Murdoch puts his hope in the e-reader. But is he still making an old media assumption?

Kirk La Pointe of the Vancouver Sun has a post up about Rupert Murdoch’s latest media pronouncements, made to the Goldman Sachs annual media conference.

Murdoch repeats what he told Fox News the other month that the printing presses will finally stop rolling in twenty years or so…but he seems to say that the device of choice won’t be smartphones or even the personal computer, but rather the e-reader, like the Amazon Kindle.

According to Murdoch (as quoted in the FT): “I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees.”

This has to be put into the context of recent US research where consumers thought a fair price for an e-reader would be $50 – barely enough to cover the manufacture of the screen.

Twenty years is of course a long time in Internet and technology terms, and so its highly likely that by then devices will be cheaper and lighter. The problem with Murdoch’s pronouncement though is that there is essentially an old media assumption around it.

Just because we now carry around books and newspapers in physical form, why does it stand to reason that we will still be lugging them around but in A4 tablet format. Then there’s the issue of what really is the problem here. Is it the delivery mechanism, or is it the actual product?

After all, separate research does show that even online, newspapers are arguably under and not over performing, with less than 1% of all US time spent online being spent on newspaper websites.

Image credit – Dekuwa