Why Newspapers Should Start Giving Away Kindles
By Anna Johnson on May 6th, 2009Amazon plans to release a large sized Kindle ebook reader designed for displaying newspapers. Many regard this as good news for print newspaper publishers who may be able to leverage off the Kindle to convert online readers into paying subscribers.
But rather than waiting to see if people adopt the Kindle, I reckon the newspaper companies should consider pro-actively giving away Kindles for free…
While Amazon’s existing Kindle ebook reading device has a screen that’s about the size of a standard book page, The New York Times’s Brad Stone says Amazon is set to launch a Kindle designed for displaying newspapers, magazines and possibly textbooks.
Apparently, some news organizations, including The New York Times, will be involved in the introduction of the device.
The device certainly provides new options for an industry that is finding its print (paying) audience dwindling and its online (largely not paying) audience growing… whilst facing fierce competition from the blogs and online-only news sites.
Some view the new Kindle device as a way of converting newspapers’ online audiences into paying subscribers via the promise of made-for-Kindle content. This is based on the theory that newspapers undermined their own revenues by giving paying customers the option of getting the same content for free online.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Arguably, newspapers have provided free content to remain competitive with the free and online-only blogs and news websites that have emerged in recent times.
Traditional newspapers, however, have much higher costs to cover (e.g. printing costs) than, say, blogs, which means that unless they get rid of their printing overheads, they will always be under much higher revenue pressure than their online-only rivals. And of course, with advertising spends declining – particularly in print – newspapers’ profitability has suffered further.
If traditional newspapers decide to embrace the Kindle and any other newspaper reading devices (ideally lots of other devices – they probably don’t want to be beholden to one supplier!) they should not, however, embrace them in passive way.
Amazon has, to date, sold its six-inch black-and-white screen Kindle with subscriptions to more than 58 newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times ($13.99 per month) and The Wall Street Journal ($9.99 per month). But it’s Amazon that has set the subscription prices and controlled the relationship with the Kindle owner, not the newspapers.
Maybe the newspapers should consider using a different model where THEY assume control of both subscriptions and the relationship with subscribers.
The most obvious example is the model used by the mobile phone industry, where the hardware is essentially provided free in return for subscribers committing to a subscription for a certain number of months or years.
Of course, that assumes the Kindle and its brethren won’t be so expensive as to undermine this kind of model. On the other hand, many newspaper publishers are part of general publishing or media companies that could offer all kinds of other content for the Kindle other than newspapers.
So, for example, a given publisher could give away a Kindle as part of a 24 month contract that includes 24 months of a newspaper plus a certain number of ebooks.
Just an idea – I certainly haven’t done any number-crunching to see if the model would work for the average newspaper publishing company!
Nor have I actually seen whether the larger version Kindle will be all that appealing to readers.
In theory, however, a larger sized Kindle does present the newspaper industry with the opportunity to give readers the ‘newspaper experience’ on a digital platform with no printing costs.
But rather than hope that readers will embrace such a device, newspapers should consider making it irresistible (free) and, at the same time, ‘lock’ subscribers into both paying for, and consuming, their content over time.
