It looks like the e-reader industry is about to explode. After Amazon launched its Kindle 2 reader, Hearst Corporation, a giant media conglomerate, announced it will launch an e-reader of its own by the end of the year.

 

Hearst’s e-reader will mainly be used to read the magazines and news papers the company publishes. Users will get the electronic versions of magazines like SmartMoney or Cosmopolitan on their e-readers and Hearst is reportedly planning to make some of its online content purchasable, The Wall Street reported. 

 

The news that Hearst is planning to launch an e-reader of its own is huge considering the fact that the media conglomerate owns 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, and is very influential to tens of magazines. Hearst publishes Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Popular Mechanics, Seventeen, and SmartMoney and several newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

 

There are rumors that Hearst’s announcement may have something to do with the announcement made by Plastic Logic, which recently unveiled the eReader. However, the principles of the e-reader, regardless of who makes it, are mainly the same. The only big difference between Hearst’s e-reader and the Kindle 2 for example will most likely be the size. The Hearst e-reader will almost certainly be larger to accommodate the format of newspapers and magazines.

 

It might be a good thing for Hearst to experiment with an e-reader, but putting some of its online content behind a pay wall will surely be at least tricky. Few publishers (big names like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal) managed to pull that off. 

 

"Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management," Steven Swartz, the president of Hearst newspapers, wrote in a staff memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal.