The Shanghai Daily is not the best newspaper in the world (understatement), but it is pretty advanced online. It has its own RSS feeds, several blogs and podcasts, and even an online PDF version. And now it will also be published in the Kindle E-Book reader format, the ugly-looking eBook launched by Amazon last year. For just USD 5.99 per month you can get your daily dose of local Shanghai stories and propaganda delivered on your Kindle. This is a good development, the more papers that get published on E-Books the better (I am a big fan of E-Books). However, I wonder if they will have any extra sales because of this, because the Kindle is only on sale in the US so far and it does not work on Chinese GPRS or 3G networks (correct me if I am wrong). And I don’t really think anybody in the US would be interested in reading the Shanghai Daily.

A nice feature is that the Shanghai Daily will be updated twice daily, meaning that it is more up-to-date than the printed once-per-day version. Right now I have a paper version subscription, but because that normally does not get delivered until somewhere in the afternoon (the Shanghai Daily is a morning paper) I would actually consider changing my subscription from paper to eBook. However, I have a Sony E-Book reader and two iLiads, but those formats are not supported yet. If you redesign your paper for E-Books, why not directly make it compatible for all available formats? The same is true of course for other newspapers like the Dutch NRC Handelsblad that is only available on the iLiad so far. But maybe this is just a first step and we will see the newspaper in other formats as well very soon.