Yet a company such as Zinio was able to pull it off, without a string of successes or a multi-billion dollar bank account to back them up like Apple has.
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More on Apple's Plans for a 'Digital Newsstand' for Newspaper Content
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Yet a company such as Zinio was able to pull it off, without a string of successes or a multi-billion dollar bank account to back them up like Apple has.
Regarding "could make the iPad absolutely indispensable, versus today where I consider the device a "nice-to-have" and not yet a "need-to-have"."...
Curious, do you own an iPad or have you just played with it for short periods at the Apple store or Best Buy store? If you do own one and have the feelings you do, you are entitled to your opinion, obviously. However, "need to have" and "nice to have" are not the phrases I would use to characterize my iPad... Rather "How did I ever get along without?!" is the phrase that comes to mind ever since my computer habits changed on June 1st with the purchase of my 3G iPad. Thanks
I do indeed have an iPad, but find for the most part that it merely cannibalizes time and tasks formerly spent on my iPhone, just now with a nicely larger screen. Many of the specialized iPad apps are indeed a joy and surfing the web on it is a pleasure, but so far I don't consider these pleasures "indispensable" versus the iPhone experience on an average day-to-day basis. (And some tasks I actually still prefer on the iPhone anyway.) But if Apple provides an easy, cohesive, standardized solution for a print media platform/paradigm on the iPad, that is suddenly a very compelling -- and daily -- justification for the iPad experience for a huge swath of the population.
This iNewsstand has the potential to do for publishing what the iTunes Store did for music: make it viable and profitable, as its frightened producers otherwise struggle and flounder with the digitization of their product.
Hope to a dying man
I am all for this. There are several magazines I would subscribe to again if a could get an iPad version. However I think the newspapers are looking at this as a savior and I don't think it is going to work. One of the many reasons why newspaper readership is dying is the content. In the old days the editorial content of a newspaper was not permitted outside of the editorial pages, and you knew this and went there when you wanted to know what the paper was thinking about an issue. The basic reporting was kept separate so you knew when you read the news it was as straight a report as humanly possible. The editor would have grown up with in the company, starting at the bottom and if he was ambitious enough editor. By the time this person got to the top he was steeped in the culture and traditions of his paper. He understood the most important thing was integrity it is everything, if you lost that with your readership you where done for. This does not seem to matter anymore. instead of wondering why your circulation is dropping like a rock you blame your readers for being too stupid to know just how good the newspaper really is. Posting the same bovine scatology on an electronic edition is not going to get you any additional readers, and will surely make you loose the ones you have. But newspapers that still run their newspapers in the traditional way will surely do just fine with an electronic edition.
I am all for this. There are several magazines I would subscribe to again if a could get an iPad version. However I think the newspapers are looking at this as a savior and I don't think it is going to work. One of the many reasons why newspaper readership is dying is the content. In the old days the editorial content of a newspaper was not permitted outside of the editorial pages, and you knew this and went there when you wanted to know what the paper was thinking about an issue. The basic reporting was kept separate so you knew when you read the news it was as straight a report as humanly possible. The editor would have grown up with in the company, starting at the bottom and if he was ambitious enough editor. By the time this person got to the top he was steeped in the culture and traditions of his paper. He understood the most important thing was integrity it is everything, if you lost that with your readership you where done for. This does not seem to matter anymore. instead of wondering why your circulation is dropping like a rock you blame your readers for being too stupid to know just how good the newspaper really is. Posting the same bovine scatology on an electronic edition is not going to get you any additional readers, and will surely make you loose the ones you have. But newspapers that still run their newspapers in the traditional way will surely do just fine with an electronic edition.
Amazon like other publishers have already proved they view ebooks as rental, not purchase.
Remember what happened when amazon lost the rights to distribute a book?
The removed it from all the kindles... even as you'd bought and paid for it. Ironically it was George Orwelll books, including 1984...
Yes they credited the purchase price...but they did sneak in and remove it from YOUR kindle without your authorisaion...
Remember what happened when amazon lost the rights to distribute a book?
The removed it from all the kindles... even as you'd bought and paid for it. Ironically it was George Orwelll books, including 1984...
Yes they credited the purchase price...but they did sneak in and remove it from YOUR kindle without your authorisaion...
Improve on Zinio and they have a winner. I feel like this could only really be good news, unless the prices and subscriptions are higher than the paper counterpart, or they don't offer subscription and subscription pricing. But I have a feeling that once they do it, they'll want to do it right and they won't let some smaller company show them up on their own platform (zinio)
I think it's important (and maybe instructive) to keep in mind that newspapers in Europe are generally (I don't know much about the UK specifically) much more expensive than newspapers in the US when it comes to subscriptions.
A Mon-Sat subscription to the Frankfurter Allegemeine costs 43 per month (~$56, if the exchange rate is relevant). A Mon-Sat subscription to the NY Times costs $15/month. (And I'm not in NY). A Mon-Sat subscription to my medium sized local paper costs $10/month.
Subscriptions to the European papers I'm familiar with save you 0-10% over the retail price (but you have the convenience of home delivery). Subscriptions to US papers always save you over 50% of the newsstand price.
So it may well be the case that substantial savings may be found for Euro papers that can't be found for US papers.
Re: costs of printing and distribution - I think that there are two ways in which P&D costs are being discussed here, and that they are being conflated. One way of talking about P&D costs is as a percentage of the newspaper's costs as a whole. This method doesn't consider the paper's revenue at all and simply sets the paper's costs at 100% and then determines what makes up these costs. This is where the 65-70% number comes from.
The second way of talking about costs is to consider the costs of P&D as a percentage of the overall revenue of the newspaper. This is where the 5-20% numbers come in.
The other difficulty in determining costs (and also in pricing eVersions) is that P&D scale massively (meaning that the marginal cost of printed papers becomes less and less). Printing and distributing a paper requires massive fixed costs (high-speed presses, buildings, trucks, labor generally), and some other costs (newsprint, ink). But if you increase circulation from, say 400,000 (the circ of my local paper) to 600,000, the cost per paper for P&D will drop dramatically because the fixed costs won't change - you won't (up to a point) have to buy new presses, new buildings, new trucks to print and distribute the additional papers (although you will have to buy more newsprint and ink). Similarly, if circ drops, the cost per paper goes up.
So calculating how much a newspaper can really save by e-distribution depends on a lot of issues (NPI). In many cases, the savings will not be great because e-distribution won't affect the massive fixed costs that are already present. Using e-distribution does not mean that the NY Times suddenly has no costs for printing or distribution. It only means that it has no costs for P&D of the eVersions themselves.
I.e., the NY Times has a print circulation of 1.6 million. If it adds 160,000 e-subscriptions, it still has to pay the P&D costs for the 1.6 million printed papers; its only savings are on the marginal costs of producing the 160,000 extra papers. As the marginal costs of increasing a print run by 10% are likely pretty small, this won't be a huge savings.
Pressreader?
I'm surprised I haven't seen much mention of PressReader. It's on the iPad. I have a digital subscription to my local newspaper, the Vancouver Sun, which costs me $10 per month. For that, I get daily access to all of the newspapers owned by that publisher. The content is 100% the same as the print edition (you literally page through the newspaper and see the identical pages as in the print edition, with ads and identical layout).
Some may gripe that $10 per month is a lot. Fair enough, but I cancelled my print subscription to the paper, and this is quite a bit cheaper than the print edition was, so I certainly don't feel like I'm getting ripped off.
For those who are interested in how to actually set this up: If your paper has a digital subscription that is served to you online via PressDisplay (most Canadian newspapers seem to be), then all you have to do is add a new account onto PressReader with your newspaper login credentials, and it all syncs up nicely. You don't need to sign up for a PressDisplay account or pay them any money. It can all go through your local newspaper account.
Also, I noticed that newspaper subscriptions seem to be available on the Kindle app, but it doesn't seem like quite as good of a deal (no access to other same-publisher papers).
I'm surprised I haven't seen much mention of PressReader. It's on the iPad. I have a digital subscription to my local newspaper, the Vancouver Sun, which costs me $10 per month. For that, I get daily access to all of the newspapers owned by that publisher. The content is 100% the same as the print edition (you literally page through the newspaper and see the identical pages as in the print edition, with ads and identical layout).
Some may gripe that $10 per month is a lot. Fair enough, but I cancelled my print subscription to the paper, and this is quite a bit cheaper than the print edition was, so I certainly don't feel like I'm getting ripped off.
For those who are interested in how to actually set this up: If your paper has a digital subscription that is served to you online via PressDisplay (most Canadian newspapers seem to be), then all you have to do is add a new account onto PressReader with your newspaper login credentials, and it all syncs up nicely. You don't need to sign up for a PressDisplay account or pay them any money. It can all go through your local newspaper account.
Also, I noticed that newspaper subscriptions seem to be available on the Kindle app, but it doesn't seem like quite as good of a deal (no access to other same-publisher papers).
I was going to say.. No mention of PressReader at all? I use it everyday on my iPad. I pay $30 a month - but for that I get access to all their newspapers.. From my Australian The Age, to Toronto's The Star to Vancouver's the sun. All for the flat rate - and the app gets the newspapers mostly before they're even avaiable.
Get the app - you get 8 free issues of any newspaper it has. Also has newspapers from 30+ days ago.
Cheers!
A news junkie willing to pay a SMALL subscription charge? Yikes.
I fear this is the mindset in the internet age. Text still costs money to produce. In some cases advertising can cover the full deployment cost, but not always.
By having Apple host these files, the server space and cost to do that becomes moot.
Second, the upset comes from the fact that big publishers charge tiny amounts ($0.60 an issue) for magazines like Time or Newsweek in a subscription - yet they charge $4.99 an issue on the iPad. Why is there no subscription model for iPad with the same reasonable rates?
I know I would be glad to pay the same inexpensive magazine subscription rates on iPad as I do in print.
The Internet always as an open medium
The power of the Internet as a publication medium has been it's openness and realitive freedom.
The moves Apple is making here is entirely contradictory to the core nature we have been building the Internet from. A subscriber should always have unmediated access to a publishers content. As the Web is maturing we are able to really offer content on par with traditional mediums: The iPad. But if we let Apple control the gates of this medium we begin to negate so much of viral and grassroots power we have spent decades creating.
The power of the Internet as a publication medium has been it's openness and realitive freedom.
The moves Apple is making here is entirely contradictory to the core nature we have been building the Internet from. A subscriber should always have unmediated access to a publishers content. As the Web is maturing we are able to really offer content on par with traditional mediums: The iPad. But if we let Apple control the gates of this medium we begin to negate so much of viral and grassroots power we have spent decades creating.
I think we need to understand they are, as the saying goes:
"Making hay whilst the sun shines"
In 5 or 10 years time Apple and the iPad and this control could well be forgotten about or something we talk about as we do Atari and Commodore now.
Apple are the 1st and current have all the power right now.
It won't last. Other more open system will come along, it's just taking time.
A closed system run by one company is not going to survive long term these days.
It's going to be interesting to see how this develops over time.
There are millions of people who would never dream of carrying around a $600 device to read their newspapers and magazines on.
Reasonable solution
Apple offers option to host and deliver publishers content. They charge something competitive considering the costs in maintaining servers, etc.
The publisher has the option to go with Apple's option or to roll with their own.
The subscriber wouldn't have to care which path the publisher chose since it would be delivered all the same.
Apple doesn't want to provide choose outside their economic cheese chunk because they want the control and profits. Their greed in this is blatenly obvious!
Apple offers option to host and deliver publishers content. They charge something competitive considering the costs in maintaining servers, etc.
The publisher has the option to go with Apple's option or to roll with their own.
The subscriber wouldn't have to care which path the publisher chose since it would be delivered all the same.
Apple doesn't want to provide choose outside their economic cheese chunk because they want the control and profits. Their greed in this is blatenly obvious!
You bring up a totally valid point of making hay while the sun shines. Apple knows that they revolutionize, but don't usually hold onto long term market share.
My concern is that, since Apple is such a trend setter, that other companies don't follow suite on their gate keeper policies. Fortunately, Google is providing some stellar competition (hopefully soon in the tablet market as well) and doesn't appear to be so Monarch like in their approach.
Sorry if I'm confused.
Your post seems to read like it would agree with either side of the argument depending on the readers bias.
The publishers have a range of options each with a range of outlets and ease of use factors weighted against there costs. If Apple roll a dedicated store then yes data maybe tied to that store and Apple's family of devices (hopefully including the Mac family) and Apple need to prove that they are offering fair trade to get both content and readers. The data pre-lock maybe of an open documented format which is just making easier for the media company to sell via another avenue if they they don't like the terms.
More shocking is this assertion of yours now, considering your memorable characterization of the iPad as a "cute little toy" back in January.
Before it was realized that it would be selling at the rate of 2 million a month, or whatever the (under)estimate is at present, any agreement would have come from a position of naivete on either side, Apple's or the publishers'.
I don't know anything about Zinio, but I suspect it is a little different from dealing with an entity like Apple, which has just gone and deployed the successor to the printing press and the book with their cute little toy.
So you want to tell them what they should have done or need to do to make the iPad "a contender"?
makes a good point. and the same can be said over all digital downloads.
this is the old discussion on illegal sharing all over again: and to my knowledge only 2 possible theories remain:
1: make the content (music, game, movies, eBook, ePaper) super affordable (consider the rental model)
2: implement a legal sharing option where you allow the customer to buy a copy and pass it on to a friend of a specific period or for instance, give it as a gift! technology is ready, now only the wills and minds of SJ and others;
I'm really looking forward to what they will come up with!
Most of the time you only get some of the stories that you see in the physical copy.
This is a great post. People might not yet know what we'll pay for eversions of everything, but what you're saying is that if we don't have the satisfaction of sharing with others that is a loss of something valuable to us and them. Even if or when we pay less, sending a link from a magazine we read and like which then opens a pay-wall to our friends is not sharing at all.
PC = Mostly spendy powerful apps, huge displays and storage, crunching capacity, endless free internet content (journalistic, entertainment and more) = revenue crisis for content providers.
iOS devices = limited but mostly inexpensive apps, vast portability and mobility, instant slides and movies, internet everywhere, ubiquitous voice, data and network connectivity - and - the attempted re-monetization of content for the advantages of access instantly and everywhere and justified by turning "print publications" into more seamless multi-media, customizable, iOS-optimized experiences (particularly on the iPad) using pre-built, "standardized" Apple tools.
Whether the big media companies can make this pay is still an open question though. In the beginning there will be some leverage for Apple and the big mags. But 1) even if conversion rates are high (iNewstand useage by a high percentage of users), at this point the base of devices is relatively small, so not a revenue savior yet and 2) as mobile web computing at 4G speeds becomes the norm - with not only Google and MS powering a flotilla of tablet variants but also, oh, HP/Palm, RIM (?), Intel (Meego - currently being integrated into Nokia hardware, etc., etc., pressure for free/cheap content will increase.
So I'm dubious. I'm not wedded to the "big" papers for my info anyway anymore.
If you ask me, they should have a newsstand, where you can get free content with ads or purchase access to an article for 5 or 10 cents, since newspapers are usually less than a dollar. The same holds for articles from magazines. At that price, transaction fees might pose a problem, but they could also start holding charges to an account until they hit a threshold.
A few others have mentioned it already but PressReader basically already implements an 'iNewsstand'... Hundreds of newspapers from all over the world, identical look/feel to the printed newspapers, various subscription options or a 59p per issue 'pay as you go' option through iTunes. I honestly don't see how Apple could really better it.