Amazon enters the tablet battle: It’s all about the shopping

What the aggressively-priced Kindle Fire will mean for news publishers.


In February 2010, before the first iPad shipments, I went out on a limb here (in a post about iPad strategies for publishers) with this prediction:

I believe the biggest transformation that will be wrought by the iPad will be to bring an enormous increase in online shopping.

How have things turned out so far? What might the results have to do withAmazon’s new tablet? And, most importantly for the Nieman Lab audience, what new disruptive challenges does all this throw at the elusive and precarious business models for news?

First, it turns out that tablets indeed push much more online shopping, as Dana Mattioli reported in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. In a story entitled “Tablets: Ultimate Buying Machines” — quoting info from Forrester Research, Macy’s, and others — Mattioli reported these findings:

• Tablet shoppers make purchases in 4 to 5 percent of shopping site visits, compared to about 3 percent for consumers visiting shopping sites on PCs. That’s about 50 percent more purchases.
• Tablet shoppers, according to many retailers, spend 10 to 20 percent more per order than PC shoppers or smartphone shoppers. Combined with the first finding, that means 65 to 80 percent more spending.
• Tablet shoppers who shop via apps tend to spend much more than tablet shoppers on websites. (At TheFind, they’re spending three times as much through the app compared to the website.)

Click here to read the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Kindle—any promise as a news delivery tool?

Can Kindle become the iPod of news?

It's got a lot going for it, but probably not, in its present incarnation. The Kindle was introduced a little less than a year ago by Amazon. The company won't say how many units it has sold, or how many e-books have been purchased by Kindle owners, or how many newspaper subscriptions. There's plenty of content available—currently 160,000 book titles, newspapers, magazines, and blogs, according to Amazon. But what concerns us here is news: right now, there are exactly 25 newspapers available, which is not a lot. They include the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, London Times, Le Monde, and Shanghai Daily, at prices ranging from $5.99 to $14.99 a month.

So, for well under the newsstand or home delivery price, you can be reading your favorite paper on an e-book reader, but the gadget will cost you $359. This is progress? Oh, you can also get your choice of a couple of dozen blogs like Huffington Post, Slashdot, Boing Boing, or The Onion for $1.99 a month, or one of 17 magazines for a $1.25 to $3.49.

Now, the trouble is, (a) no color, (b) most of this content is available for free online, wherever you can connect to the internet on your desk- or laptop. My normal morning surfing would add up to $100 or more a month, and a lot of other things I look at online are simply not reachable via Kindle.

But hold on, there's a solution. Via Feedbooks, you can create your own personalized newspaper from multiple RSS feeds. (The trouble with this is, of course, that while you can get the news mix you want, you're doing the kind of personal aggregation possible also at sites like DailyMe, for which the media creating the content get little or no revenue. But still, from a publisher's point of view, perhaps eyeballs are better than no eyeballs.)

The Kindle may well be the best-selling e-book reader around (allegedly 280,000 units sold), although there's no way to know for sure. What's next for Kindle? Several sources are rumoring an imminent 2.0 version: one with a larger, better screen, thinner body, and more streamlining in general. And Amazon also seems to be eyeing a truly logical market: e-textbooks.

A bigger user base is probably a prerequisite for more news dissemination via the Kindle, or any other e-book reader. So improvements in the Kindle's functionality features are steps in the right direction. But along with major and minor tweaks, it will take some major cost reductions to turn it into a more widely used tool for reading news.