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New York Times, Wall Street Journal raise prices for Kindle, iPad editions
April 3, 2010 | 3:21 pm
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By Chris Meadows
TechCrunch reports that the New York Times is raising its rates for electronic delivery. The “E-Edition” of the paper is going from $14.99 to $19.99 per month, and the Kindle version is going from $13.99 to $19.99 per month for new subscriptions and starting in 6 months for existing subscriptions. Presumably, the iPad edition will be at the same $19.99 monthly rate.
PaidContent points out that this is still less than half the cost of having the print edition delivered ($46 per month), but it’s still a hefty bump for people used to the older pricing.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has announced the price of its iPad edition will be $17.29 per month—whereas subscriptions to the print and on-line edition are currently only $11.67 per month and the on-line only rate works out to $8.62 per month. Rupert Murdoch must really hate iPad users.
Mike Masnick at TechDirt has a really great editorial pointing out that there seems to be a fairly strong meme going around that the iPad is somehow supposed to “save” traditional publishing, but the noises they’re making sound suspiciously like what was said about the CD-ROM during the revolutionary days of the ‘90s.
The media is running to the iPad because they think it’s magically going to transport them back to a world where there is scarcity and they can charge ridiculous prices again. The Wall Street Journal, for example, is apparently offering an iPad app that’s more expensive per week than getting a combined subscription to both the paper version and the online version. There’s a lot of wishful thinking going on here.
Will the iPad “save” publishing? Or will this play out like a second coming of the CD-ROM—which, while ubiquitous now, has not substantially changed the face of publishing in the way proponents thought it would? We’ll just have to wait and see.
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Comments:
Gouging the early adopters of new technology is always a GREAT plan! (For the short term).
But, then again, Apple users are notoriously bad at making bad decisions about price versus functionality. Being the first in your crowd to sport a new toy seems to be more important than any practical considerations.
My guess is that the NY Times and WSJ will make tons of early sales but the retention rate will be abysmal. I wouldn’t be surprised if subscription prices drop to $5 a month within a year or two.
Simply ridiculous. Why wouldn’t people simply use the browser to access the web version instead of using the app if it saves them almost $10 per month? If you wanted to download content for offline reading you could still use a program like Calibre to compile the content into an ePub or Mobi file.
Interesting that they are taking this step right before they put the content behind a paywall. Seems like a good setup for an epic fail!
Hey Binko
If Apple users are “notoriously bad at making bad decisions” that means that they actually are good decision makers – so are non Apple users notoriously poor at making their case? See how stupid it is to generalize like that.