A while back, I talked about the idea of a customizable travel guides (Lonely Planet to be exact) and commented on how the publishing industry probably was not capable of creating customized books with how the printing presses were set up today. Mike Masnick over at the infinitely more popular Techdirt recently took a tour of the Wall Street Journal's Palo Alto printing plant and found out that most of the technology and innovation had gone to streamlining the printing process and saving cost, but not really at creating a better product (in this case, a customizable newspaper). A customizable newspaper is probably more complicated than a customizable book due to the numbers involved and the delivery method (paper boys versus mail).

I'm not sure if customized newspapers are the solution (I'm more sure of customized travel guides), but there is probably a easier way of accomplishing this. Imagine a web service that will tabulate the top stories from different news sources (online newspapers and blogs) every day and provides a .pdf which you can print (or even prints for you, but that would probably require some kind of software). All you need to do is specify the sources (in my case, Engadget, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, Techdirt, etc.) and print. You could even specify the printing frequency (i.e. once a day, twice a day, etc.), or the target number of pages. There's clearly a business opportunity here for advertisement since by knowing someone's reading habit, you can also provide targeted ads (same for a customized newspaper too).

Labels: book, customization, newspaper, techdirt