Suzanne Vranica has a very good article about the Kindle Fire. See Magazines Join With New Tablet Challenger

She is right to point out the growing overhead associated with all these devices.

“With each new tablet comes a long and expensive process for publishers, which have to retrofit their content for each device.”

That’s exactly right. It would be so much easier if all these devices adopted a common standard.

There is another thing that often gets overlooked in discussions of Kindle, iPad and such, and that’s the ability to synch the digital subscription with the print subscription. This is important for making combination offers (e.g., print + digital), but it’s also important for customer service.

If a customer has a Jan. to Dec. subscription and wants to convert it to digital, or add digital access, there’s no way to do that if the print subscription record is controlled from one system and the digital subscription is controlled from another.

Amazon and Apple are completely correct in trying to make the purchase process as easy on the customer as possible. That is, if you’re in the iTunes store, all you should need is your iTunes login.

However, they need to add the ability to synch up their record with the publisher’s record.

This would do two things. First, it would alleviate publisher fears that Apple and Amazon are trying to steal their customers. Second, it would promote the “buy once, read anywhere” model that everybody wants.