A quick c.v.: In Wired's early-90s days, he wrote about a Usenet war and tried, Michael Moore-style, to get McDonald's bureaucrats to register mcdonalds.com. In 1995, he predicted the future of online journalism with remarkable accuracy. In the 00's he was editor in chief of the now defunct Business 2.0 magazine.
This week. Fortune's latest cover story is Quittner's inquiry into The Future of Reading. Will tablets change how we read? He thinks yes, although he also brings in a skeptical Mark Andreessen to argue about it.
Here's the 100-word version. I omit Quittner's readable wrapup of the problems facing publishers today, and his insidery explanation of why newspapers didn't drop what they were doing to embrace the Internet until it was financially impossible not to. Read the whole thing. You still read, don't you?
A great device is actually the key here: When you've invested in a tablet (or an iPhone or a Droid or a Kindle, etc.) and love it, you want to increase its functionality -- with media. That's why nearly half of the 75 million iPhone and iTouch users download one paid app a month, by the way, when they could get the same kind of stuff for free elsewhere. Isn't the idea of a magazine irrelevant in the atomized, buy-the-single-not-the-album world? If that were so, we'd expect to see fewer people reading magazines. But according to the Magazine Publishers Association, 174.5 million people paid to subscribe to magazines in 1970; that number has steadily and consistently risen over the years, to 324.8 million as of 2008. Magazines are just vertical collections of content that feed our individual interests. Like blogs. The trick for publishers will be to figure out how to be compensated for individual articles as well. How will tablet-based ads work better than the web? Three words: full-screen ads. Expect to see them reemerge in digital magazines and other publications -- even blogs. These ads actually have the potential to deliver the best of both the old world and the new: They can have as much impact and be as relevant as the most compelling TV commercials, with the same analytics as the web. While prototyping digital magazines during the past few months, I've seen new kinds of interactive ads that are cool and arresting -- like highly produced videogames. While I think most publishers will allow you to skip an ad with a swipe of your fingers, a 10-inch full-color touchscreen gives the advertiser a rich enough canvas to grab you by the eyeballs and make its case.