The Kindle to Save the Elderly .. and the Newspaper Industry

Anec­do­tal evi­dence seems to sug­gest that Ama­zon’s Kin­dle is appeal­ing, per­haps coun­ter­in­tu­itive­ly, to an old­er gen­er­a­tion. Accord­ing to Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion, “over half of report­ing Kin­dle own­ers are 50 or old­er, and 70 per­cent are 40 or old­er.” Why is the Kin­dle skew­ing toward a more senior demo­graph­ic? At least one rea­son is that it allows old­er folks to nav­i­gate around var­i­ous phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties, rang­ing from visu­al prob­lems to arthri­tis to carpal tun­nel syn­drome. If you have bad eye sight, then you can expand the Kindle’s fonts and you’re good to go.

In the mean­time, on a dif­fer­ent front, The New York Times is report­ing today that news­pa­per pub­lish­ers may be hop­ing that the Kin­dle can save their indus­try. Instead of dis­trib­ut­ing free con­tent via the web, papers may be look­ing to cir­cu­late con­tent through big screen e‑book read­ers on a sub­scrip­tion basis. Charge a fee + elim­i­nate print­ing costs =  back in busi­ness. That’s the think­ing.

via Andrew Sul­li­van’s Dai­ly Dish