I’m not reading books on my Kindle, at least not regularly. The two things I do most frequently with it are read The New York Times and catch up on RSS feeds via KindleFeeder. And while those two services hardly justify the $360 price tag (let alone the $13.99/month Times subscription), it’s my iPhone (once again) that’s bringing me closer to the end of my Kindle infatuation.
The only thing preventing me from abandoning the Kindle entirely (and passing it down to my wife) is one very simple feature that’s missing from The New York Times iPhone app: All I need it to do is pull down the entire paper so that I can read it offline, on a plane or anywhere else that I don’t have a live connection. The Kindle does that nicely, but the iPhone app forces you to click and access one article at a time.
The Times iPhone app would be complete if they’d just add a simple button to let me quickly pull down today’s entire edition. I’m not even looking to store multiple editions…today’s and today’s alone would be just fine! In fact, I’d gladly pay $5, $10, $20 or more for that capability (as a one-time fee, not a monthly fee). Why? It would enable me to dump the $13.99/month Kindle subscription.
Why isn’t there a Premium version of the app that offers this functionality? Surely they’re not afraid of cannibalizing sales of the Kindle edition. Did I recently read that more than 30 million iPhones have been sold? Even the most ambitious sales projections for the Kindle put it well below 1 million. Why not get a fraction of that 30 million base even if you completely lose the less than 1 million Kindle owners? And they could include plenty of advertising (like the USA Today app does so nicely, I might add).
