TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Newspaper reading on the Kindle: Satisfying and convenient for PublicAffairs Books founder

By Peter Osnos, Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation

Moderator’s note: See Amazon customers’ opinions on the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal editions of the Kindle. - D.R.

The other morning, when the New York Times had not arrived by 8:00 a.m. (which, I should add, is very rare), I decided to try reading the paper on my Kindle, the Amazon digital reader. Settled into an armchair, I bought the paper for $0.75 and it downloaded, through wireless, in seconds. It could not have been easier.

I purchased the Kindle when it was released last fall and have now read David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, mainly during a round trip flight to China, and found that experience satisfying and convenient. Checking the Kindle bestsellers from time to time, I noticed that many of the country’s leading newspapers dominate the list. The New York Times has been #1 and the Wall Street Journal #2, except for last week, when a new Oprah book selection blew them both away. The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle are steady sellers also, and among magazines, Time, Fortune, the Atlantic, the Nation, and, of all things, Readers Digest show up too.

$13.95 a month on the Kindle vs. $10.20 a week in P, and free on the Web

A monthly subscription to the New York Times costs $13.95 on the Kindle, compared to $10.20 a week for home delivery of the paper and it is, of course, gratis on the Web. I routinely check headlines, and occasionally scroll through a breaking story, on my Treo. (Since I pay monthly fees for my home broadband and the phone, the contents of what I read may be free, but maintaining the device does come at a price.) Once you set up a Kindle account with Amazon, you can, with a single click, buy the paper for $0.75, versus the $1.25 price for the printed daily, along with books, magazines, on-line magazines such as Slate and Salon, and, significantly, downloadable audio books, with what seems like frictionless ease. If you subscribe monthly, the paper shows up on your home page as soon as it is printed and available.

What you get when you buy a newspaper is a list of all the stories, no frills, no pictures, no display features, and no advertising; just the words. I scrolled through the front page, then read, section-by-section for as long as I had time. So how was it? It felt a little awkward at first, as most new forays in digital experiences tend to do. But if I was on a crowded subway, a bus, or a flight, I would quickly adjust. Once you download the newspaper, it stays with you, even if you are out of Wi-Fi range, which is a plus. I especially liked the ability to highlight stories I wanted to read and could then go back to them after I was done skimming and scrolling.

Later, when the newspaper did arrive at the front door, I read it again and, truth be told, it was a much richer object than the digital version. But having the contents in a machine at my beck and call was an acceptable substitute and doubtless will get better as the technology evolves.

Nine U.S. newspapers for sale for K-reading

In all there are nine U.S. newspapers for sale and several foreign ones and, including magazines and wires services, about twenty of the top one hundred items for sale on Kindle are news and commentary based. The rest are books, for which you can choose among 80,000 titles, and I suspect this remains as the big payoff for Amazon, since the process of digitizing all those files to their proprietary system is still under way. The Sony Reader is the Kindle competitor. It is embarked on a determined push to match Amazon’s selection of material, and will doubtless get there in time, which should mean that the consumer will benefit from options.

Amazon has not released any specific numbers on sales of the device or the content. But from the day it was launched, Kindle has been backordered, and CEO Jeff Bezos said last week that it was doing much better than anticipated. Amazon is also spending $300 million for Audible, the leading supplier of digital downloads of books and podcasts, which has an exclusive arrangement for supplying iTunes, the Apple store. So the Kindle could become as much an audio device as a reading machine. After at least a decade of anticipation, hype, and frustration about e-books and portable reading machines, Kindle and Sony Reader definitely feel like they are gaining traction.

One sign that newspapers still have a future

As for the supposedly vexed future of newspapers, the very strong presence of them on Kindle’s list of what people are buying is another indicator of their potential in digital media. As long as the great providers in the news business go on doing what they do with unique skill—gathering news, features, and commentary—and figure out how to reach readers in all the new-fangled ways we get information, the future is, well, ahead of us. I was glad to be able to read the New York Times on my Kindle and pay for it, as I am happy to see it on my smart phone and laptop. But most of all, I like hearing it hit the ground outside the door.

The amalgam of Amazon, Kindle, Audible, and wireless delivery of reasonably priced, world-class information and literary enlightenment has to be to be a good thing for readers, if only the publishers keep on providing the goods.

Peter Osnos is founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books and executive director of the Caravan Project. Reproduced with permission from a regular Osnos column called The Platform.

Related: Amazon customer comments on New York Times subscriptions for the Kindle.