at the big picture of what's happening with Apple and the consumption junction society we're in now.

Apple wants (probably not consciously, or at least overtly) to be the de facto hub for content distribution, and their hardware wants to be the de facto hub for content consumption. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this (though some of us would like other options), but it's the way Apple is doing this that causes contention among the ranks.

Even though I do not own one (I did spend about 30 minutes at Best Buy reading the NY Times Editor's Choice App), it feels very much like Apple is renting an experience to users, instead of selling one. A casualty of the digital age perhaps? Is the idea of owning content a dead one?

A question for another time.

[mechanical_fish]

I wouldn't be too quick to assume that the idea of owning media is dead, or even threatened. What would kill it? The cost of printing and shipping? That is lower than ever. The cost of production and editing and marketing? Those need to be paid for ebooks too, and once you have done that reformatting for print is a minor task.

And readers aren't going to be forced to abandon old media. They must be coaxed. If you want readers on iOS, or Kindle or anything else, you need to offer an experience that is better than print, and better than the open web. Because readers have many alternatives.

I agree that the current ebook model is rental, not sales. We will see how that plays out. My expectation is that the buying of print books will persist, alongside the ebook rental market, until the DRM comes off the ebooks. Lending books is an important use case. Borrowing library books is an important use case. Shifting media from platform to platform is an important use case.

[hartror]

I feel like many of the baby boomers with their LP's but . . . They'll have to pry dead tree books out of my cold dead hands.

[mechanical_fish]

I'm with you, which actually surprises me. Now that I own a very nice ebook reader in the iPad, I've bought a couple of ebooks, but it feels oddly like pulling teeth. I'm not excited about ebooks, unlike movies or music.

I have four reasons why I want to buy media rather than rent it:

I want to be able to consume it as I like. I don't want it to be tied to a device that I might sell or that might break. If I get a new device, I want to be able to move my media to it.

Convenience. I want to be sure that, when I need book X, I can get to it quickly.

Future proofing. I want confidence that the media I like won't get taken off the market and disappear into a black hole where it will never be seen again. This happens depressingly often in commercial publishing. Consider the dreadful fate of the version of Star Wars I saw as a kid.

Price. I don't want to have to pay hardcover price for everything. I'm kind of resigned to the fact that ebooks won't be much cheaper than normal books, but I do want them not to be significantly more expensive.

Music and movies have effectively solved most of these problems, basically because they either have no DRM or are easily rippable. Because it is easy to rip music, via the so-called "analog hole" if nothing else, I can always move it to another medium in an emergency. I can back up my music and video onto hard drives or web services. If I encounter a video or song on YouTube that I really like and am afraid is going to go away, I can back that up too. And it turns out that it's hard to stop video from circulating on the internet, so the risk of stuff going out of print and becoming completely unavailable has gotten much lower. Indeed, the ease of online distribution is flooding YouTube with more old video material than I ever knew existed.

In such a world, I'm increasingly happy to move to an all-rental model for most movies and music.

Books are different. They are really hard to rip from physical media: Scanning is a total pain in the ass. The rental ones have DRM. There is no lending of ebooks, and they can't be moved from reader to reader unless the vendors support it. And so, famously, there is no guarantee that the thing I paid money for won't just evaporate.

Which brings up another important criterion: It is hard to compete with the durability of the printed book, which is more archival than any digital data I own. Even my crappiest pulp paperbacks are likely to outlive every piece of digital media in my house. Contrast this with DVDs: They're not just physically frail, but the whole format isn't guaranteed to outlive me: What good are the disks if the players go the way of the Victrola, or even the eight-track player? That kind of makes it easier to sell me on rented DVDs: The alternative to a cheap rental is a dubiously durable personal copy. But alternative to ebooks is the codex book, a medium that routinely lasts hundreds of years, which I can read so long as I still have vision, and which is probably cheaper to buy. (Though not, alas, cheaper to store or move.)

[protomyth]

I think Netflix is doing more to prove people are ok with renting rather than owning. Apple is still more own than rent with iTunes and the App Store. Heck, 37signals and their contemporaries proved a lot of people are ok renting apps.

[icefox]

Well to be fair there are very few movies I would watch more then once, while that is not true of music. For books and Movies I have no problem renting. Of course used books off amazon almost feels like renting because they can be so cheap.

[enjo]

Trying to move your music away from iTunes sure feels like renting...I get that it's not entirely Apple's fault, but the problem persists either way.

[lr]

The print media needs to come up with a system for micro payments, and fast. I am not going to pay for a subscription to NY Times online, but I will hit a TipJoy-like button to give $0.10 - $0.25 every time I watch a NY Times cooking video! This problem is bigger than the NY Times...

[bl4k]

The battleship analogy is quaint. The NYTimes is the Tirpitz - the big bad guy who ends up spending the entire war hiding in a fjord for fear of what lies in the open oceans.

Likely to also share the same fate as the Tirpitz.