“I can assure you, we will not be sending our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle,” he said. “We will control the prices for our content, and we will control the relationship with our customers.” This means that it’s unlikely that News Corp will be partnering with Amazon’s Kindle, much like the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post are doing. Users are offered a discount on the $489 Kindle DX if they take out subscriptions for the newspapers.
Does that mean that News Corp will be designing their own electronic reading device? Or will they simply partner with an Amazon competitor, like Sony, iRex, or Fujitsu? Well according to Murdoch, they will likely be considering a subscription-based service on an existing portable ebook reader. The possibility still exists for them to create or rebrand their own wireless reading device, but it’s unlikely.
Finally, Murdoch touched on a possible coordinated effort with the media industry to convince Google to pay a license fee for linking to professional news content. Ha, good luck with that!
Either way, it’ll be interesting to see what News Corp unveils in the following months…
