Murdoch wants more money for Kindle-WSJ

Well, Robert Murdoch wants more money for all his other news deliveries too, in general.
See the earlier article about Murdoch "rebuffing" the Amazon Kindle business model.  He said that Amazon wouldn't be getting his content, while others pointed out Amazon already had the Wall Street Journal content and books by Harper Collins.  If he didn't already know that (seems so), he may have gotten even more perturbed that this was a done deal in his case.  The sudden 50% increase in the Kindle pricing of the Wall Street Journal was made about 2.5 weeks later.  No other increases have been seen on the other Kindle newspaper offerings.

The Amazon Kindle Community forum response is something less than delight (with numerous reports of WSJ cancellations) over the WSJ price increase from $9.99/mo. to $14.99/mo. and one can wonder if Murdoch won't see a net loss on this.  He had bristled over the idea of the 30% or so said to be alloted to publishers while probably assuming that Amazon got the balance.
  As mentioned here in an entry posted on May 10

"According to a reliable source in the know, The New Yorker's Kindle split is divided 33% New Yorker, 33% Amazon, and 33% wireless carrier."

At Washington Post's paidcontent.org, Staci D. Kramer wrote, on May 6:

' Murdoch put it simply ...“We will not be ceding our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle.  We will control the prices for our content and we will control our relationships with our customers.

' Any device maker or website which doesn't meet these basic criteria on content will not be doing business long-term with News Corporation.”

' Take this one of two ways: News Corp. will keep pushing other possibilities until Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) backs down on its controls (good luck with that) or News Corp. will opt for a device it either owns or at least controls and can use in a proprietary way. '

But then, WP's paidcontent.org added:

' (The perils of writing live about Murdoch.  In further comments, he brushed off the idea of News Corp. investing in a device, saying the company may invest in something experimentally: “We're not appliance makers.”  A spokesperson later explained that the decision about how News Corp will handle this literally hasn't been made yet.
' But in nearly the same breath, Murdoch bragged about 360,000 downloads of the free WSJ iPhone app over the past three weeks; that would be from the App Store operated by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) with the same lack of control for News Corp.  It's as contradictory as offering the content-rich app for free and complaining about how the online business model has to change.

'   Then again, he promised that as soon as the technology is there, readers will be asked to pay “handsomely” for access. (It will be fascinating to see how many “free” readers pony up—and how much the WSJ charges.) '

  On May 11, Kramer wrote

' And, in today's reality, DJ [Dow Jones] is looking at any and every way to get more people to pay directly for access to the WSJ in a variety of forms, while encouraging current subscribers to pay even more by expanding offerings... '

For the WSJ-disenchanted who still want a good paper for financial news and analysis, try the Financial Times subscription, at $9.99, as they get an average of almost 5 stars from a good number of Amazon customer reviews.  The WSJ never did better than 3 stars in customer satisfaction.  The 14-day free trial applies to this also.

Murdoch Rebuffs Amazon's terms for Kindle model

Financial Times's Kenneth Li and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson report Murdoch's strong resistance to Amazon's Kindle business model.

Proposing a new revenue stream for newspapers, Amazon apparently wants as much as 70% of any subscription revenues earned through the Kindle, per a statement by James Moroney, the chief executive of the Dallas Morning News during a Senate hearing on the future of Journalism.  Moroney mentioned that Amazon also wants "the right to republish the newspaper’s stories on other portable devices," per the FT writers.

 It's been established (but not mentioned in the FT article) that Amazon offers Kindle book publishers 35% of the List price but can discount their own selling price to $10~ while still paying the publisher 35% based on the publisher's price.
 So, if a publisher sets the List price at at $25 and Amazon sells a book at $10, Amazon pays the publisher almost $9 from the sale and keeps about $1.

Murdoch is quoted as saying that though News Corp could make money from customers' interest in using a mobile device to read the news, "We will not be giving our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle."

At the same time he said one of his general newspapers will start charging for its content online, within the year.

The New York Times and the Washington Post are backing the Kindle model (though the pricing could vary somewhat for each company).  And the FT adds that "Textbook publishers Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, Cengage Learning and Wiley are also to offer some books on Kindle."

UPDATE 5/8/09: - Financial Times is puzzled by this, since Wall St. Journal and Harper Collins are part of his operation and are already on Kindle.  Is he threatening to withdraw? (Not ultra likely)