The New Republic has published my commentary on Apple’s iPad announcement. I reprint it here (with the important second sentence, which was cut from the New Republic version):

The PC era ended this morning at ten o’clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs mounted a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad, Apple’s version of a tablet computer. What made the moment epochal was not so much the gadget itself – an oversized iPod Touch tricked out with an e-reader application and a few other new features – but the clouds of hype that attended its arrival.

Tablet computers have been kicking around for a decade, but consumers have always shunned them. They’ve been viewed as nerdy-looking smudge-magnets, limited by their cumbersome shape and their lack of a keyboard. Tablets were a solution to a problem no one had.

The rapturous anticipation of Apple’s tablet – the buildup to Jobs’s announcement blurred the line between media feeding-frenzy and orgiastic pagan ritual – shows that our attitude to the tablet form has shifted. Tablets suddenly look attractive. Why? Because the nature of personal computing has changed.

Until recently, we mainly used our computers to run software programs (Word, Quicken) installed on our hard drives. Now, we use them mainly to connect to the vast databases of the Internet – to “the cloud,” as the geeks say. And as the Internet has absorbed the traditional products of media – songs, TV shows, movies, games, the printed word – we’ve begun to look to our computers to act as multifunctional media players. They have to do all the work that was once done by specialized technologies – TVs, stereos, telephones, newspapers, books – as well as run a myriad of software apps. The computer business and the media business are now the same business.

The transformation in the nature of computing has turned the old-style PC into a dinosaur. A bulky screen attached to a bulky keyboard no longer fits with the kinds of things we want to do with our computers. The shortcomings of the PC have created, the iPad hype suggests, a yearning for a new kind of device – portable, flexible, always connected – that takes computing into the cloud era.

Suddenly, in other words, the tablet is a solution to a problem everyone has. Or at least it’s one possible solution. The computing market is now filled with all sorts of networked devices, each seeking to fill a lucrative niche. There are dozens of netbooks, the diminutive cousins to traditional laptops, from manufacturers like Acer and Asus. There are e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. There are smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Nexus One. There are gaming consoles like Nintendo’s Wii and the Microsoft’s Xbox. In some ways, personal computing has returned to the ferment of its earliest days, when the market was fragmented among lots of contending companies, operating systems, and technical standards.

With the iPad, Apple is hoping to bridge all the niches. It wants to deliver the killer device for the cloud era, a machine that will define computing’s new age in the way that the Windows PC defined the old age. The iPad is, as Jobs said today, “something in the middle,” a multipurpose gadget aimed at the sweet spot between the tiny smartphone and the traditional laptop. If it succeeds, we’ll all be using iPads to play iTunes, read iBooks, watch iShows, and engage in iChats. It will be an iWorld.

But will it succeed? The iPad is by no means a sure bet. It still, after all, is a tablet – fairly big and fairly heavy. Unlike an iPod or an iPhone, you can’t stick an iPad in your pocket or pocketbook. It also looks to be a cumbersome device. The iPad would be ideal for a three-handed person – two hands to hold it and another to manipulate its touchscreen – but most of humans, alas, have only a pair of hands. And with a price that starts at $500 and rises to more than $800, the iPad is considerably more expensive than the Kindles and netbooks it will compete with.

But whether it finds mainstream success or not, the iPad is the clearest sign yet that we’ve entered a new era of computing, in which media and software have merged in the Internet cloud. It’s hardly a surprise that Apple – more than Microsoft, IBM, or even Google – is defining the terms of this new era. Thanks to Steve Jobs, a bohemian geek with the instincts of an impresario, Apple has always been as much about show biz as about data processing. It sees its products as performances and its customers as both audience members and would-be artists.

Apple endured its darkest days during the early 1990s, when the PC had lost its original magic and turned into a drab, utilitarian tool. Buyers flocked to Dell’s cheap, beige boxes. Computing back then was all about the programs. Now, computing is all about the programming – the words and sounds and pictures and conversations that pour out of the Internet’s cloud and onto our screens. Computing, in other words, has moved back closer to the ideal that Steve Jobs had when he founded Apple. Today, Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer.

Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.

My next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that the tools we use to think with – our “intellectual technologies” – not only shape our habits of thought but exert an actual physical influence on the neurons and synapses in our brains. I look at the Internet, an extraordinarily powerful intellectual technology, in this context, examining what the scientific and historical evidence tells about the effects it is having on our thoughts, memories, and even emotions – and how different the effects are from those exerted by earlier intellectual technologies such as the printed book.

Here’s the table of contents for The Shallows:

Prologue: “The Watchdog and the Thief”

Chapter 1: “HAL and Me”

Chapter 2: “The Vital Paths”

Chapter 3: “Tools of the Mind”

Chapter 4: “The Deepening Page”

Chapter 5: “A Medium of the Most General Nature”

Chapter 6: “The Very Image of a Book”

Chapter 7: “The Juggler’s Brain”

Chapter 8: “The Church of Google”

Chapter 9: “Search, Memory”

Chapter 10: “A Thing Like Me”

Epilogue: “Human Elements”

The Shallows will be published in June in North America, by W. W. Norton, and in September in the U.K., by Atlantic Books. Translated editions are also forthcoming.

Jay Rosen points to another interesting, if not altogether surprising, tidbit about how the New York Times plans to construct its promised paywall. Essentially, it appears that if you come to a Times article via a link, either on the Web or in an email, you will get to read the whole article, and the article won’t count against your monthly limit of articles. This news comes from a Q&A in which Times CEO Janet Robinson and digital chief Martin Nisenholtz answered readers’ questions about the subscription plan. Here’s what they said:

Q: … will I still be able to send the e-mail link to others who may or may not be NYTimes subscribers so that they can open the link and read the article?

A: … yes, you can still send links to your friends.

Q: What about posting articles to Facebook and other social media? Would friends without a subscription then not be able to view an article that I think is relevant for them?

A: Yes, they could continue to view articles. If you are coming to NYTimes.com from another Web site and it brings you to our site to view an article, you will have access to that article and it will not count toward your allotment of free ones.

The Wall Street Journal has been doing something similar with Google News; if you come to the Journal site from a Google News link, you get to read the whole article, even if it’s blocked for other nonsubscribers. The Times model would seem to expand this loophole enormously, basically giving news surfers (“freeloaders” in my market segmentation scheme) unlimited access to the Times’s online content. Or, as Rosen puts it, “for those people who get their news from the web itself, using search, aggregators[,] social media and blogs to find the stuff they want, the stuff they find from the New York Times will always be available, free of charge.”

The Times’s paywall is not only a delayed paywall, falling after some number of articles have been read; it’s a delayed, leaky paywall. This makes it all the clearer that the Times plan is a versioning strategy, through which, as I described yesterday, Times readers will segment themselves according to the value they ascribe to the Times and their willingness to pay. Freeloaders will continue to get more or less unfettered access to Times stories for free, while Times Loyalists, who value the Times as an information source and want to spend significant time browsing its site (or using other digital delivery mechanisms), will be asked to pay a modest subscription fee.

Inveterate news surfers will scratch their heads at this plan. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? In fact, a commenter on Rosen’s post raises this point: “This is super weird … It’s an interesting (if nothing else) way to structure a paid system, but it won’t take long before people realize they can just browse the @NYTimes Twitter stream, as opposed to NYTimes.com’s home page.” (In another comment, the normally astute Scott Rosenberg also professes dismay at the Times plan, saying it “makes zero sense.”) But that view is a fallacy. It assumes that everyone wants to bop around on the web all day trolling different sources for stories. It also assumes everyone is a scheming hacker who, to avoid having to fork out a few bucks, will click links in the Times twitter feed or otherwise figure out some geeky way to get around the system. But not everyone’s like that. In fact, most people aren’t like that. Some people just want to go to a few trusted outlets for most of their news – sources rather than links define their news-gathering behavior – and some subset of that group will likely be willing to pay something for the convenience of having free run of a trusted site. (The iTunes store has revealed that a substantial set of people will happily pay money for digital music files that they could fairly easily scrounge up for free elsewhere on the web.)

The Times subscription plan may fail. It may be built on a misreading of the marketplace. But it’s not super weird, and it’s not cockeyed. It’s a reasonable, thoughtful plan, and the company may discover that a delayed, leaky paywall is the kind of paywall that pays.

UPDATE: Reuters’ Felix Salmon writes: “if this is true, then [the Times is] not actually charging for NYT content; they’re charging for NYT navigation. What you get charged for isn’t reading NYT stories, but rather navigating from one NYT page to another. Now, the navigation at nytimes.com is excellent, and I can see that some people might be willing to pay for it. But it’s a pretty weird thing to charge for.” I think navigation is part of what you’re paying for, but I think the more salient sources of value will be convenience (of which navigation is one element), access to various modes of digital delivery beyond the web site, and, most important, the Times’s editorial skill and judgement as a producer and aggregator of the day’s news and commentary. (To find all of the Times’s content through external links might be possible, but it would be a royal pain in the neck.) What the Times is hoping, obviously, is that a large enough set of people will perceive that value as something worth paying for.

The soon-to-be-disappeared Sun Microsystems had a knack for prescient slogans. “The network is the computer” has come true. And then there was “write once, run anywhere,” which heralded the age of universal software applications. Rather than tailoring their programs to run on a particular type of computer – an IBM mainframe, say, or a Windows PC – programmers would use a language like Sun’s Java that was adaptable to any computer. It was a liberating idea: Software developers and users would no longer be locked into one operating system, and beholden to the owner of that system.

And it came to pass. The Web, a universal medium built on device-agnostic standards, sped the embrace of the “write once, run anywhere” ethic. The idea of tethering an app to an OS came to seem kind of absurd. All was good in the land of software.

And then Apple opened its iPhone app store, and in a Cupertino minute everything changed. Suddenly, the idea of tethered software seemed normal again. (Ironically, when Apple was struggling to survive in the 90s, the Web’s run-anywhere ethic had served as an important lifeline for the company, reducing the importance of Microsoft’s control of the PC software market.) Proprietary app stores are popping up everywhere, as device makers and social network operators seek to extend the usefulness of their gadgets and sites and at the same time strengthen their ability to lock in customers. Just last week, Amazon announced it would be opening an app store for its Kindle e-reader.

The rise of the app store comes as the nature of personal computing applications is changing. Some of the apps sold for the iPhone and other devices are old-fashioned, self-contained programs, drawing on data stored in the device itself. But most of them are what might be called “cloud translators.” They serve as software gateways between the Internet and the device. They tap into stores of data that exist out in the Net’s cloud, from maps to message streams, and they tailor that data for some practical use geared to the device’s form and interface.

So is Sun’s “write once, read anywhere” ethic as doomed as Sun itself? Is the proprietary app store model the new normal? Farhad Manjoo, writing in Fast Company, doesn’t believe so. Although “companies increasingly see it as the future model for all software distribution,” he argues, “the app bandwagon” may soon hit “a dead end.” The universality of the Web, he says, will once again win the day: “The App Store’s true rival isn’t a competing app marketplace. Rather, it’s the open, developer-friendly Web. When Apple rejected Google Latitude, the search company’s nearby-friend-mapping program, developers created a nearly identical version that works perfectly on the iPhone’s Web browser.”

“You’d be a fool,” concludes Manjoo, “to ignore the long-term trend in software – away from incompatible platforms and restrictive programming regimes, and toward write-once, run-anywhere code that works on a variety of devices, without interference from middlemen.”

He may well be right. The advantages of run-anywhere software, and of the browser as a universal platform, remain strong. And yet you’d also be a fool to ignore a different trend: people’s retreat from the open Web and their embrace of private networks, whether run by device makers like Apple or site operators like Facebook. The battle between universal software and proprietary apps is also, in other words, a battle between two models for the future of personal computing. While both models will almost certainly survive, only one will be the dominant model. The question that will be answered in the years ahead is this: Is write-once-run-anywhere the destiny of software, or was it an anomaly?

It’s always slightly disturbing, when scrolling through an old book in Google Books, to suddenly come across a page obscured by the fingers of the technician who manned the Google scanner. You find yourself, for a moment, both repelled and beguiled, as if you were witnessing a secret, ghostly act of violation.

The writer Caleb Crain, in doing research for a review of Adrian Johns’ new book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, came upon a particularly eerie image:

And what work, you might ask, is the scanner’s hand so boldly groping? It’s an essay by Immanuel Kant, the title of which is “Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books.”

Comments Crain:

Could there be a fitter representation of copyright’s contemporary plight than the fingers of a Google technician obscuring Kant’s defence of writer’s rights? An author’s consent, Kant cautions in a footnote, “can by no means be presumed because he has already given it exclusively to another”, yet Google is struggling to effect exactly this sort of transfer of consent today, as it attempts to win approval for a legal settlement in the United States that will allow it to republish works whose copyright owners have not come forward. I couldn’t have read Kant’s essay so easily without the Google technician’s labour – in fact, without Google, I might not have got around to reading it at all – but her fingers were nonetheless in the way. The internet’s attitude toward Kant’s words is ambiguous, combining respect, appropriation, liberation and accidental vandalism.

Jeff Jarvis, the popular media blogger, has long ridiculed newspapers for trying to find innovative ways to charge for the stories they publish online. True to form, he had a kneejerk reaction to the New York Times’s plan to ask frequent readers of its digital content to buy a subscription. Jarvis argues that in seeking to charge its “best customers,” the Times is guilty of “cockeyed economics”:

So why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away? The logic eludes me. So do the economics.

But it’s Jarvis, not the Times, whose economics, and logic, are askew. Jarvis might want to spend some time reading about the fundamentals of pricing, particularly Hal Varian’s classic work on the “versioning” of digital goods. Varian is a distinguished economist who teaches at Berkeley and is also now Google’s chief economist. Here’s a little of what he says about “versioning information goods,” which is extremely pertinent to the Times’s strategy as well as the news and media business in general:

One prominent feature of information goods is that they have large fixed costs of production, and small variable costs of reproduction. Cost-based pricing makes little sense in this context; value-based pricing is much more appropriate. Different consumers may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important … [One] particular aspect of differential pricing [is] known as quality discrimination or versioning … The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay. Consumers with high willingness to pay choose one version, while consumers with lower willingnesses to pay choose a different version. The producer chooses the versions so as to induce the consumers to “self select” into appropriate categories …

[Consider the case] in which the seller knows something about the distribution of willingness to pay [WTP] in the population, but cannot identify the willingness to pay of a given consumer. In this case the seller cannot base its price on an exogenous observable characteristic such as membership in some group, but can base its price on an endogenous characteristic such as the quality of the choice the consumer purchases. The appropriate strategy for the seller in this situation is to choose two qualities and associated prices and offer them to the consumers. Each of the different consumer types will [select] one of the two quality/price pairs. The seller wants to choose the qualities and prices of the packages offered so as to maximize profit.

The intention is to get the consumers to self-select into the high- and low-WTP groups by setting price and quality appropriately. That is, the seller wants to choose price/quality packages so that the consumers with high WTP choose the high-price/high-quality package, and the consumers with low WTP choose the low-price/low-quality package.

The Times’s plan is, obviously, a variation on this versioning strategy, where the quality variable that is being controlled is the number of stories available to be read in a month. By establishing a volume-based trip wire for a paywall, the Times introduces a mechanism that requires its readers to self-select based on the value they perceive in the Times’s offering and hence their willingness to pay.

Such versioning strategies have proven very successful for many digital goods. Software companies routinely use versioning to segment their customers and optimize their profits, and many cloud services – such as Google Apps – are also following the strategy. The common thread through the strategies is that the “best customers” pay more, while the “worst customers” pay little or nothing. When news stories or other media products are digitized, they also become candidates for versioning strategies. If news organizations don’t experiment with versioning plans, they’d be foolish.

The only thing cockeyed about the economics of the Times’s plan is Jarvis’s view of it.

In a mildly anticlimactic announcement, the New York Times let it be known today that in, oh, a year or so it will get around to figuring out exactly how it will charge some people for its stories.

If discretion is the better part of valor, the Gray Lady is Rambo.

This much we know: The Times will refer to its as-yet-undefined online subscription service not as a “paywall” (which it is) but as a “metered model” (which it isn’t). “Paywall,” apparently, carries the wrong sort of connotations; it sounds like the type of thing Ronald Reagan would have demanded to be torn down. “Metered model” is less likely to raise hackles; it’s the way we get electricity and water and parking spaces.

But the essence of a metering system is that what you pay goes up along with your consumption. That’s not what the Times has in mind. Its system will be a delayed-paywall scheme similar to that already in place at the Financial Times. You’ll be able to read some number of stories, or look at some number of pages, during the course of a month, and once you hit the limit a big old paywall will come clattering down, and you’ll be asked to fork up a few bucks for a monthly all-you-can-eat subscription. There are just two prices, in other words: zero and nonzero.

It’s not the most aggressive move imaginable, but it’s a smart move, particularly when viewed in the context of the Times’s previously disclosed last-man-standing strategy. (Saying it’s a smart move doesn’t necessarily mean it will work; it means that the risk of not trying it at all is higher than the risk of trying it and finding that it doesn’t work.) The structure of the written news business is in flux right now because the Net has erased the traditional local and regional boundaries that once defined newspaper markets. Because, as I described in an earlier post, the highly dispersed and fragmented newspaper supply model was built on the assumption of local market boundaries, the industry is now weighed down with much too much supply. That imbalance is in the process of being remedied as newspapers fold, consolidate, and lay off journalists. The supply side of the industry is shrinking, and every time a newspaper disappears the surviving papers get a little bit stronger. Once the shakeout runs its course, the “last men standing” will face less competition, for readers and advertisers, which in business is always a good thing.

The reduction of supply won’t solve all the problems faced by written news organizations. They will still have to grapple with changing modes of news consumption (and production), the resistance of large numbers of news consumers to paying for the news, and the fact that the web provides a less-than-ideal platform for the kinds of traditional advertising that have been the bread and butter of newspapers. One way to deal with these challenges is to start some rational experiments in market segmentation, and that’s what the Times’s paywall plan – oops, I mean “metered model” – is fundamentally all about.

The Times recognizes that, even in our digital age, the news-consuming public is not an undifferentiated mass. Some people are blind to differences in the quality of reporting and writing; other people pay attention to those differences and place a high value on quality. Some people are happy to skip around the net sampling all sorts of stories by all manner of producer; other people have better things to do and would prefer to stick with a few trusted sources. Some people still prefer printed newspapers; other people prefer to get their news from web sites or Kindles or iPhone apps; other people want all of the above. Some people find the idea of paying for news anathema; other people don’t.

The Times’s plan involves dividing the market into three categories and tailoring a different offering and business model to each. Here are the segments, as I see them:

Traditionalists: Largely though not exclusively an older and fairly well-heeled crowd, they continue to value the unique attributes of a printed newspaper while also wanting the option of digital delivery. They’ll pay a pricey subscription fee for a print edition, and they’ll (likely) get the full panoply of digital options thrown in for free. Because they’re an attractive audience to many advertisers, they’ll also generate significant advertising revenues, across print and digital media.

Loyalists: They don’t care about print editions. They want their news digitally, but they value quality and hence tend to be fairly loyal readers of what they see as quality news outlets. The Times hopes to convince a good chunk of these folks to subscribe to the all-you-can-eat digital version of the paper. This will be a tough sell, but it’s not an impossible sell. And if more digital news starts to be delivered through software applications and computing devices better geared toward the display of text and the navigation of an online newspaper (like the soon-to-be-nonmythical Apple tablet), the idea of paying for access to a quality online news outlet will likely become more palatable to this segment. Here, again, the subscription fees will be supplemented by ad revenues.

Freeloaders: The biggest and (from a business standpoint) least attractive segment of the market, they’re happy to hop around the web gathering news content from many different outlets, and there’s no way in hell they’re going to pay for it. The Times will give these folks free but limited access to its site (though probably not other kinds of digital delivery), and it will carefully establish the limits on free access to ensure that most of the members of this segment will go on getting what they’re used to getting from the Times (and if they don’t, they’ll come back for a few stories next month). Freeloaders will continue to provide the Times with some marginal ad revenues, and over time some small but not insignificant number of them might relocate themselves into the Loyalist category. Maintaining some level of free access is crucial for a news outlet like the Times because, as the company’s top execs put it in a staff memo, it needs to “remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web.” It needs to stay in the link stream.

The newspaper business has been shrinking for decades, at least in terms of readership. It will never be what it was, and it will certainly never be what it was before the Web. But for the last men standing, things may not turn out as bad as the doomsayers think. The consolidation of supply in the industry, the reduction of competition, the emergence of new market segments, the willingness to experiment with targeted subscription programs and other types of pricing schemes, and the coming of new devices and software for news delivery: these may not be causes for optimism in a beleaguered industry, but they are causes for hope.

This is the third installment of “Dog Bites Newspaper,” Rough Type’s non-award-winning series on the future of written news. The earlier installments were The Writing Is on the Paywall and Google in the Middle.