Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9.2 Traditional Versus Electronic Newspapers
We have now entered the digital millennium and traditional printing and
distribution of books, magazines, and newspapers have to adjust. On one
hand, environmental conscious movements are exerting pressure to protect
the natural resources employed in paper production. On the other hand the
ubiquitous multimodal access to digital information sources drives up the
demand for interactive publications with more dynamic content. Evidently
printed materials in their traditional form could not satisfy such a demand and
that is why publishers are presently offering complementary electronic versions
of their materials. NewsStand Inc. [3], for example, provides subscriptions and
access to the electronic versions of several dozens of newspapers from different
countries and in different languages. All these e-newspapers, however, are
said to appear exactly as their printed counterparts and do not thus offer any
special advantages, apart from the instant delivery and paper savings.
A true e-newspaper could indeed support more advanced functionality that
is not available in traditional printed newspapers. Some online e-newspapers,
for example, link many of the photos, included in the printed version to
video clips that are playable in the e-version. Published rapidly changing
information, such as weather forecasts, currency exchange rates, stock prices,
and so on is often linked in the e-version to some external online information
sources that is periodically updated. In the e-newspapers additional assistive
support like integrated access to online dictionaries with word descriptions,
pronunciations, and translations in different languages could also be
supplied. Despite all extras that e-newspapers might be in a position to offer,
their presentation is still confined to displays with limited resolution and size.
Conventional displays require constant power supply and the cost per unit
area is far too high than the one for printed materials. Ideally, when adopting
a new e-newspaper model, we should first try to preserve all the attractive
features that traditional paper documents offer, and second introduce new
advanced functionalities that are only available for digital documents.
9.3 Cross-Media Linking and the Newsputer Concept
One possible approach could be to keep using the paper for what it is best
suited for, namely to show information content that is mostly static and
would rarely need reprinting. All dynamic content, on the other hand, could
be provided on a separate, much smaller display. The main challenge of such
an approach is how to bring together the printed and the digital content in
a single easy to operate system. The progress in camera-based document
image analysis [4] stimulates the development of OCR-related approaches
