Printing the NY Times vs a Kindle

An article on Silicon Alley Insider claims that the New York Times would be saving money if it were to buy every subscriber an Amazon Kindle. From the article:

According to the Times’s Q308 10-Q, the company spends $63 million per quarter on raw materials and $148 million on wages and benefits. We’ve heard the wages and benefits for just the newsroom are about $200 million per year.

After multiplying the quarterly costs by four and subtracting that $200 million out, a rough estimate for the Times’s delivery costs would be $644 million per year.

The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: “We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.” Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million — a little less than half as much as $644 million.

While this makes sense it also seems to me that the Times would have more readers than 830,000. I’m just wondering if that number even accounts for all of the copies sold at Starbucks and other coffee shops every day. While it may be cheaper for the Times to get all of its subscribers Kindles I can’t believe it would actually be cheaper to get all of the people who read print editions of the Times a Kindle.

Link via Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle.