Whenever fellow SiliconANGLE editor Sean P. Aune and I get together on a podcast, we end up solving one of the world’s problems.  Last night, we tackled the eBook reader dilemma.

Valleywag’s Ryan Tate put out a blog post trumpeting Time, Inc’s intentions to come up with their own e-book reader. The post was entitled “Time Inc. Joins E-Reader Suicide Stampede: Report,” which give you a pretty good idea on how the rest of the post played out.

Download the MP3 directly.

From the post:

It’s easy to understand how an e-reader project would appeal to beleaguered magazine executives. While their industry is crumbling , analysts have estimated sales of 800,000 or more Amazon Kindle e-readers, and there is some evidence that device has goosed book sales.

Grand gestures, in other words, are no substitute for the grinding work of real change; one would think a company owned by Time Warner, of all entities, would know that by now.

Peter Kafka from AllThingsD says that Time isn’t looking to get into the hardware business itself, at least not in terms of an eBook reader.

The fact remains, though, that eBooks haven’t been the big seller yet that dead tree publishers have hoped they might be. The problem isn’t the tech, or the feature set – it all comes down to how they’re positioned, and most importantly, the price point.

It’s quite easy to economically line up dumping the dead-tree business for eBook distribution, subsidizing the cost of the eBook with subscription fees and saving money in the process.

This is the angle Sean and I tackled and explored in yesterday’s CobWEBs daily edition. Feel free to take a listen, and leave some feedback if you have something to add.  Download the MP3 directly, or use the player at the top of the post to listen.