Time Inc. said earlier this year it wasn't planning to join the rush of old-media companies like News Corp. and Hearst who are developing their own e-readers. But now, according to documents obtained by NBC Bay Area, the company has plans to rush out a prototype by the end of this year, possibly in cooperation with a hardware partner:

"Whoever defines the interface wins," [an internal Time Inc.] slide concludes. A slide labeled "Key components to the winning model" includes... "product design" including "tools for research, design innovation and manufacturing," which suggests plans for a physical gadget; and a "consumer-facing brand" — a name for the device and service akin to Amazon's Kindle.

The company is also exploring a joint venture with Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst, according to the documents.

It's easy to understand how an e-reader project would appeal to beleaguered magazine executives. While their industry is crumbling , analysts have estimated sales of 800,000 or more Amazon Kindle e-readers, and there is some evidence that device has goosed book sales.

But Amazon opened up a new market, taking books once available only physically and offering them via instant electronic purchase. Magazines are already available on the Web in a format superior to the e-book, complete with comments, videos and these things called hyperlinks. If Time Inc. wants a financially healthy future, it should focus on growing in that medium, which it already has some experience with, rather than on a brand-new hardware device far outside its core competency.

Grand gestures, in other words, are no substitute for the grinding work of real change; one would think a company owned by Time Warner, of all entities, would know that by now.

UPDATE: Peter Kafka at AllThingsD hears from Time Warner sources that the company does not want to get into the hardware business.

(Pic by Angel Leon)

Did we say "kindled"? Amazon's Kindle, the e-book reader, has indeed sparked fever dreams among the ailing lords of print. The New York Times has paused from chronicling its own doom to contemplate its salvation — a large-format Kindle, better suited to displaying newspaper-like pages. Hearst, News Corp., and other print-media concerns are pushing their own devices, loath to grant Amazon so much power over their future — but they are fumbling, while Amazon may introduce its newspaper-friendly device as soon as Wednesday.

What a petty concern to worry about, rather than asking if that future even exists!

The argument for e-readers goes like this: Newspapers and magazines will once again be able to charge for subscriptions to support the cost of production, while shedding the expense of printing presses. Readers will pay for the convenience of getting the news delivered to a device.

That prediction fundamentally misunderstands the lessons of the Kindle, which made books available in a convenient digital format, on an appealing device, for the first time. Downloading five books for the beach is vastly more appealing than packing them.

What are the publishers really proposing? Taking a product available for free on the Web, dumbing it down, and then charging for it. News without links, comments, or video, in black and white, updated once a day? In an age when print media ought to be learning to do more with less, they are instead fixated on getting customers to pay more for less.

There is one prospective market for this: The old, who may be so attached to printed media that they will accept an electronic substitute. Hearst digital chieftain Phil Bronstein, the former San Francisco Chronicle editor, told Maureen Dowd that the industry's best hope was that people would live longer, so those trained to read newspapers will stick to the habit.

The obvious converse of Bronstein's feeble hope: The young will never learn to read newspapers and magazines again, having grown up reading online. Why would they switch to a product like the Kindle?

Like the libertarian wingnuts who would rather flee to science-fiction cities on the sea, escape to outer space, or cosset themselves in an online fantasy world rather than live in reality, the addled lords of print like Bronstein would rather dream of a technological rescue than face the hard work of survival.

What newspapers and magazines need to do is obvious: Build appealing websites, and sell them better. But that would require changing.

Sure, start scoffing. But Digg's past acquisition talks with Current and News Corp. failed in part because they looked at Digg as a media play, and community-generated sites like Digg aren't particularly attractive to advertisers. More recently, Digg and Google got close to an acquisition. That deal fell apart, according to a source familiar with the talks, because Google wanted to closely probe the quality of Digg's engineering staff early on in the deal, and Digg did not relent until talks were well along. (Digg CEO Jay Adelson refused to comment on the company's talks with Google.) The lesson: Digg's not a media company, and not a technology company. It's something else altogether.

Who makes money off of online community? The surprising answer is Amazon. One study suggests that Amazon.com makes $2.7 billion — billion! — a year in incremental sales because of its user-written reviews. Amazon uses the simple mechanism of asking shoppers if a review was helpful to rank its reviews.

It's remarkably similar to Digg's option of "digging" or "burying" a news story. Where might that be useful? Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. In addition to selling digital books, Amazon already charges for some news feeds available for free on the Web. Magazine and newspaper editors are delusionally optimistic that they might be able to charge by the article on a device like the Kindle, through a scheme of micropayments.

Micropayments have been technically possible for more than a decade. The problem has always been consumer behavior: How do you know if an article is worth paying for? The time spent pondering that question isn't worth the nickel people hope to charge for it.

But what if you didn't have to ponder that question? What if you knew, through Digg's rating system, that a large number of people had read the story and given it a thumbs-up?

An Amazon-owned Digg wouldn't have to charge for access to its website or the stories it links to; indeed, that would be against its interests, since the rating activity on Digg requires free access to work. The Wall Street Journal even gives Digg users free access to its stories so they can read them and vote.

Instead, Digg would charge Kindle users for a new service which delivers a personalized newspaper to the device — a service far quicker and simpler than the cumbersome process of going to Digg.com and scrolling through endless lists of popular headlines. They'd only pay for the stories they read — which in turn would provide more valuable feedback on what Amazon can charge for. The payment would be essentially voluntary, since readers could always pull up publishers' websites and read the stories for free there — but they payment would be more for the simplicity and ease of use, rather than the content itself. (Arguably, that's why people pay for music on iTunes rather than download it from file-sharing networks.)

Is Amazon.com thinking about such a move? We haven't heard anything about talks between Amazon.com and Digg. But, intriguingly, we heard whispers that Amazon.com is talking to Twitter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a personal investor in Twitter. Presumably, the attraction would be the same: getting some kind of real-time pulse on what people are interested in.

But Digg's focus on headline voting and Amazon's push into news distribution make them seem like a better match. Will Bezos dig the idea?

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Why is a cable company dabbling in the e-books business? Aside from running Discovery, Hendricks has long played at being a part-time inventor. In 1999, he and two co-inventors filed for a patent, granted in 2007, on an "electronic book security and copyright protection system" which included "a portable book-shaped viewer is used for secure viewing of the text."

Sounds like Hendricks might have a case against Amazon.com, whose Kindle is widely viewed as the first e-book reader with commercial promise. But why does he care? The answer may lie in another patent Hendricks registered, which describes a system for transmitting e-books over "video signals" — an apparent reference to cable-TV systems. Discovery styles itself as a "nonfiction media company." Either Hendricks fears Amazon getting a lock on the nonfiction market. Or perhaps he's just wasting corporate resources to bolster his reputation as an inventor.

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones economized.

Children's Hospital star Rob Corddry stabbed, then rinsed.

New York Times writer Jenny 8. Lee planned a party with, no surprise, fortune cookies. (Yes, but is she bringing her millionaire Googler boyfriend?)

Former AOL CEO Steve Case tried to feel relevant.

Author and sometimes entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson dined alone with his Kindle.

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Television has been distracting people from the written word long before the Internet came along. And while the Internet has been good for reading, it's mostly encourage the consumption of short-form writing.

Print is a much better way to read long chunks of text — fewer distractions, easier on the eyes, portable from room to room, etc. — and to the extent the Kindle replicates these technological advantages, it is basically a crippled laptop.

But Granger imagines an e-reader that advances beyond the "crude" Kindle. He thinks better technology will do the trick:

... as electronic readers improve, as they add graphics and design and, eventually, color, even more people will opt for the more sustained, contemplative experiences more often. And all will be well with the world.

What he forgets: The Kindle has a built-in Web browser, though few people use it because the Web is not particularly attractive in black-and-white. If it adds color, won't people inevitably use it to read websites, and thus fewer books, just like they do on PCs? There goes Granger's theory out the window.

We suspect he has another reason for touting the Kindle, though. Hearst, the owner of Esquire is working on its own e-reader. By paying the Kindle such a backhanded compliment — right idea, wrong device — Granger is carrying water for his publisher's business interests. And not for the first time.

Hearst has invested in E Ink, a Cambridge startup whose low-power screen technology is used in both the Kindle and Hearst's planned reader. E Ink appeared on a splashy, Granger-praised Esquire cover last year. Perhaps this E Ink-stained wretch has even handled the product he envisions killing the Kindle? If so, it's too bad Granger won't tell his readers how much he loves that, too.

If you didn't buy Amazon,com's e-book reader — shown above in a CNET video — you're far, far from alone. A CrunchGear rumor report says Amazon will try again for this year's holiday shopping season. Kindle 2.0, says "an insider," will be bigger, less fussy to use, and thank God Almighty they're going to get rid of the original model's retro 1983 IBM PC sickly off-white plastic case color. Even Zune Brown would be an improvement. The key points from CrunchGear's report:

An insider let slip that two new Amazon Kindle models will hit stores this holiday season, with the first coming as early as October.

The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface. The source told us that Amazon has “skipped three or four generations,” comparing the old Kindle to the 1st gen iPod and the new version to something like the sexy iPod Mini.

The second new model, which is shaped like an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, is considerably bigger than the current model and should be available next year.

Both models should come in multiple colors and may be aimed at younger readers.

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore.

New York Times bestsellers and hardback new releases will go for $9.99, with classics going as low as $1.99. Through the service, which is an extension of the Amazon store, you also can subscribe to newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post) and magazines, which are automatically sent to Kindle when they drop on the wire.

Talking about the hardware itself, it'll hold 200 books on board, though you can supplement with unspecified memory cards. It'll get up to 30 hours of reading per charge and weighs 10.3 ounces. So, why does such a potentially disruptive device look so very plain? They wanted it to look like "an austere vessel of culture." The moniker Kindle is from the same line of thinking, "the crackling ignition of knowledge." But, thankfully, it doesn't get warm itself.

Some obvious questions are left though, mostly about the "always-on" connection—is the EV-DO-based Whispernet service included in the $399? If not, what's the pricing on that? And what are its limits, since you can go out onto the real web? Odds are, Bezos himself will reveal the answers tomorrow.

The goals here are pretty lofty: "Amazon believes it has created the iPod of reading." We really, really dig Jeff's vision, "that you should be able to get any book—not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this device in less than a minute," so we hope about as much as he does that this little beige slab lives up to all the wonderful that they're promising. [Newsweek]