Reading the Kindle with Your Morning Coffee

Print devotees will likely find Amazon's newfangled e-reader an imperfect substitute for the old-fashioned newspaper—even if it saves trees

by Arik Hesseldahl

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Great for reading, portable, and easy to use

The Bad: Easy to forget to charge the battery; the rare pictures don't look very good

The Bottom Line: A fair, if imperfect, replacement for the daily newspaper

Reader Reviews

My typical day begins with a stack of four newspapers waiting outside the door to my apartment. Picking them up is what I do between shutting off the alarm and turning on the coffee pot. Although I may be increasingly unusual in a world that no longer seems to love newspapers, I take the usual batch of what you'd expect for a New Yorker in my line of work: The New York Times (NYT) seven days a week and the New York Post (NWS) on weekdays. I also get The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times (TRI) six days a week. All told, it works out to about 100 newspapers a month, and after vacations and other delivery pauses, about 1,100 a year. And while I take care to recycle them all, I can't help but feel guilty about all that paper and all those trees.

This led me to try out Amazon.com's (AMZN) Kindle e-reader device. While for the most part the device is marketed as an electronic replacement for printed books, I turned to it for a month in an effort to soothe my environmental guilt while still indulging my three-decade-old newspaper habit.

The device, which costs $359, is for the most part a pleasure to read because it's as readily portable as a newspaper itself. (My colleague Steve Wildstrom reviewed it last year (BusinessWeek.com, 12/3/07). It contains much for a newspaper junkie to appreciate. For starters, the very appearance of the black text on its light-gray screen evokes the appearance of newsprint ink.

A Good Value

Through Amazon's Kindle store, reachable directly on the device or on the Web, there are 19 daily newspapers available—not enough, but a fair start—including two of my daily four, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Others include The Washington Post (WPO), the International Herald Tribune, The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and a few international papers, including France's Le Monde, the Irish Times, and Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Newspapers are delivered to the device every day via a wireless connection to Sprint Nextel's (S) data network, and presuming the Kindle device is charged and its wireless connection left on overnight, they're available each morning. The cost for the Times on the Kindle is $13.99 a month, vs. $10.20 a week for the paper edition. The Journal costs $10 a month on the Kindle compared with about $27 a month for the paper version.

It's a good value if you consider the most important product a newspaper delivers is its words, and in some ways it's more convenient if you find paper gets in the way. I found it somewhat easier to read the Kindle over breakfast at my favorite diner, mainly because it takes up less space and requires less effort—no folding to make it fit the table, for instance—than paper.