MEDIA I An Ottawa company can print 135 international newspapers from its kiosk
Kristin Goff
Sun
OTTAWA – An Ottawa company started by a couple of self-described “news junkies” has begun offering the first service in Canada to print international newspapers from a kiosk on demand.
The kiosk, slightly bigger than an automated teller machine, is linked to about 135 electronic newspapers, ranging from the Shanghai Daily in China to Libero Sports of Peru, using a system owned by Satellite Newspaper Corp., based in The Hague.
To operate, the customer inserts a credit card, touches the screen to select a publication and within a minute or two gets a tabloid-sized newspaper in black and white. Prices range from around $4 US to $6 US depending on the size of the paper.
While there are services in major Canadian cities which download electronic newspapers from the Internet, print and deliver them to newsstands or specific customers, this is the first stand-alone kiosk system in Canada, said Ted Britton, co-founder of International Newspaper Kiosks.
The Ottawa company reached an agreement with Satellite Newspapers to introduce the system elsewhere in Canada if a trial run proves successful over the next six months.
Britton, who owns two news and magazine shops in Ottawa, and his partner Shahab Bakhtyar, a former photojournalist, hope to roll out print-on-demand kiosks later in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.
Even in an online world with electronic newspapers, Bakhtyar says he’s confident there will be plenty of demand for the printed word.
“A lot of times when we introduce the machine, the immediate reaction is, ‘I can go on the Internet and read it. Why do I want it?’,” he says.
But there are many reasons why travellers, business and government officials, foreign-born Canadians and others will want them, says Bakhtyar, who immigrated from Iran more than 20 years ago.
Online newspapers don’t always provide the full edition of the paper and some require subscriptions to get access. People also need to have computers and connections. And lastly, there’s a comfort factor. Some people just like the convenience of a newspaper they can hold in their hands, he says.
The newspaper printing machine quietly began operation last week from a seemingly odd location — a small Ottawa restaurant which Bakhtyar owns.
In addition to selling newspapers directly from the kiosk, which they hope to relocate to a busy downtown location, the partners also plan to set up a delivery service to bring the latest edition of selected papers to customers each day. As an extra, they can sell advertising to run on the screen of the kiosk and to print out on newspapers.
For the business to work, they figure they need to sell a minimum of 200 newspapers daily. But they hope to sell many, many more.
“Ottawa is a good place for us with the embassies, foreign affairs, hotels and tourist trade,” said Britton, who already distributes international publications to various government departments and embassies.
There are many more newspapers available through Satellite Newspapers than are now available in most Canadian cities. The print-on-demand papers are updated as new editions are produced, which is also a benefit over two- or three-day-old papers shipped from overseas, he said.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006