The San Francisco Chronicle is advertising home subscriptions at $7.75 per week for eight weeks, sweetened by a $25 gift card from Macy’s or Safeway. At that rate, the annual cost of a home subscription is an astronomic $403.
The Chronicle is barely hanging on. In my humble opinion its best hope is to embrace the digital format as quickly as possible, and the means is finally at hand. According to one reviewer, Amazon’s improved ebook reader, the Kindle 2, heralds
the moment when the direction of our momentum changed. After years of steadily moving away from physical print, it feels as though we’ve only just now crossed that purely mathematical and symbolic waypoint and have begun moving towards a destination where we purchase all of our books and publications in the form of ebooks.Amazon sells the Kindle for $359. Surely the business mavens at the Chronicle can work out a deal with Amazon to bundle a Kindle and a one-year subscription for, say, $399. Buyers would own hardware that would allow them to purchase over 240,000 titles, as well as the Chronicle. At that price I’d be a subscriber again. © 2009 Stephen Yuen
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