Google: Flipper is just reinventing newspapers. Only worse.

All that money and effort to get the experience of "flip through it" see snippet
From this printer's point of view, it's pretty funny.

Meanwhile the wikipedia-entry-appearing-with-search is the killer app
if and only if you connect to the printernet. Consider: A versioned newspaper with 3 pages of the lede + 2 paragraphs with the wikipedia entry and link to the YouTube video. The other 21 pages are filled with whatever and lots and lots of print ads.

If the community of interest is a high school class and the content contains news stories chosen on the basis of what a classroom teacher needs textbooks in California can disappear in peace. And the high school ed problem for every one becomes much more manageable. If you add in public health and service advertisements the whole thing makes money for everyone. Just ask your ed and non profit users and see what they say.

If the community of interest is a organization you can sell ad sense users a platform in print ads that speak directly to the needs of that organization. If it's a bunch of hobbyists, same thing.

Geeks just can't see Print
As a Print person, I've seen this with designers, admins, and especially with geeks. They keep just drinking their own Kool-Aid.

Ok, newspapers haven't had the speed or the scale, but with printernet publishing that goes away. 50,000,000 versioned newspapers with content pulled from the cloud from search, edited for a specific community of interest and delivered overnight with a minimal carbon footprint. Plus ads to make some money in the bargain.

C'mon Google, the web is all very nice, but if you want to crack the real world and the mobile web get in touch with a Print Professional. Ask him/her about Clickable Print.

Printers print stuff.
Publishers use printers to print stuff. Most publishers don't care about what Print can do. They're all caught up with blablabla business models blablabla advertising blablabla ROI blablabla meme du jour. Meanwhile Printers keep printing more and more stuff.

So cut out the middle man, let everyone be a publisher in print. If you think blogger is a big deal, consider what happens if you use Clickable Print to be the real world portal to Blogger +YouTube + Wikipedia + Facebook + whatever comes next.

The two mass media are TV and Print.
Everything else is a niche media. You already have a nice lead in TV with YouTube. Once you can figure out the Print piece, you can stop having to mollify a bunch of "content creators" who think their words should be locked behind IP.

I'll let the engineers reinvent the newspaper on the web. Nice for the niche web audience. And then the niche of a niche that reads on the web. Then let the MBAs figure out the "new business model." Sooner or later they'll figure out something.

In the meantime, I'll stick with paper, thank you very much.

From Tech Crunch
Google Flipper Is About To Jump Out Of The Water:
"Google is about to launch a new Google Labs project it calls Flipper, we’ve learned. No, it’s not a dolphin. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks like the project is a more visual way to read Google News, or to “flip through it,” as it were.

"