Dallas Morning News publisher James Moroney loves the concept of Amazon.com Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle, a so-called electronic book or e-reader, but hates the current form of the retailer's revenue-sharing platform. At a Senate subcommittee hearing on the future of newspapers Wednesday, Moroney said: "They're not a platform that's going to save newspapers in the near term."
Moroney might be wrong about that, in fact: If the Kindle takes off, it might be the game-changing device that resuscitates the moribund newspaper industry. It might do for the newspaper industry what iTunes and the iPod did for the music industry: save it. But that seems light years away, since the Kindle still has less than 1% penetration in the U.S. market.
For Moroney, who oversees A.H. Belo Corp.'s (NYSE:AHC) largest daily newspaper, the Kindle comes down to dollars and sense for his paper to offer its content on the reader:
"The best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News ... and we've negotiated this up to the last two weeks -- they want 70% of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30%, they get 70%. On top of that they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers? I get 30% and they get the right to license my content to any portable device -- not just ones made by Amazon? That, to me, is not a model."
What do you think? Does the Kindle have the potential to breathe some life into the newspaper industry? - Gerald Magpily
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Dallas Morning News publisher James Moroney loves the concept of Amazon.com Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle, a so-called electronic book or e-reader, but hates the current form of the retailer's revenue-sharing platform. At a Senate subcommittee hearing on the future of newspapers Wednesday, Moroney said: "They're not a platform that's going to save newspapers in the near term."
amazon is greedy