“Because that’s what the market will bear — at least for now,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes for Fortune.
“If you buy the digital editions of Popular Science or TIME Magazine on the iPad, they cost $4.99 each — same as on the newsstand,” Elmer-DeWitt writes. “However, one-year subscriptions to Popular Science (the paper magazine) are currently selling for $12 — or $1 an issue. And TIME subscriptions can be had for $20 — around 35¢ an issue.”
“The attendees at the WeMedia conference had widely divergent opinions about the approach publishers are taking,” Elmer-DeWitt reports. “‘I like the brazenness of TIME’s $4.99 an issue,’ said Roger Black, a veteran magazine designer whose portfolio includes the logos for both TIME and Newsweek. ‘I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever,’ said Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis, a former Time Inc. editor and author of What Would Google Do? ‘The ego of it was unabashedly awful.'”
Elmer-DeWitt reports, “As for that $4.99 per-issue magazine price, it will come down in a month or so when Apple allows magazines to set up subscriptions on the iTunes store, says Popular Science’s Jannot. But it won’t come down much. He’s planning to charge $29.99 for 12 iPad issues and $19.99 for six.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you think the prices are too high, capitalism provides a simple remedy for this: Do not buy the the magazines. Visit them for free on your iPad’s Safari browser until the publishers lower their prices. If enough people think the prices are too high and don’t buy, then prices will come down. If iPad magazine prices do not decrease, then you know that you are in the minority.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Joe J.” for the heads up.]