Am the only person who doubts that Amazon’s Kindle will take off as a newspaper reading device? I’m not convinced that people will want to carry around yet another electronic brick (beyond their phone and their iPod) to read the output of the world’s news media. And surely with more of us getting ever more comfortable reading our news in mobile phone formats, the days when we had to deliver news in a format akin to a newspaper are gone. Or am I missing something here?





Launching an entire new platform with a whole new standard is always the hardest of tasks. I’d be supprised if it does well without what geeks sometimes call a “killer app” such as spreadsheets did for early PCs and Pokemon did for the Gameboy series.
No one in the UK can really pass judgement on the Kindle until it’s out here. Everyone I know in the US who uses it loves newspapers on the thing, though they initially bought it for books. I rarely read newspapers in print these days - I read them on my Mac (two screens, one 23 inch, one 24). I don’t find the experience of reading a newspaper on a phone or any other small device, including my Nokia N81, particularly useful for anything but quick snapshots. If I could get a working Kindle over here today I’d buy one - and take out a newspaper subscription.
My bet is that all the UK newspapers will be fighting to be on Kindle when it comes out, and before long there’ll be a price war over subs prices (when will News International come out with the Times for free?)