For the first time in many years i’m again paying for a newspaper subscription. Nobody is more surprised than me.
With the rise of blogs and online news sites, and various news readers for easily accessing that content, i turned off my subscription to the mercury news a number of years ago. With the rise of alternative news sources, i don’t even find stories from the mercury news to rise to the top of my rss reader much anymore. They are buried below Original Signal, TechCrunch, O’Reilly Radar, Scobleizer, etc.
The paper version of the San Jose Mercury News was just too much of a pain. I’d feel guilty when five of them would stack up unread. Then we’d go on vacation and i’d forget to put on a subscription hold and my driveway would look like an ad for burglers when we returned. The times when i had the most time to read the paper was when i was on the road, and so i wouldn’t have access to it anyway. And while my colleagues will often refer to stories in Techcrunch and the NY Times, i haven’t heard a reference to a breaking story from the mercury news for a long time.
So what changed. I got a Kindle. I got it for books, but i’m finding it equally interesting for reading news and blog content…even though it is clear the device was not designed for these media types – no next story button!
Suddenly i’m paying for subscriptions to a number of content sources. I’m paying for the Mercury News, the NY Times, Time magazine. I’m even paying a monthly fee for access to Scobleizer and OReilly Radar! All of this content is available for free on my laptop….but the convenience of having it right at hand, instantly with wireless upload, has made it quite addictive. There is something in here…
I’d love to know whether the bloggers are getting some of the economics of my $1-2 per month subscriptions to their services or if Amazon is keeping all of it to offset the wireless costs.
The kindle can be further optimized. I recently read Tim O’Reilly’s post on the top 10 books from 2007. There were two of them that i wanted to read. Unfortunately, the links on my kindle were to the website-not to a single click buy page on the Kindle Store…so i still haven’t purchased them. Seems i can go to O’Reilly’s site and buy the book in PDF, and then email it to my kindle. Would be so much better if it was single click right from the Kindle store.
Would be great if someone created kindle.oreilly.com and i could put in my amazon credentials and it would set my kindle account to receive content from oreilly’s email, charge me via my existing amazon account, and then send me the daily radar with links that allow me to single click to get other related content sent to my kindle. single click signup to conferences would be interesting too. perhaps when there are more than a few of us kindle readers, someone will do that.
When do the kindle economics get to a point where Oreilly gives away a connected reader along with a monthly subscription to their content..because the value of having a user’s daily attention, and $20 per month subscription, is worth more than the couple hundred bucks of the cost of a reader…
