Would you read a newspaper on a Kindle?

Let me say right now I love my Amazon Kindle. It’s easy to use in almost every way possible, from reading books on it to buying them to carrying it around. 

Now there is a new model, specifically aimed for newspapers and larger print items, called the Kindle DX. Some think this could, if nothing else, mildly help the print news industry, since people might not buy a hard copy of the paper, but wouldn’t mind reading it via their Kindle.

There are a some problems with this idea. First of all, the Kindle DX is expensive. It’s $489. That’s a big chunk of change to spend on an e-book. It also limits who its users are. That means only select people can buy it and use it to read newspapers. 

Secondly, Amazon might be wanting a huge cut of the profits from newspaper, according to Mark Wilson in this Gizmodo blog post.

According to James Moroney, President and CEO of the Dallas Morning News, Amazon demands a ludicrous cut of newspaper sales for distribution on the Kindle. From his talk with the Senate:

The Kindle, which I think is a marvelous device, the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News-and we’ve negotiated this up to the last two weeks-they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. On top of that they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers?

So yeah, I’m sure cash strapped newspapers don’t/can’t really agree to that. I mean, maybe some of bigger brands could, but this has to end up helping them make money, not lose even more.

And ultimately, people will only use the Kindle DX if they want to read a lot. A newspaper on a Kindle is still page after page of reading material. It’s not like the internet where you can easily click to something else in a heartbeat.

There are a lot of great aspects to the Kindle. It is true that people who said they could never read on a machine get a look at the Kindle and reconsider that idea. Maybe if Kindle went down in price and how much it charges paper, this thing will be successful.