NYTimes.com: French newspapers sign up for e-reader trial

An e-paper reader, similar to Amazon’s Kindle, is being trialled by seven French newspapers.

The technology has been developed in partnership with France Telecom, which will deliver the paper’s content through its wireless network.

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Shanghai Daily available on Amazon Kindle

China’s English language newspaper the Shanghai Daily has made its e-paper edition compatible with the Amazon Kindle.

According to the Daily, the paper is the first in Asia to launch an e-paper for the device – launched in November last year -  which downloads editions wirelessly and automatically.
The title joins other papers, including the Washington Post and New York Times, which have developed editions for the Kindle.

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Newland launches Emirates newspaper

Martin Newland’s newspaper for the United Arab Emirates has gone live online and published its first edition.

Developing The National, which is owned Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), has involved an international recruitment drive by ex-Telegraph editor Newman with journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Daily Telegraph joining the team.

Around 200 staff will work to produce the website and 80-page paper, which will initially run from Friday to Sunday.

The site currently carries a slideshow of the making of the new paper – a nice touch. It also offers an e-paper edition of the print product and online commenting functions for users.

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How to make a blog an e-paper…

(…if that’s what you really want to do)

Using Feedjournal bloggers can essentially pdf their content by putting the feed for their posts into the site’s generator. The result is the blog laid out in a newspaper style, complete with headlines and bylines, you can even make a masthead if you so wish.

Dave Lee has tried it out on his blog and I have to agree with him that I’m not really sure what the point is. The idea of taking a functional online publishing platform and shoehorning it into a ‘traditional media’ format seems counterproductive.

Plus it doesn’t really make longer posts more user-friendly, as, having tried it out on our feed, a long enough post will take up a whole page and find its way to the front of the ‘paper’.

On the other hand the service could be a way for newsletter-style publishers to better link their print handouts with content online. Being able to repackage a blog’s content so quickly could encourage these kind of operations to devote more time to what they do online without neglecting their print operations.

For e-paper fans, however, the forthcoming release of a FeedJournal service for readers, allowing users to select the feeds that make up the pdf’s content, might be more appealing.

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