All entries tagged: eInk
Morning Links: December 4, 2008
— Andy Dickinson argues the Kindle-like device the news companies are hoping for misunderstands how people interact with a newspaper.
[T]he compelling feature of newspaper as a medium is that we are prepared to throw it away. Bin it, shred it, leave it on the bus. Whatever we do we are happy to spend money on it and then leave it…Allowing people to download the daily newspaper to an e-reader or flexible screen may feel like it gives the industry back some of the monopoly on the distribution platform it thinks it needs to survive. But in reality it flies in the face of the way we consume and discard our daily news fix.
— Adrian Holovaty wants to call his project “microlocal,” not “hyperlocal.”
— Ken Doctor argues the bailouts of the financial and auto industries will be good for newspaper classifieds. The issue is how much of the lost ad spin in those sectors will, when they return, come back to newspapers. Ken has some ideas on that front worth checking out.
— The Christian Science Monitor’s John Yemma leaves comments.
NYT’s 10K subscribers on Kindle: The start of something bigger?
One other important note from that internal New York Times memo my colleague Zach got a hold of: The company reports it has “more than 10,000 paid subscribers” to an electronic edition of the newspaper on Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader. To my knowledge (please correct me if I’m wrong), that’s the first time a major newspaper has released numbers on how it’s doing on Kindle — a platform lots of newspaper execs are eager to see turn into a saving grace for their industry.
Given that the electronic Times costs $13.99 a month, that would mean the NYT Kindle edition is generating in the neighborhood of $1.68 million a year. How much of that goes to NYT Co. and how much stays with Amazon is unclear.
Amazon has been tightlipped about how many of the devices it has sold, which has led some (including me) to think it might be a smaller success than some had hoped. (TechCrunch claimed in August it knew the number: 240,000.) If we do some highly crude back-of-the-envelope calculation, that would mean The New York Times has a penetration rate on the Kindle of around four percent.
Not bad, considering the Kindle is the first incarnation of that dreamy aspirational future of newspapers: no physical distribution costs, plus a steady revenue stream that comes from news consumers, not advertisers.
