The Great Unbundling

The launch of PaperLater shows that readers really want something that publishers can’t currently provide.

A couple of weeks ago, the British newspaper-on-demand company Newspaper Club announced the launch of a new service, PaperLater, that allows customers to order newspapers consisting of the reading material of their choice. The service is in beta and limited to the UK for now. Still, the announcement was met with an enthusiastic response on social media, both in the UK and elsewhere.

A couple of days ago, Johannes Kleske tweeted the photo on the left, showing a Berlin newsstand that sells only the feuilleton section of major German dailies for 50 cents apiece. Again, the response was excited, if more sceptical, seeing as it came mainly from Germans: this practice is forbidden under a German law known as “Verwendungsbindung”.

The two things got me thinking. One — the excitement around PaperLater shows that people apparently want the distraction-free reading experience that print provides, but they want it on their own terms. It stands to be seen how many of the people who’ve enthusiastically tweeted about this will actually order a newspaper, and how often, but the mere idea seems extremely appealing to a surprisingly large number of people.

Two — this response must make publishers’ eyes pop, possibly in outrage. Newspaper sales have been falling steeply and steadily over the past decade — and now people suddenly want print? The internet has forced publishers to unbundle their content — and now you want to re-bundle it according to your own liking? PaperLater and the newsstand selling only one newspaper section highlight the rift between readers’ interests, and the publishers’. Publishers sell bundles, even online, whether it is to advertisers or to subscribers.

Three — I doubt that publishers will sit still on this, because there are laws protecting their interests — namely the anti-unbundling law mentioned above, and of course copyright. At the moment, PaperLater states on its About page that publishers can opt out of the service, which is an interesting approach (digital read-later service Instapaper takes the same approach). Limiting the service to the UK will doubtlessly make things easier as it controls the scale and facilitates personal interaction with publishers.

(I think it’s interesting that people’s knee-jerk reaction to PaperLater was to cry “copyright infringement” more loudly than they ever did with digital read-later services like Instapaper and Pocket, which have been running happily for some time now, or with RSS feeds, which spearheaded the great unbundling of content on the web. Clearly, we regard print as somehow more valuable than digital.)

Four — PaperLater is an experiment and can probably get away with what they do as long as they remain small and don’t turn a profit off third-party content (and as long as they don’t try to expand to Germany). However, if they want to expand or make money, it leads to some interesting monetisation challenges.

Money could come from either commercial sponsors or from the customers themselves. The former is very difficult if there’s no editorial oversight, because advertisers won’t want to be associated with certain types of content. What if someone puts together a newspaper full of racist or pornographic material? No company would like their ad next to that.

So having customers pay would certainly work better, but whether you go for a subscription or a per-print model, it would only work with a rather large scale — a scale that I’d say a personal newspaper business is unlikely to reach, despite the enthusiastic response. (NB, Choire Sicha wrote an overview of how read-later services approach copyright and publisher remuneration three years ago.)

Whatever happens with this little experiment, it shows that customers really want something that publishers aren’t currently prepared to offer. That doesn’t mean that enterprising minds won’t keep on pushing. And who knows, a Netflix for news (*cough*) might just come out of it.