Here’s a tempting offer: Barnes & Noble is offering a free Nook Simple Touch or a $99 Nook Color (the one that’s easily hacked into a tablet) if you subscribe to the New York Times through them. If you’re not much into hard news, they’re also offering the Nook Tablet for $199 (a $50 savings) when you get People Magazine.
Downside: My father would spend hours trying to figure out how to fold the darn thing.
Personally, I follow the Times Twitter feed for articles I’m interested in and my wife reads People.com on her iPad. I don’t think you can really get cheaper than those two options. However, if you’re someone who would rather buy either of these in dead tree form anyway, then it seems like a cheap way to get a tablet. One of the main reasons this caught my attention though is because of an old article from 2008. In it, Business Insider did the math and noted that it would actually be more cost-effective for the New York Times to send every single subscriber a Kindle (costing $399 at the time) than to constantly send paper copies. How cost effective? It would be a good fifty percent cheaper.
It looks like someone at B&N read the same article and managed to convince the upper echelons of the N.Y. Times and People to try it out. Could this start a trend in the Old Media world? It’s doubtful, but it’s worth watching. And hoping.
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