News Corporation gets only $6-%6.50 of the %15 that Kindle subscribers pay for the Wall Street Journal each month, and News CEO Rupert Murdoch is POed. He’s looking forward to “half a dozen readers” in time, with deals possible for them—presumably with Murdoch’s people enjoying full access to subscriber information. Perhaps two dozen or so companies are already selling readers, and B&N and Sony will be going wireless very shortly.
“The Kindle is a fantastic invention for books,” various news accounts quote him, “but it’s not much of an experience for newspapers.”
So what do you think, gang? Certainly a color screen would help both readers and advertisers, and a fairer revenue split at Amazon would help the news business and many a book publisher.
I myself use my Netbook for newspaper reading, for free, though I would gladly pay for a mix of archival access and a really good Time-style reader if the costs wee reasonable and the subscription applied to many publications. Ahead is PixelQi technology, which many a netbook could start using to make them function as e-readers. In Murdoch’s place I would focus a bit less on devices and a bit more on content and presentation on a variety of machines.
Murdoch could have as easily said: The newspaper format isn’t much of an experience for e-book readers.”
But then he’d have to come to grips with the fact that the newspaper format is suited only for newspaper. To properly deliver news content to an e-book reader, the content should be formatted and organized to fit the device, not, as he suggests, the other way around. But committing to that would require time and money Murdoch doesn’t want to spend. I’ll bet he hopes someone will create a reader with a huge screen, so he doesn’t have to alter his content one iota.
If Murdoch was smart, he’d be converting his newspapers to a reader-friendly format that would make them a good experience, instead of griping that his size-elevens don’t fit in a size-nine shoe.