By Steve Windwalker

Well, here’s a Free Book Alert for something other than a book, and it’s a pretty good deal that could become an even better deal if it is extended fairly across the board.

Between now and February 15, you can get a free 60-day trial subscription to the Kindle edition of the New York Times.

Here’s a link: The New York Times

So, instead of the usual 14-day free trial, The New York Times is offering a 60 days free.

And here’s an interesting wrinkle: as of this afternoon, customers who had cancelled their old paid Times subscription because of its ridiculous $19.99 a month price and resubscribed to get the free 60-day trial were getting it. 

UPDATE 11.3.2010 5:30 am Eastern: Alas, Amazon has taken action overnight to “correct” the apparent “malfunction” that was allowing customers to re-subscribe for the 60-day free trial after cancelling because of the exorbitant $19.99 price.

Instead, an Amazon representative told me last night:

Current subscribers do not receive another free trial, but we are giving subscribers as of about Oct 15^th a $5 rate reduction in their monthly bill for four months (Nov-Feb).  This has been messaged to them via e-mail.

Half a loaf for long-time subscribers. Hmph.

This is based on a survey of one customer — me — and it may not be the intention of either the Times or Amazon. As you may be aware, that practice of allowing re-subscribers to get the free 60-day trial is different from the usual practice with Kindle periodicals and the standard free 14-day trial, but it’s what happened. Perhaps it won’t last, but frankly it is the only fair way to handle this.

Why? Because the real reason for the free 60-day trial is that The New York Times has been offering all of its content free as an iPad app, and promising that the iPad app would remain free until early 2011. For people like myself who have both a Kindle and an iPad, it was a no-brainer to cancel the Kindle subscription. Even if the net number of Kindle Times subscriptions has increased in the past few weeks, there’s no doubt that there were a significant number of cancellations.

It’s very important that both Amazon and the Times drill down on this situation immediately and provide the free 60-day trial not only to new subscribers but also to re-subscribers and to all customers whose subscriptions have not been cancelled. A failure to handle the situation this way would be to treat old, current, and cancelled subscribers as a second class of customers, and would amount to a very un-Amazonian middle finger in the face of some of the company’s most loyal customers.

And from the point of view of the Times, a failure to extend the offer and embed it within current subscriptions would be to treat its longest-term and most significant group of paid digital content readers as if they were less valued than (a) subscribers to the free iPad app; and (b) new subscribers to the Kindle edition of the Times. It’s behavior that wouldn’t be worthy either of the Times or of Amazon.

That’s my opinion. What do you think?