Here’s another publisher publicly throwing its weight behind Apple–and against Amazon–in the e-book pricing war. Hachette Book Group says it will pursue the “agency model” for pricing e-books: It sets retail prices and the retailer gets a 30 percent cut. In more practical terms, this means Hachette’s titles will be getting more expensive, and the rest of the industry will be following suit.
It is all Apple, all the time in techland this week. Except at Reddit, where the social news site’s users spent most of yesterday obsessing about something else: A rogue ad.
Can’t really say that BusinessWeek’s 80-year run at McGraw-Hill ended on an up note, since the publisher sold the magazine for a fire-sale price.
But at least that price was a little bit more than McGraw-Hill expected.
I got a great glimpse of the future of magazines last week. It’s the March issue of Wired, transformed into a digital edition that takes full advantage of the Apple tablet we’re going to see on Wednesday. But you’re not going to be able to buy a tabletized Wired for some time: Condé Nast, like most would-be Apple media partners, simply doesn’t know that much about the device yet.
After much consideration, the New York Times has finally decided to start charging readers for access to its Web site. But not for a while: The Times says it will introduce a “metered model” for NYT.com in 2011.
Amazon is doubling the royalty rate it pays small e-book authors and publishers–if they promise to keep the prices of their digital texts below the price of physical books. The goals here are obvious: Push prices down and try to keep business away from a growing list of rivals.
Here’s someone else you won’t see onstage with Steve Jobs next week: Anyone from Time Inc. With good reason: The magazine company doesn’t have any tablet-ready stuff to show off yet. Tease that out a bit and you can tell the story of most media companies. They’re excited to start taking advantage of the tablet–as soon as they find out what it is, exactly.
Has the New York Times finally started charging people to read its news online? Not yet. But people who aren’t the New York Times are using the paper’s name and charging iPhone users to read the paper’s stuff–with Apple’s blessing. What gives?
No surprise: A study financed by Yahoo says that Yahoo ads helped a customer sell more stuff. A big surprise: The same study says the ad only works on people born before Woodstock.
Here’s another e-reader clamoring for attention in a Consumer Electronics Show full of e-readers: The Skiff Reader, produced by a company funded by publisher Hearst Corp. and supported by Sprint. But in many ways, the Skiff Reader’s specs are beside the point, because the real point of its parent company isn’t to produce e-reader devices at all–it wants to create a publishing and distribution platform. Does this sound familiar? And does it sound like something another publisher might want to buy?
Condé Nast has taken another small step into the future of digital magazines: The publisher has put a second edition of its GQ magazine up for sale on Apple’s iTunes Store. Seminude pop star aside, this doesn’t seem as sexy as the Tablet of Tomorrow talk. But the fact that people are indeed buying magazines in digital form seems pretty relevant to me.
CBS says it will stop doing business with ad networks, which are ubiquitous on the Web, and will offer access to its audience of 60 million unique visitors solely via its own salesforce. The company is one of a handful of big publishers trying to force buyers to pay more for its stuff. Clever or quixotic?
Last month, Condé Nast played show-and-tell with its concept of a digitized magazine. Today it’s Time Inc.’s turn: The publisher is demoing a concept version of Sports Illustrated it says will be able to run on whatever tablet Apple or any else has up their sleeves.
Want to see Condé Nast’s not-so-secret plans to produce tablet-friendly editions of its magazines? Get yourself to New York’s Meatpacking District. Or check out this grainy YouTube clip.
Here’s yet another content creator that’s convinced Apple has a tablet device in the works: Condé Nast says it will have a digital version of Wired magazine ready for the purported gadget by the middle of next year and will eventually create similar versions for all of its 18 titles.
But Condé, like other publishers, says Apple won’t actually talk to the company about its plans for the device–or even acknowledge that it has plans.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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