Amazon's Kindle DX encounters some newspaper pushback

Amazon.com's rollout yesterday of the new large-screen Kindle DX has sparked a lot of talk about Amazon being a possible savior for newspapers. But not everyone in the media industry is jumping on that bandwagon. Rupert Murdoch and the Dallas Morning News publisher aren't buying the Kindle buzz.

Murdoch, who has dropped hints of investing in rival electronic reader to Kindle, was downright cranky on the subject of the Kindle in a News Corp. earnings call yesterday.

“We will not be sending our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle," Murdoch said. “Too many content creators have been passive in the face of obvious violations of property rights….Our content is extremely valuable and the violators recognize that value.”

It was not immediately clear what steps Murdoch is prepared to take to remedy that. The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corp., sells subscriptions through the Kindle.

James Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News offered a more detailed critique of the Kindle model at a U.S. Senate hearing on the future of newspapers:

The Kindle, which I think is a marvelous device, the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News -- and we’ve negotiated this up to the last two weeks -- they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. 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 percent 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. Maybe what Plastic Logic comes up with or what Hearst comes up with, might provide a good model but today Kindles are less than 1 percent penetration in the U.S. market. They're not a platform that's going to save newspapers in the near term.

Moroney was referring to Silicon Valley startup Plastic Logic, which is developing its own large-screen e-reader and has lined up publishing partners including Financial Times and USA Today, and Hearst, publisher of the Seattlepi.com, the San Francisco Chronicle and Cosmopolitan, which is working with a venture called FirstPaper LLC to create a software platform for electronic newspapers.

[Via Wall Street Journal, paidContent.org]

[Flickr photo via indio]

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