5

By Paul Biba

This is from the Sydney Morning Herald. You will remember, also, that News Corp. has said it is looking for other devices, too.

images.jpegThe race by newspaper publishers to explore platforms to deliver their content digitally is hotting up with news that Amazon Kindle is, in effect, out of the running in Australia.

Fairfax Media, publisher of the Herald, has rebuffed Amazon’s portable e-reader as the way to deliver digitised versions of newspapers to readers on the run. …

Fairfax’s director of marketing and newspaper sales, Robert Whitehead, said: "We’re continuously examining all options for extending the reach of our mastheads and we’ll be very interested to see what Apple comes up with.

"I’m not sure how Amazon will go with Kindle in Australia but we are unlikely to proceed with it. Their business model represents a very unattractive partnership deal for newspaper publishers." …


Richard Freudenstein, the chief executive of News’s Australian digital operations, News Digital Media, and the leader of a team in Sydney examining the move to paid digital content, said of Kindle: "News is platform agnostic – wherever consumers want to engage with us, we want to be. That includes e-readers and mobiles, and any future devices.

"Clearly, we have to have favourable terms in any deal we do. Which means having a direct connection with our subscribers and an appropriate revenue split. These are deal breakers for us."

 
5