Kindle Review – Kindle 2 Review, Books

Nov 25th Update: Internal NYTimes memo leaked, and it lists 10K Kindle subscriptions for the New York Times. I’ve added a guesstimate on subscription figures for the top 3 newspapers based on a super simplistic subscriptions to reviews measure. Draw your own conclusions.

There’s a Kindle Newspapers section of the Kindle Store. I thought it’d be interesting to list all the newspapers available on the Kindle in terms of popularity and see if there are any inferences to be made. Also for nearly every newspaper you can buy the current edition for $0.75 to $0.49 cents – a great way to see whether it’s worth it to subscribe.

1. The New York Times – A 3.5 stars rating, $13.99 monthly subscription price and the #1 spot. 67 Reviews on Amazon. Internal NYTimes memo indicates 10,000+ subscriptions. That means 1 out of 147 subscribers is actually writing a review. Interesting.
   

   New York Times for Kindle

2. The Wall Street Journal- A $.99 price, a 3.5 stars rating, and the #2 spot. Note: you do not get access to online WSJcontent with the Kindle subscription (makes no sense to me). Approximate 5,820 subscriptions.
   

   Wall Street Journal on Kindle

3. The Washington Post, Kindle Edition – A 4 stars rating, $9.99 price. Approximately 3,283 subscriptions.
4. Chicago Tribune – 4.5 stars rating, $9.99 price, only 4 review though. Can’t help thinking that the number of newspaper subscribers must be rather low for there to be just 4 reviews. And this is the 4th most popular newspaper. Just 4 reviews (also it’s fallen in ranking to #7).
5. Financial Times – Wow, a 5 star rating, and from the reviews it seems that this is the best paper available on the Kindle. 10 reviews.
6. Kindle edition of the Arizona Republic – I don’t understand how a paper announced just a few days ago is the 5th best selling paper. It does have a 4.5 stars rating (just off of two reviews though). I’m seriously beginning to think that Kindle Newspaper subscriptions have not taken off at all.
7. The International Herald Tribune – #1 International Newspaper, 4 star rating. 11 Reviews.
8. Los Angeles Times, kindle edition – Also 4 stars rating. 9 Reviews.
9. Investor’s Business Daily- 3 star rating. A lot of user issues such as charts and IBD 100 being missing. 15 Reviews.
10. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution – $5.99, 3.5 star rating. Do read the reviews here as they describe what you get with the Kindle Edition, and what you don’t, very well.
11. The Boston Globe – The Boston Globe gets appalling ratings – 2.5 stars doesn’t really describe it properly. You can buy individual issues for $.49 and I’d recommend doing that before buying a subscription. 10 Reviews.
12. The Philadelphia Inquirer – Great 4 stars rating, individual editions for $.49.
13. San Francisco Chronicle – $5.99 price. Another really poor set of ratings, with a common theme being late delivery. 12 Reviews.
14. The Seattle Times – The same late delivery problem – the newspapers and amazon needs to fix this quickly. A kindle edition newspaper is worthless if it doesn’t arrive at 4 or 5 in the morning. 11 Reviews.
15. Orlando Sentinel – This gets the lowest ratings so far – just 1.5 stars. Definitely not recommended.
16. Austin American-Statesman – A really well regarded newspaper – right behind Financial Times with a 4 star rating.
17. The Irish Times – A very highly regarded newspaper with good Irish and European coverage. 4.5 stars.
18. San Jose Mercury News – Ratings are literally all over the board with an almost equal number of 1s,2s, 3,s 4,s and 5 stars. Another local newspaper with a so-so rating.
19. The Times, Kindle Edition – 3.5 stars. Reading the reviews made me realize something – the substitution of newspapers by television news leads to less well informed people. In a way television is a dumbing down device. In that sense blogs are much better as a means to actually understand what is going on than TV.
20. Houston Chronicle – 2.5 stars. A common perception (and its shared with a lot of the people canceling their kindle edition newspaper subscriptions for other papers) is the lack of enough content.
21. The Orange County Register – 2.5 stars. Again complains about the level and amount of content.
22. The Denver Post – 3 stars. Apart from the top 3-4 most popular newspapers the amount of reviews is rather low – to the point where I’d always recommend trying out 2-3 single editions before buying a subscription.
23. The Independent – Great 4.5 star ratings. $14.99 price.
    

    the Independent on the Kindle

The Kindle also has Le Monde, Shanghai Daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and Les Echos – the latter two of which are rated 4 stars.

At this point my thoughts on Kindle Edition newspapers are -

1. A good first step – the papers themselves are way too unpolished except for New York Times, Financial Times, The Independent, and the two international newspapers rated 4 stars.
2. The late delivery issue is a deal killer. Amazon should fix this immediately.
3. Having the ability to get the current version is so cool. Read the paper for the day, try out a newspaper’s kindle edition, and other nifty uses.
4. It saves trees – hopefully soon, it’ll save a lot of trees. Speaking of which I don’t see this benefit of the kindle reader drummed up enough – PlasticLogicstart off their ad with how 4 billion trees are cut down every year for paper.
5. I’m leaving out the Baltimore Sun for now.