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Read the rest of this articleSony’s News Corp deal reboots e-reader war with Kindle 2
Amazon’s Kindle 2 is enjoying a wave of hype this holiday season. The wildly popular device has an revived foe in Sony who signed a major deal with media powerhouse News Corporation.
News Corporation will offer Sony e-reader owners subscriptions for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) for $14.99, the New York Post exclusively for $9.99, and the Dow Jones’ MarketWatch financial news for $10.99.
WSJ subscribers with Sony’s latest e-reader called “Daily Edition” can opt for an evening update called WSJ Plus for an additional five dollars. The Daily Edition lets users to take notes, highlight text, and search for words on a built in dictionary. It also borrowed a major Kindle 2 feature of downloading content wirelessly.
Amazon offers a slew of newspaper subscriptions for the Kindle so why is this such a win for Sony? It’s all about the money. Amazon pockets about two-thirds of every subscription sold. If newspapers wanted to get a healthy profit from the deal they’d be forced to raise their subscription price to an ubsurd level. Sony’s not telling what their split is but News Corporation hinted that it’s far better than Amazon’s.
Declining revenues are a real factor in the newspaper world today. Amazon’s system seems more than greedy to newspapers looking to keep any sort of profit they can generate. The CEO of the Dallas Morning News, Jon Moroney, isn’t exactly a fan of Amazon’s Kindle swindle. In his testimony in front a a Senate subcommittee he complained about their revenue structure and republishing rights. He said, “I get 30 percent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device — not just ones made by Amazon? That, to me, is not a model.”
There’s no telling how many more content partners will join the WSJ and NYP on Sony’s e-readers. More competition from Sony or Barnes & Noble’s Nook can only help consumers. Let the battle begin.
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Comments
Interesting development. At the end of the day, market dictates things. So, we will see.
WSJ calls Amazon greedy, but on this great new deal they have with Sony, they are charging the customer the same amount as the customer would pay thru Amazon. Not very smart - they are not influencing the market to switch, but they are showing where the greed is actually is. WSJ is the most expensive paper Amazon sells, and it is certainly not worth it. Five dollars to get an extra headline at dinner time? I don't think so.
Well from all Ive been able to read online the race has at this point been won by Kindle 2.In second place comes Nook, the product billed as a Kindle killer, yet couldnt deliver the knockout punch nor its Christmas delivery time. Last but not least comes Sony. I think Amazon really, really, really wants this and from what Ive seen is delivering the goods to keep it that way.Even the recent tech reviews place the Kindle ahead and say the Nook key pad isnt any good and that the boot up time is a long 55 seconds. One thing you cant do in the market is over promise and under deliver. If Barnes and Noble were really serious they would have done all they could to silently quietly deliver a product that was superior ot the rest and they would have had them ready for Christmas,even if that took time or was ready at a later date. It just seems all to quick and unpolished,like they were trying to hard to rush.
Today I read that Barnes & Noble will be refunding $100 to anybody who didn't receive their Nook by Christmas. Sounds like their starting from behind with a lot of catching up to do with the Kindle 2.
My money is on the new Apple Tablet rumoured to be coming out in 2010 - they will pick apart the other products, see where they're lacking & wipe the board. My only question is how they will source the content. Amazon has a huge book market as does B&N - it will be interesting.
Lauren
http://reader-ebook.co.uk/sony_reader.php
PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait...wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... C: wait...
I'm interested in Barnes and Noble 1.5 version of it's Nook e-reader's firmware. The page refresh rate is at 50%, imagine the page literally flashing in milliseconds :) Have been thinking a lot between Kindle III and Nook and maybe it's going to be Nook because the Nook supports the overdrive media library from DRM and it's not so with Kindle. For Kindle, we buy DRM protected books from Amazon and for Nook we buy the DRM protected book from Barnes and Noble.
Adagio Condos