New York Times Extends Free Trial To 2 Months on Kindle, Matching Its iPad App For Now; More Changes Indicated

Don't Miss Today's Planet iPad Daily Free Book Alert, Monday, November 1: 5 Brand New Free Titles for Your Kindle App, plus ... ANCIENT EYES by David Niall Wilson (Today's Sponsor)

When the New York Times started offering a new and expanded iPad app on Oct. 15, free until early 2011, the truncated version sold in Amazon's Kindle Store didn't look like such a great deal at $19.99 a month.

That's changing.

As of the morning of Election Day, the NY Times' “face” in the Amazon Kindle Store is in dishabille (above), rather undone from its usually pulled-together look. The Time's monthly subscription header lacks a photo. Overhead in the Amazon listing of Times' products, an empty spot streams an offer to “subscribe today and receive an extended two-month trial. Offer Expires Feb. 15, 2011.”

Click on the link to start the two-month trial, and off you go to the order page bereft of a picture of the paper.  But when you subscribe by clicking, the thank you message tells you the worrisome news that your billing will start in two weeks!

For now, the NY Times for the Kindle can only be read on the Kindle. But the Amazon Kindle Team let slip last week, in a forum titled “Coming for Kindle,” that newspapers and magazines will “soon” be distributed to from the Kindle Store to iPads and other devices.  Up-coming apps similar to “Kindle for iPad,” which currently deliver only ebooks to iPad readers, are on their way "soon."

Meantime, Apple is happily selling an app with a much more robust version of the NY Times for the iPad.

Of course the NY Times and Amazon will get competitive with the iPad app faster than you can say, "Extra! Extra!"  And that will undoubtedly happen within 3 seconds of your Planet iPad editor posting this report and leaving to cover another story.

iBooks App Slips as Kindle App Jumps in the iPad App Store

By Stephen Windwalker
Editor of iPad Nation Daily
Originally posted May 8, 2010

Related posts:

In Thinking About Google Books, the Kindle, and the iPad, How About a Little Reality?

at Teleread: Don’t diss Stanza and people who love e-books, Jeff—including us iPad owners

Click here to have posts like this one from iPad Nation Daily pushed directly to your Kindle 24/7 with a free 14-day trial from the Kindle Blogs Store

See updated status report below.

Could this be a watershed moment?

Apple's iBooks Store has just fallen from the top rung among free iPad Apps in Apple's Top Charts listing. Beatweek Magazine called attention to the iBooks' slippage, in which it has been supplanted an utterly lovely ambient app called Pocket Pond (see screen shot at the right, but it is just the beginning). As the screen shots at the end of this post attest, Pocket Pond is the new #1 free app for the iPad, iBooks has fallen to #2, and the Kindle Store has climbed from the mid-20s to #13 in recent days.


Naturally, after all we have heard about iBooks during the past three months, most of us iPad owners were eager to download it for free and try it out. The reading environment is very nice for indoor reading, but iBooks has a long way to go to compete in the ebook content marketplace when it comes to selection, prices, user-friendly search/sort/browse features, and access to a critical mass of reader ratings and reviews.

The flip side of these shortcomings and the obvious likelihood of comparison with the 2 1/2 year old granddaddy of all ebook readers may be among the reasons why the iBooks fall is juxtaposed with the Kindle app's rise, but they are not the only reasons. As the three ads on a single web page in the screen shot at right suggest, however anecdotally, Amazon is investing plenty in making sure that iPad owners and enthusiasts are aware of the ease with which they can download the Kindle for iPad app free in a few seconds to gain access its 512,000 ebook offerings, at a mean price that's about half the mean price of the iBooks store's comparatively meager array catalog offerings.

Of course, snapshots are just snapshots, and it remains to be seen what the long-term trends will be. I'm finding the iPad a terrific place to read Kindle books, listen to free Audiobooks and paid Audible.com books, and read free Internet Archive texts in ePub with the Stanza for iPhone app (even after the departure of Stanza fountainhead Neelan Choksi from Stanza.Amazon.com yesterday). Stanza doesn't show up in the iPad rankings because its app is designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch and has not been optimized for the iPad, but it remains prominent in the smaller devices' app store ebook-related rankings and may still be the best way for an iPad owner to access over two million texts that are available from the Internet Archive, to say nothing of 12 million titles that may be available in the sweet bye and bye from Google Books.

Update: As of 7 pm ET May 9, 2010, 24 hours after the original post, the iBooks App has moved back to the #1 Free Apps position in Apple's TopCharts sales rankings, but the Kindle app continues to climb and has passed a Solitaire app and the Dictionary.com app to move into the #10 position.

Geeksugar: Netflix "Watch Instantly" on the iPad? There's an App for That!

Although our primary preoccupation at the iReader is with the iPad and the other iDevices for readers, we also know that there's plenty of overlap between people who love to read and people who love movies, so here's a piece of great news for movie lovers!

Geeksugar reports:

Netflix is coming to the iPad. If you have a Netflix unlimited membership (starting at $9 a month) and are picking up an iPad on Saturday, you'll soon be able to stream TV shows and movies to your tablet. Launching April 3, the Netflix app will be free to download from the new iPad app store and will allow you to manage your queue, as well as continue watching a movie you started viewing on your computer or TV (and vice versa).

I love this, since my Netflix history shows that I use the Netflix "watch instantly" feature to stream about 2 dozen movies for every DVD that arrives via snailmail.

Who else will love this? Netflix shareholders. NFLX closed yesterday at $75, but this app provides the company with the perfect hard pivot from mailing out those little red envelopes, which was very 2007, to what realtors and retailers know as "location, location, location" on the most important consumer platform for multimedia content in the next three years.

Now if Amazon will just come up with an Amazon Video on Demand app for the iPad, I'll be able to watch the rest of my AVOD subscription to 24 on the new toy that arrives on Saturday from Shenzen, China. It only makes sense, if Apple wants to make the iPad the best tablet computer in the world for customers, that it should allow it to run all media provided not only by iTunes but also by Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand and MP3, and Hulu, for starters.

Thanks to Andrys at the Kindle World blog for tweeting the good news!