The (magazine) industry is discovering a lesson already learned by music labels and Hollywood studios: Apple may offer new opportunities with its devices, but it exacts a heavy toll. Magazine publishers argue in particular that limiting magazine sales on the iPad to single issues (except in a handful of cases) has hamstrung publishers from fully capitalizing on a new and lucrative business model.
“If you look at the Apple store,” said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, which offers five publications on the iPad, “the most common reason that people give an app a low rating is that it lacks a subscription option. They want to subscribe, and they don’t like the idea of paying $4.99 a month.”
Many applications cost almost as much as a printed copy of a magazine, a difficult concept for consumers to get their heads around.
In addition to limiting magazine sales to single issues, Apple has declined to share consumer data, meaning the Hearsts, Condé Nasts and Time Incs. of the publishing world know nothing about the people who are buying their digital magazines.
While they are far from writing off the iPad, publishers are eagerly awaiting the development of new tablet technologies from Google, BlackBerry and others that could at least give them some leverage.
Tablets, they believe, offer magazines a do-over in digital form. The picture quality can be far better on a tablet than on a computer screen; the ability to create multimedia, interactive storytelling is greater; and there are more opportunities for advertisers to innovate.
Read more at the New York Times.
