Kindle, Who? News Corp. Cuts New Digital Edition Deal with Sony

When a digital newsstand consortium comprised of Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp. was announced just over a week ago, John Squires, the group's interim managing director told Portfolio.com, "These publishers need to have multiple routes to market… These are big companies, and they should be trying a lot of things."

Yesterday, News Corp. announced yet another route to market: A partnership with Sony to offer digital subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the company's MarketWatch service, according to a report by the Journal's Russell Adams.

The Journal is already available for subscription on Amazon's Kindle, but according to Adams, Amazon keeps as much as 70 percent of the subscription revenue, making it a great deal for the hardware and pipeline creator, but not so good for the content provider. (This mirrors Amazon's unbalanced relationship with publishers of e-books.)

In Ad Age, Nat Ives also looks at the deal and sees another benefit: Sony is willing to share subscriber information—even as basic as how many people subscribed to a given paper on the tablet. Ives quotes News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch complaining, "We don't get the names of the subscribers… Kindle treats them as their subscribers, not as ours, and I think that will eventually cause a break with us."

Exactly how good a deal Sony is providing News Corp. is not known. Yesterday Journal Editor-in-Chief Robert Thomson told the New York Times' Nick Bilton, "You can assume we’re getting a better split than the Kindle."