Kindle's real effect on publishing ...

This is taken from an editorial at the Register entitled 'Amazon wants your kidney for the Kindle':

You know newspapers are in trouble when they tout Amazon's Kindle reader as a potential saviour for the business. Many did just that last week, and while they concluded the answer was "No", what were they thinking when they asked the question?

Today's e-readers like the Kindle bring all the expense of a computer, and all the inconvenience that comes from having to lug a computer around with you, to a medium that's cheap, portable and disposable. The Kindle's dull monochrome screen drains all the life and texture from the news - and all the branding and differentiation[*] a newspaper has built up over the decades. Put a newspaper onto a Kindle and you bury it alive in a grey digital coffin.

I'm writing as someone who has spent the last decade reading newspapers on mobile gadgets - from offline readers to the iPhone. Believe it or not, the Kindle is as nice as it gets. It's just that paper - where you can still get it - is a superior technology for browsing and reading to anything digital.

Newspapers are nervous, though, and can't think clearly. They pay enormous sums to digital shroud-wavers like Jeff Jarvis, to hear that they must commit suicide for the greater good of Web 2.0. Because Kindle makes subscribing easy - and subscriptions are a newspaper's Holy Grail - it's got the publishers twitching with excitement. Thanks to the Senate hearings last week, we now all know a little more about what Amazon is asking newspapers to do to kill save them.

The piece goes into some detail regarding Kindles business model, and its unsuitability as a replacement for newspaper distribution.