Hearst and Sprint team up for Skiff launch

Publishing giant Hearst is set to enter the e-reader market in 2010 and will team up with Sprint to offer an e-reading service platform for mobile devices, smartphones and netbooks.

The platform, called Skiff, will provide magazine and newspaper content with “high resolution graphics, rich typography and dynamic updates.” Sprint will offer Skiff powered products at its stores and Hearst said it has also teamed up with several top consumer electronic manufacturers and with chip maker Marvell.

“Skiff signifies a new era in live content distribution-anywhere, anytime, even any size delivery of high quality text, images and graphics, all tailored to the always on demands of today’s consumers,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s co-founder.

Skiff’s management team includes former executives from Sony, AT&T, Apple, Palm, Intel and Microsoft. No release date has been set for the devices.

A Kindle killer? Probably not. While the Skiff platform is definitely something to look forward too, it appears it will focus on digital media like magazines and newspapers rather than e-books. Hearst publishes Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, O, The Oprah Magazine, Esquire, and other popular magazines and 15 daily newspapers including the Houston Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Connecticut Post and San Francisco Chronicle. The devices will no doubt come with subscription models for each publication, and since they claim their new technology preserves layouts, it’s quite possible we’ll see ads as well.

If this new platform is a success it could inject new life into the struggling newspaper and magazine industries as it moves readers from paper to screen. 2010 should be an exciting year for digital media!

Read [PC Magazine]