With the recent launches of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, Amazon’s second iteration of the Kindle, and the rumors swirling around an Apple iPad device, the publishing world is in a frenzy about the supposed demise of their business models. Really?  They haven’t learned anything from the evolution of the music industry (and those that try to stop it)?

The newspaper and magazine industries are inefficient because their products are inefficient.  Much like an album with only 2 good songs on it, a lot of print publication content is irrelevant to its readers.  And when you add a national advertising buy into the mix, the volume of irrelevant content grows.  Readers have a lot of online options and customize their media intake accordingly.  It’s why I have an iGoogle landing page, the NewsAddict iPhone app and why I only read certain parts of my Wall Street Journal.  I know what I want and I am not going to bother with the rest.  And that’s the key to the publishing industry reinventing itself (and rediscovering profits).

Although these new reading devices shift control of distribution, they free publishers up to focus solely on content.  And if they’re smart, they’ll start focusing on the customization of that content.  Here are a few innovations I’d like to see from newspaper and magazine publishers in the near future:

1) Create alliances.  We don’t need more than a handful of national newspapers.  But what those national newspapers need is local outreach via the smaller, struggling, regional brands.  Better yet, make alliances with the tiny papers.  Hire them as the foot soldiers to create localized relevance for your customers.

2) Offer a la carte options.  If I could order the Friday Calendar section of the L.A. Times, op-ed and art reviews from The New York Times, the front page and Marketplace sections of the Wall Street Journal, and the weekend section of my local (and otherwise dreadful) San Diego Union-Tribune, I would.  Oh, and Calvin & Hobbes reprints.  This would be a hybrid paper that reflects my tastes and interests.

3) Deliver relevant adveritsing.  So, I’ve just defined my reading preferences for you, you probably know where I am sitting as I read your content, and I have a screen in front of me that (should) let me click through an advertisement.  That sounds like the holy grail of newspaper and magazine advertising.  You’re able to hypertarget audiences, create measurable impressions and clicks, and reiterate the process with greater and greater relevancy.  Doesn’t that make your ad space even more valuable?

Seriously, it’s not like someone isn’t thinking about these things.  But who is executing on them?  If it’s Amazon and Apple, then that’s the failure of the publishers who should be defining how the content is bundled.

Though I focused on newspapers in my examples, the same holds true for magazines.  I’m waiting for my FastCompany / Wired / The Week / Entertainment Weekly / Conde Nast Traveler mash-up.  Is anyone going to deliver?