The Kindle DX
No shortage of coverage of today’s announcement, telegraphed in the NYT on Monday, of a new, larger Kindle from Amazon:
- Matt Mansfield of Medill points out this good comparison with the Plastic Logic eReader at PaidContent.org, for instance.
- Commenters at several sites, including the NYT, point out that while this new Kindle costs as much as some laptops, it includes free wireless access, use of which is not limited to downloading books, magazines, and newspapers.
- And I even got into the act (video link), appearing on CBS2Chicago. My points are similar to those I made in an April 11 post here on owenyoungman.com about the Kindle 2:
There is a lot to like already about the Kindle as a platform for magazine and newspaper content, but I haven’t read much about the reason I think it works, and is worth paying for: unlike the Web sites of most newspapers, the Kindle preserves a key newspaper-reading experience: Serendipity. [Read the whole post]
I talked more about that today, as well as a point I also made this past Monday when I spoke in New York on a Medill-sponsored panel, “Managing in a Time of Crisis and Opportunities”: Implementations like the Kindle help to demonstrate that even if people aren’t much paying for news content today, they ultimately are likely to pay for content that is tailored to their needs, their use cases, and experiences they value. Publishers need to pay attention to that, not to eking out micropayments on yesterday’s platforms.
I may yet double back on Monday’s presentation, but for now suffice it to say that nothing I saw about the new Kindle today made me any less cheerful, except perhaps the price. And I’m cheerfully hoping it comes down soon, for others’ sake if not my own.