Kindle Review – Kindle 3 Review, iPad Review

Perhaps the dozens of free books from the last post aren’t doing it for you. Well, Amazon comes in for the rescue with a free kindle book offer -

• Sushi for One by Camy Tang gently pokes fun at Asian culture and the life of Christian Singles. It’s rated 4.5 stars on 53 customer reviews.

By the way there are a grand total of 3 books priced over $9.99 in the Kindle Store Top 100 List at the moment. Makes me happy.

On Newspapers letting technology companies take them to customers

Tom’s Tech Blog has an excellent post which talks about how media companies should not “burn the boats” i.e. they should not end print newspapers and should stick with their core competency – content.

This snippet is particularly good -

Media companies are not going to reinvent the newspaper for the digital age because they are not technology companies.

Their product is not software or hardware it’s content.  They need to focus on improving their content and dealing with disruptions in the content business.

I agree that content companies, like any other, need to go where the customers are.  But as the iPad, Kindle, et al. have proven there will be technology companies out there to take them to the customers.  They don’t have to flush their print business down the drain to get there they just need to embrace new things when they come about. 

Print companies shouldn’t care who wins between print, the iPad, Amazon’s Kindle or some unknown disruptor in the future.  They should embrace them all and tailor their businesses to match the market as a clear leader becomes evident

The ideal course of action for newspapers is to scrutinize the motives of companies that are offering to help them – A platform that wants 30% makes sense but very few other companies or platforms or channels do.

Any company that promises newspapers a model that seems to good to be true and tells them they can continue business as usual is setting them up to be exploited. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that every company is looking out for its best interests - Companies that pretend they’re not and that they just want to help newspapers are the most dangerous.