Sony's electronic reader will offer subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, the latest in a series of moves by publishers and consumer-electronics companies to loosen Amazon's hold on the embryonic e-reader market." />
Hearst plans to launch next year a service called Skiff to sell digital subscriptions to newspapers and magazines in a format it hopes will be more visually appealing to users of electronic readers and other electronic devices." />
Publishers win a big one in confrontation with Apple. No more requirement that content subscriptions must go through Apple, no more 30% revenue sharing with Apple, and control of user/reader information remains w/publishers.
Questia Library Plus iPhone app. Credit: Questia We'll spare you the obvious "there's an app for that" joke. But you can get a library's worth of books on your phone. Questia, an online research portal for students, announced its application today for reading books, articles and periodicals on an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app costs 99 cents for 5,000 public-domain books and a week of unlimited access. After that, users can buy a two-week subscription for $9.99. There are so many things wrong with this we don't know where to start. For one, students don't like to buy things....
Experimenting with new business models in epubs:
"For the first time, customers can subscribe to unlimited reading of as many as 32 titles from five different publishers through one app, with one user interface, at one price."
Amid all the bleak news for newspapers, there's something good going on: Subscribers are sticking with their papers for longer -- and frequently paying more.