"If the smell of paper is the biggest push back, then we're good to go."

I had coffee this morning with Erika Huff from SmartCEO magazine. She was excited to show me the new digital version of their publication that is launching in July. The prototype had some issues on the Panera Bread wireless, but that's what makes it a prototype. If the presentation was smooth as silk, I'd have been looking at the first digital issue.

As we went through the prototype, complete with links, rollovers, embedded video (albeit a bit clunky in the demo), I steered the discussion towards adoption. Who is the audience? How are you going to get it in front of them? The answers make sense - some people are going to stick with reading their print version, but going digital allows for a much wider audience to experience (not just read) the content, at a much lower delivery cost for the publisher. New eyeballs...people that want the content, but wont' subscribe (pay) for the printing and delivery.

After our meeting a very timely article in Fast Company came across my RSS reader. It's a short series of quotes by Steve Haber who developed the Sony Reader. Obviously he's biased, but he makes some great points about what he's witnessing in terms of people adopting digital readers instead of picking up bound pieces of paper for their content. They rang true for me. I didn't dig my Blackberry screen at first, but now I wonder what I did without it. The thought of all of my books on a reader at once sounds good to me.

10 years huh? I'm guessing half that...

A good quick read. Check it out here.