If there was one thing stranded travelers at the Vancouver, British Columbia, airport hotel wanted more than their breakfast the morning of Sept. 12 it was their newspapers.
With no planes flying, none had been delivered, but they arrived just the same.
Readers at the Vancouver hotel were able to devour copies of nearly a dozen newspapers from various parts of the globe, including Le Monde and the New York Post. The papers had been downloaded directly from the publishers' computers and printed on one of the hotel's office printers. Although the hotel generally charges a markup from the US$2 to US$3 it pays for rights to print each copy, that day it gave away the papers.
"We had something like 10,000 people stranded in Vancouver from diverted planes," said Sarah Good, a spokeswoman for the Fairmont Vancouver Airport hotel. "People really wanted the news from their own city. We printed out extra newspapers and put them out, and they were gone within minutes."
Halfway around the world that same day, workers at the US Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, also unable to obtain their usual newspapers, poured over similar printouts, which are produced on sheets about the size of a tabloid-formatted newspaper.
The technology -- which allows anyone with an Internet connection and a printer to receive exact images of participating newspapers around the world -- was developed by a Russian company known by the acronym IBS. That company, together with a small group of other investors, including the venture capitalist, Esther Dyson, has formed a company in New York, NewspaperDirect, to sell the service.
The service shortens the distribution process: a file of the newspaper's content is sent in a compressed graphical format over the Internet from the publisher to NewspaperDirect's operations center, and then on to local distributors -- the company's customers. Paper copies are printed at the point of distribution. This allows readers -- in banks in Moscow or hotels in Sydney -- to pick up a stapled, printed copy of The Boston Globe soon after it runs off the press in Massachusetts.
While various newspapers have their own Web sites, including many of NewspaperDirect's member papers, the office-printed versions of the papers are meant primarily for people who do not want, or have no means, to read the newspapers online.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, NewspaperDirect's sales have more than doubled, pushing September's sales forecasts up 25 percent from August, when the company sold 13,000 copies of its papers.
Currently, 83 newspapers from all around the world use the service, including The Wall Street Journal, Spain's El Pais, and papers from South Korea, India, the Philippines, Japan and Russia.
The participating papers also include the International Herald Tribune, which is a joint operation of The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as The Boston Globe, which is owned by The New York Times Co. So far, The New York Times is not distributed by NewspaperDirect, although the Times is in discussions with the company.
NewspaperDirect is still far from being profitable, with monthly sales so far covering only about 20 percent of costs. But the company says it has come a long way from the 1,000 copies it sold in January, its first month of commercial operation.
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