For those of you who don't already know, Kindle Newsstand is closing, and magazine editors are freaking out.

If you are like me, and not a heavy Kindle user, you might not even have known what Kindle Newsstand is. (My own reading habits are part "paper books please!" and part surfing the Internet.) It's the part of Kindle where they subscribe users to magazines. They're not only phasing out electronic subscriptions through Kindle, but also any print subscriptions that used to be available through Amazon. (Some magazines will still be available through Kindle Unlimited, but that's a different business model which allows for a lot more obfuscation of crucial data like how payments are calculated and how much each magazine is supposed to actually be getting.)

This is a big deal because quite a lot of the speculative fiction magazines we know and love were getting most of their subscriptions through Kindle Newsstand. (It’s a hazard of having a business landscape where a single company, like Amazon, can gobble up such a large majority of the market share for an industry. When they suddenly decide to stop doing something, everybody who depended on that thing is toast.) Magazine editors are looking at their income and panicking! I am in the SFWA Discord watching some of them panic! It's grim. To be honest, in the short term future, losing KN is a bigger threat to magazines' survival than AI.