will ipad kill traditional newspaper sales?

[RWinOR]

I think the biggest between music and news hard-copy to digital change is that with music you had to buy a device to play the music, be it CD player, cassette player etc, so you had to buy a relatively expensive device to access it anyway, just owning a CD does not give you the ability to play the music. Whereas you don't need anything to read a newspaper or magazine. Say a newspaper costs 50p, most people will be reluctant to pull out £300+ for a device to access it when the hard copy is so much cheaper.

I personally will use electronic copies, because I don't buy newspapers anyway, it is just a nice extra feature that I will take advantage of.

I like your analogy but it should be refined a bit.

It is really more like when the music industry transitioned from vinyl or cassette to digital CD's. For those who are to young to remember back around 1985 a cassette or vinyl record was < $7 USD. A very good player was <$100.00. CD's came out they were difficult to manufacture, and there were only 2 or 3 plants world wide manufacturing all the CD's. CD cost $15.00 USD and even cheap CD players were > $200.00.

Now many people argued both sides, and some on the analog side stated the digital music did not sound the same, it did not have the warmth or depth of an analog playback. I believe this may have been true for some, I still have friends who believe this. However I was a first adopter, Loved the new delivery systems, the fact it never degraded and always sounded the same. The way I enjoyed listening to my music, I never noticed the difference. As more people bought into the digital age, CD players became better, cheaper and had more features. Now the digital age has changed to downloads and those players are going away. This means that the mass's need to have expensive computers (relative to the cost of a CD player) to download and put music on there MP4 players. Still most are embracing this.

The written word too is in a transition period, there are many advantages of print, if you read one book it is far easier to carry this on an Aircraft then a large computer. The IPad changed that, now I can carry many books in a small electronic device.

For me the biggest drawback of digital media over written media has nothing to do with the way I read it. I prefer to read on the computer, or IPad. It is the fact when I have finished reading the book I cannot simply hand it to a friend to read. Once I buy it it is mine. The same is true with magazines. We have many digital subscriptions, however I cannot give last months mag to anyone. The plus side is the digital subscriptions are far cheaper, no printing costs, no delivery cost, and it saves our precious resources and old growth trees here in the NW from being turned into paper that will ultimately just go into a landfill.

Both are valid, Paper will be around for a while for those who prefer it, however it will become more and more difficult to find new books, magazines and news delivery systems as the cost of all things go up, (paper, fuel, shelf space in a store, etc.) not to mention if it is digital the publisher can continue to sell it without re-forcasting a print schedule. Or through away something that did not sell as well as expected. For Publishers it is a win win, lower manufacturing and delivery cost, and always have the correct amount available for sale.