January 25, 2009

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One Click Away from Abandoning My Kindle I'm not reading books on it, at least not regularly. The two things I do most frequently with my Kindle are read The New York Times and catch up on RSS feeds via KindleFeeder. And while those two services hardly justify the $360 price tag (let alone the $13.99/month Times subscription), it's my iPhone (once again) that's bringing me closer to the end of my Kindle infatuation. The only thing preventing me from abandoning the Kindle entirely (and passing it down to my wife) is one very simple feature that's missing from The New York Times iPhone app: All I need it to do is pull down the entire paper so that I can read it offline, on a plane or anywhere else that I don't have a live connection. The Kindle does that nicely but the iPhone app forces you to click and access one article at a time. The Times iPhone app would be complete if they'd just add a simple button to let me quickly pull down today's entire edition. I'm not even looking to store multiple editions...today's and today's alone would be just fine! In fact, I'd gladly pay $5, $10, $20 or more for that capability (as a one-time fee, not a monthly fee). Why? It would enable me to dump the $13.99/month Kindle subscription. Why isn't there a Premium version of the app that offers this functionality? Surely they're not afraid of cannibalizing sales of the Kindle edition. Did I recently read that more than 30 million iPhones have been sold? Even the most ambitious sales projections for the Kindle put it well below 1 million. Why not get a fraction of that 30 million base even if you completely lose the less than 1 million Kindle owners? And they could include plenty of advertising (like the USA Today app does so nicely, I might add).
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Jon Fine on Web Video I remembered just how much I missed BusinessWeek when the first issue of my new subscription arrived last weekend. I let my print subscription lapse several months ago, but after giving up on the hope that Amazon would offer it for the Kindle, I recently gave in to an offer (one year for $30) and I read this first issue cover to cover on a recent flight. I'm mentioning it here because I also missed Jon Fine's excellent Media Centric columns. The one in the current issue is well worth reading as it talks about making money on web video. He raises one particularly important point: If video on the Internet merely meant "television," as CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith puts it, then that network's top show, "CSI," would be its most popular online. (It isn't. Reality series "Survivor" is.) and asks an equally intriguing question: "What is the fantasy football for entertainment?" The two are deeply intertwined. It's easy for us book publishers to think that our greatest hits in print should become our greatest hits online, but that logic misses the point. You've got to rank each title's ability to drive an community online. Some books have loads of potential while others have almost none. Fantasy football is the perfect analogy. Twenty years ago, who would have thought there would be an entirely new industry like this built around the NFL? Heck, my own son is now a fantasy addict and he never cared about the NFL till a couple of years ago! The question we have to ask ourselves is, "What sorts of titles, authors and other publishing properties most lend themselves to a fantasy football-like enthusiasm?" The answer may have no correlation to your best-selling print products.

Joe Wikert

I'm Chief Operating Officer at OSV (www.osv.com)

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