All the cool kids on campus are going to be paying for digital subscriptions to their crummy college newspaper this semester. Chug! Chug! Chug! (Image via Wikimedia)

Yesterday, Amazon announced an ambitious plan to bundle copies of print books and ebooks and accidentally (probably) leaked information about its upcoming second generation Kindle Paperwhite. Oh, and Jeff Bezos promised to lead The Washington Post into a new “golden era,” like some sort of corporate Aleister Crowley, in his first interview since he purchased the paper last month.

But nobody puts Barnes & Noble in a corner. Yesterday, the Chris Gaines of bookstores announced it had partnered with UWIRE, a wire service for college newspapers, and unveiled its big, ambitious back to school plan: it will now offer digital subscriptions to hundreds of college newspapers, including the Harvard Crimson and the Columbia Spectator, on its embattled NOOK ereader. Barnes & Noble’s newest plan to compete with Amazon: pairing the thing your parents got you that you didn’t want with the thing your school gives you that you don’t want.

And, as Laura Hazard Owen notes in her report, “The store is aimed at ‘students, alumni, faculty, and sports fans,’ whom Barnes & Noble and UWIRE are hoping will shell out for a product that is almost always free on the college newspapers’ websites. It looks as if most subscriptions are being sold for between $0.99 and $1.99 a month.” So this is like if Blockbuster had tried teaming up with the Ad Council to rent out PSAs.

Still, Barnes & Noble seems hopeful that this new partnership will reach these kids. In a press release, it crowed that “at the nearly 700 Barnes & Noble College campus stores nationwide, an expansive network of 4.6 million students are provided with an unrivaled selection of learning resources, including the NOOK line of eReaders and tablets.” 4.6 million people is an impressive target market, but once you factor in how many of those students actually own NOOK tablets (probably a lot less than 4.6 million), how many of those students would be willing to pay for something that they already get for free/don’t read (DEFINITELY a lot less than 4.6 million), and the exceptionally low cost of the service, one starts to wonder how much revenue this new program will actually generate.

Then again, I barely read The Oberlin Review when I was in college (shoutout to The Grape!), but I know one person who rarely missed an issue: my mother. So maybe focusing on students is the wrong way of looking at this. Maybe Barnes & Noble will finally hit on the lucrative market that will save its troubled tablet: parents who wish their children would call home more often.

Eric Jett contributed to this piece.