King Gillette lives! The spirit of the mogul, who transformed product marketing by giving away the razor and selling the blades, hovered over Amazon’s press conference unveiling the big-screen Kindle DX. There, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. pledged to subsidize the full price of the jumbo reading device for subscribers committing to long-term subscriptions. The retail price of the DX is $489.00.

We did a little research and learned that a daily subscription to the Times in our area of Manhattan will cost $5.30 per week at current rates. At that rate, we would have to enlist for one year and forty weeks.*

It’s not a bad deal for subscribers – you end up with a Kindle that you can use for many other things besides reading the newspaper. But is it a good one for the Times? Gawker, the snarky media website, doesn’t think so. In fact, Gawker doesn’t think so at all. The site’s Owen Thomas thinks Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “has managed to scare the press lords into shelling out their precious remaining cash into funding the distribution of his pricey e-reader…” and “…he’s cajoled the gullible likes of Sulzberger into handing him a pile of cash.”

“If he’s such a big believer in supporting journalism,” asks Thomas, “why didn’t Bezos announce he was personally giving away 160,000 Kindles to people who agreed to sign up for a newspaper subscription?”

Well, maybe Bezos never heard of King Gillette.

Read A Bigger Kindle Makes Jeff Bezos Richer and Newspapers Poorer.

RC
*(Of course, the Times would get a discount for buying Kindles in volume; on the other hand, subscribers who commit to long-term subscriptions also get discounts, so the two discounts wash each other out.)