Eliminating the Kindle Content Middleman
Posted by Joe Wikert at 6:30 PM
Dear content owners/producers/publishers, please wake up! Why does everyone assume that you have to go through Amazon if you want to reach Kindle customers? That’s simply not true and NewspaperDirect is the latest service to prove the point.
One of my biggest frustrations with the Kindle is the limited content that’s available for it. 300,000, 400,000 or even a million titles sounds like a lot…till the title you want isn’t included in that total. That happens to me about half the time and it’s an even bigger problem with newspapers and magazines. The Kindle is more than 2 years old and for the longest time there were only a couple dozen newspapers available for it. Even today there’s still less than 100, and that number includes a lot of recent (and if customer comments are any indication, lame) additions to the service.
Enter NewspaperDirect. As their press release indicates, they’re offering Kindle versions of more than 1,400 newspapers and magazines from 93 countries. 1,400+. Wow. OK, the downside is that you have to manually load the content from your computer to your Kindle via USB cable. Bummer. Why don’t they just partner with KindleFeeder and enable wireless delivery like KindleFeeder’s RSS service? (And even if Amazon ultimately deems that a violation of its terms of service, how about creating a simple desktop app that automatically pushes the content to my Kindle if it’s connected via USB so that I don’t have to do it manually?)
Btw, one of my other complaints about Kindle newspapers is how they’re rendered on the device. All the Kindle newspapers and magazines I’ve subscribed to scored well on text but poorly on design. NewspaperDirect’s approach is far from perfect, but as you can see from the demo video below, at least they let you see the original formatted page. Come on, Amazon…why haven’t you already implemented this feature on your own subscriptions?!
My employer, O’Reilly Media, Inc., also sells Kindle content directly, btw. We sell it from our own website as well as on Amazon’s site. I’m amazed that almost no other publisher has gone with this same two-pronged approach. The e-content world needs more NewspaperDirect’s and O’Reilly’s to prevent Amazon from becoming the only outlet for Kindle content.
