Could Amazon's Kindle Help Save The New York Times?

There has been a lot of debate about how and if the internet is killing the New York Times and the newspaper industry in general. Google has been close to the center of the blame--by absorbing millions of advertising dollars while distributing content from the news industry in general. Others may blame the emergence of blogs and blog technology on the internet, which may have pushed some readership away from the larger publishers.

Silicon Valley has been looking for solutions to help prop up the newspaper industry--as they are the spearheads of investigative journalism--a form of checks and balances for politics and business corruption.

The Kindle, Amazon's electronic reader (a software and hardware platform for reading electronic books), may be one of many solutions that could help the industry. Amazon has been partnering with the New York Times to lower the cost of Kindle when purchased alongside a long-term NY Times subscription.

Obsessable.com went so far as to say that the Times should give away a free Kindle to all its subscribed readers, since it would reduce production and delivery costs overall--and outweigh the cost of the Kindle. The idea proposed by obsessable.com would only work for subscribers who have memberships longer than two years, and it would have to replace their paper delivery.