• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, June 17, 2009

Steve Brill took issue with Amazon's plan to take the lion's share of revenue from newspaper subscriptions coming through the Kindle, likening it to Sony demanding HBO pay a share of its subscription fees for people who watched its shows on Sony TVs. At the Wired conference earlier this week in New York, Bezos didn't claim that the Kindle could 'save" newspapers, as some have suggested, but said the device and other e-readers would be increasingly part of how people get newspapers.

Bezos, who's never been a fan of ad-supported models, said the key problem for online publishing is the Internet's infinite inventory. "The biggest structural problem in my opinion is that there's just so much supply of advertising space. That's a fundamental problem that's not going away," said Bezos. So, both Brill and Bezos would agree newspapers cant rely only on advertising to survive, but obviously differ on how much, if anything, Amazon should get for Kindle newspaper subscriptions.