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It's a fair point: You already pay for the hardware and internet access, why pay for the news?
The answer is: You weren't paying for the news on paper... at least, not much of it. Do people really think a newspaper can be run off of their dime a copy? Heck, no... advertising runs a paper, and your dime just helps grease the wheels the advertisers paid for. If people don't buy the papers, they can still soldier on, but if all the advertisers pulled out, they're out of business yesterday.
Besides, the old newspaper model had hidden costs you didn't have to pay--like the cost of cleaning up the air from the diesel fumes of those delivery trucks, every day, 365 days a year. Believe me, thanks to newspaper advertisers, we get off cheap.
We've mentioned the advertiser-financing model on these forums before, and although it wasn't specifically mentioned in the article, advertisers are the ones who really hold the purse-strings for newspapers (as they do for TV and radio, for instance). The suggestion I'm making is that it might be the solution to e-papers, and if it works for e-papers, it might for e-books, too.
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