Kindle with your breakfast? « Librarians-Crossing

Print devotees will likely find Amazon’s newfangled e-reader an imperfect substitute for the old-fashioned newspaper—even if it saves trees

My typical day begins with a stack of four newspapers waiting outside the door to my apartment. Picking them up is what I do between shutting off the alarm and turning on the coffee pot. Although I may be increasingly unusual in a world that no longer seems to love newspapers, I take the usual batch of what you’d expect for a New Yorker in my line of work: The New York Times (NYT) seven days a week and the New York Post (NWS) on weekdays. I also get The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times (TRI) six days a week. All told, it works out to about 100 newspapers a month, and after vacations and other delivery pauses, about 1,100 a year. And while I take care to recycle them all, I can’t help but feel guilty about all that paper and all those trees.

This led me to try out Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-reader device. While for the most part the device is marketed as an electronic replacement for printed books, I turned to it for a month in an effort to soothe my environmental guilt while still indulging my three-decade-old newspaper habit.

The device, which costs $359, is for the most part a pleasure to read because it’s as readily portable as a newspaper itself. (My colleague Steve Wildstrom reviewed it last year (BusinessWeek.com, 12/3/07). It contains much for a newspaper junkie to appreciate. For starters, the very appearance of the black text on its light-gray screen evokes the appearance of newsprint ink.

A Good Value

Through Amazon’s Kindle store, reachable directly on the device or on the Web, there are 19 daily newspapers available—not enough, but a fair start—including two of my daily four, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Others include The Washington Post (WPO), the International Herald Tribune, The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and a few international papers, including France’s Le Monde, the Irish Times, and Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Newspapers are delivered to the device every day via a wireless connection to Sprint Nextel’s (S) data network, and presuming the Kindle device is charged and its wireless connection left on overnight, they’re available each morning. The cost for the Times on the Kindle is $13.99 a month, vs. $10.20 a week for the paper edition. The Journal costs $10 a month on the Kindle compared with about $27 a month for the paper version.

It’s a good value if you consider the most important product a newspaper delivers is its words, and in some ways it’s more convenient if you find paper gets in the way. I found it somewhat easier to read the Kindle over breakfast at my favorite diner, mainly because it takes up less space and requires less effort—no folding to make it fit the table, for instance—than paper.

Visual Concerns

What’s missing are some of the visual conventions of the printed page. Headlines on the articles of Kindle-ized newspapers are all the same size, and so they lack the emotional punch conveyed by big, screaming 80-point type. When reading a newspaper on the Kindle, the first thing you see is a list of front-page stories from that day’s printed edition, but there’s no visual representation of the front page itself. Pictures are also a problem. More often than not, no pictures whatsoever accompany stories, and when they do, they don’t register well on the Kindle screen.

Visual concerns aside, I found that more often than not I was willing to read stories on the Kindle for reasons I might have otherwise overlooked. I found I methodically paged through each newspaper section and read more stories as a result. Another added benefit: The Kindle is easier to read outdoors on a breezy Saturday for the simple fact that it doesn’t rustle with a strong wind.

But the device does require a power cord and a regular charge. A few times during my test period, I was annoyed to discover I had neglected to charge the Kindle, and so I had to charge it before downloading the day’s editions. The charge usually didn’t take more than a half hour, and downloads were snappy. But in three centuries no one has ever had to plug in a newspaper.

Making Sense

During my trial I put the subscriptions to my four newspapers on hold, and so had only the Kindle to feed my habit. I have to say—pictures aside—for the most part I didn’t miss the paper edition. Perhaps this had mainly to do with some self-satisfaction that I was consuming less paper while getting my daily dose of news. To that end, I enjoyed it and have no trouble recommending a newspaper subscription to any Kindle owner. Additionally, if you’re uncertain about buying a Kindle, its availability of newspapers goes in the “plus” column.

It also makes financial sense. A combined year’s subscription to the Times and the Journal costs about $880. The combined purchase price of the Kindle, plus a year’s worth of subscriptions to the Kindle editions—granted, not quite an equal product—amounts to a total of only $647, a savings of $233 in the first year. Assuming all the prices stay the same, the savings climbs to more than $500 in the second year. Plus, there’s no delivery person to tip at the end of the year.

Amazon may be on to something here, and should the Kindle prove popular—the company doesn’t disclose sales—it should consider embracing the product aggressively. But I’d encourage Amazon to get together with its partner newspapers to find a way to present stories in a more newspaper-like manner than they do today. Improvements to the digital-ink display technology that the device uses will help. But so will finding a way to stay true to the traditions of the newspapers, many of which are under attack from forces both technological and economic. There are, sad to say, not enough newspaper-loving people like me.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.

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