In his Observer column today,  Peter Preston argues that newspapers will not die, merely switch on to another delivery mechanism. He cites an e-reader launched by Plastic Logic of San Diego which you can fit in your briefcase and flick through newspaper pages while on the commuter train into Euston.

Preston’s argument is based on this premise:

In sum, a newspaper tells you many unexpected things which you didn’t know in the process of telling you what you wanted to know, while a website deals in expected things that you already know you need to know. So format matters.

Like all those who cannot bring themselves to see what is happening to their industry - that newspaper readership is either rapidly shifting to the web or is simply migrating to a different astral plane, Preston believes that the format developed over hundreds of years cannot simply disappear but will merely lift and shift to some new piece of technology in all its existing finery.

That, to former editors like Preston and others who cannot conceive that today’s and tomorrow’s consumers of information don’t receive their information in linear ways - here is the news and here is the way we’re going to present it to you - is why the web and all of its delivery mechanisms cannot replace the newspaper. People, argue the curmudgeons, want to be presented with a series of choices of  what to read by those ‘who know best’.

Preston argues that Google referrals cannot satisfy this need because a search is, by its nature, a search for information that the user already knows he is looking for:

Probable answer: you flip through the paper, turning the pages, absorbing pictures and headlines, stopping when something catches your interest - but you go to the net with specific intent, Googling, digging deeper

But the web, particularly in its second and third incarnations, is all about things we didn’t know which stop us and catch our interest. How else to explain the rise and rise of Digg and Fark, Reddit and Stumbleupon? This is the future, where the user editor suggests content to millions of other user editors. This is the future of news online. We, the providers, supply the content while the users edit and decide on prominence and dissemination.

I can see e-readers catching on in niche markets. But when it comes to the mass market of news, they are nothing more than lift and shift - moving an 18th century format on to a electronic delivery device.