I always thought it was insane for a magazine to give away 30% of its sales to Apple, simply for selling through the App Store.
If I were the magazine industry, I would threaten to only support Android until Apple came up with a more reasonable fee.
That, of course, ignores the entire cost picture.
Let's say a magazine has an annual subscription rate of $15. If you have the same price on the iPad, Apple keeps $4.50 and the publisher keeps $10.50.
Now, if they sell the print subscription for $15, they have to physically print 12 magazines (if it's monthly) as well as mail 12 magazines. In addition, some percentage let lost or damaged in the mail and are routinely replaced.
Do you think that printing and mailing a dozen magazines is less than 30% of the retail price? If so, you're dreaming. Most reports are that printing and mailing costs are close to 100% of the retail price - and the publisher's profit comes from advertising alone. The e-version allows them to have a 70% gross margin.
I see it like I see my former profession as a photographer. Film, negatives, darkrooms... all things of the past except for the few who savour it as a symbol of quality from days gone by..
Hey Hermit, no sarcasm intended when I say I fully sympathize with the above. I was never a pro but did spend a lot of time doing my own B&W stuff in a little closet in my garage. Had a lot of fun with that old (and, for me, very expensive) Beseler enlarger back in the day.
"But since November (2010), the company (B&N) said more than 1.5 million magazine subscriptions and copies of single issues had been sold on the Nook Color."
and this:
"Hearst, which publishes O and Cosmopolitan, is selling tens of thousands of subscriptions on the device each month."
Considering that B&N has probably sold far fewer than a third as many NookColor's as Apple has iPad's, ( http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/03/29...ks-color-sold/ ) the results from the two articles I linked surely supports the argument that the Nook so far makes a better platform for the magazine publishers, delivering more results per unit sold if we go by these reports.
If the NookColor has less than a third of the iPad user base, and more than 1.5 million magazine subscriptions and copies of single issues had been sold on the Nook Color. the percentage of subscribers must be damn high, like 120% maybe?
They're probably quoting figures for total subscriptions for ALL digital media.
Or else this:
Quote:
Goldman Sachs estimates that Barnes & Noble "now has a 27% share of the e-book market, to Amazon's 58% and Apple's 9%" and goes on to say that "The Nook has 22% of the e-reader market, compared with the Kindle's 67%. According to the report, the Nook color e-reader, introduced in October, generated 64% of the company's hardware sales in the most recent quarter".
is just a whole load of cow dung or the 1.5 million figure is distorted.
I think iTunes still sells less albums (12 songs per album) than CDs. It's just that iTunes is the single largest distributer of music.
Either way his argument fails because labels who want to maximize sales are selling CDs and digital downloads.
And that's why I think a syndicate agency model is what's going to work for magazines as well.
Time will come when people don't want an entire magazine of what the editors thought you should read this weak or month. People will want articles that THEY want to read, and ONLY those articles.
Because Apple doesn't do any hosting, distribution, and collecting sales data is a sore point. Publishers want that. it does do purchasing but the publishers can handled that.
Is that a fact?
When you are downloading music, software, books, magazines, they are not located on Apple servers?
I would tend to agree that publishers want sales data. They always had access to that but nothing says that cant be worked out in the user agreement when you purchase a subscription.
If the NookColor has less than a third of the iPad user base, and more than 1.5 million magazine subscriptions and copies of single issues had been sold on the Nook Color. the percentage of subscribers must be damn high, like 120% maybe?
They're probably quoting figures for total subscriptions for ALL digital media.
My wife has at least three of those 1.5 million.
Altho putting Cosmopolitan and Family Circle on the same page just seems wrong.
BTW, why would 3 million Nook color owners buying 1.5 million magazines/subscriptions be any issue for you? That's only one of every two owners.
How much of a markup do stores put on printed material? Less than 30%? Do you also refer to publishers as giving away their sales when B&M stores mark up their printed items?
Stores could probably live with a lower markup if they charged each customer $500 for the right to shop there.
Apple do many things well, but this is not one of them. In fact it's awful.
Ya know when the book came out everyone feared it and thought it would fail.
ebooks emagazines will not be mainstream as long as we dinosaurs from the industrial age are still around. After we're gone the new generation that only knows the information age, will treat the printed books like a collectible at best
Not surprising to me. Before you can subscribe to Popular Science on the iPad, you've got to know Popular Science is on the iPad.
I never knew it until I read this article, and I'm in the iBook Store and the books section of the App Store all the time.
iBook Store doesn't even have a "magazine" category. Neither does App Store. You can search directly for "Popular Science", but unless you're thinking about "Popular Science", you're unlikely to stumble across it.
Yeah I agree with you for once. We need Magazine rack section, preferably in iBookstore.
This dude apparently did too much LSD in the 60's and fried his brain.
Yeah, i love CDs, and haven't yet embraced digital downloads? but even i understand that the CD's days are numbered.
Newspapers, magazines and books are all dinosaurs, and dying even more rapidly than the music industry. The handwriting is on the proverbial wall. Change is afoot.
Totally off-topic, but having seen the Pink Floyd Immersion Sets, I think if CDs have to go, they ought to go out with a bang like that!
Even Nick Mason said that this maybe the last time they can milk the cash cow via the physical format, so they want to release these immersive sets!
That's becuase it's costly to open a physical store.
If we actually have an open internet, the cost of opening a competing web store to sell digital magazine would be much lower, which means the digital store (in this case Apple's app store) shouldn't charge nearly as much. But obviously, this is not an open OS so that's why Apple can charge the local-monopoly price. Same for Android (which is not really open either).
Like Playboy Magazine did with their WebApp sold through their "store".
The co-founder of Rolling Stone can't roll with he times and responds to change with "sheer insanity and insecurity and fear." What ever happened to the green goal of a paperless society that embraces trees?
it only matters to them if it's not in your industry.
Yeah I agree with you for once. We need Magazine rack section, preferably in iBookstore.
Glad we agree. I'd just say they need a "magazine" category in both stores. There's a lot of magazine apps in the App Store. They're just nearly impossible to find unless you know about each individual app ahead of time.
And they need sub-categories as well. Today, I can go into a brick-and-morter book store and find the magazines that I'm looking for, not matter if what I'm looking for is a science mag, a politics mag, a comic book, a bride mag, a mens fitness mag, etc. And I can do it in less than 15 minutes even if I've never been in that particular store before. By contrast, searching for things on the iPad is an exercise in futility.
They also need something that fills the function of the magazine rack, where I can easily scan the magazines available to see if something I wasn't thinking of at the time catches my eye.
Finally, Apple needs to realize that the problem we're talking about here with magazines exists for _all_ of their items for sale in all of their stores, not just magazines. It's nearly impossible to find anything in their stores unless you know about it ahead of time.
Which is why I've been saying _all_ of their stores need a serious upgrade in their organization and search capabilities.
Remember the days when the dot-coms were threating to send ALL brick and mortars businesses the way of the dinosaur?
Guess who is still standing?
Brick and Mortar stores.
The same analogy applies here.
The reason why the dot-coms failed going up against brick-and-mortar stores was because they thought they were going to change people's shopping habits. But it was obvious that online shopping didn't present anything new in buying when compared to physical presence as people bought using mail order, telephone sales, etc. via catalogs for over 100 years. That's how Sears became the largest retailer back in its day.
After the dot-com bust, when retailers' online operations were operational, who's businesses suffered as the economy recovered? The catalogers.
Don't listen to VCs and entrepreneurs talk about what the next big thing is. Check with customers first. Always.
But don't consider brick-and-mortars free and clear yet. As trust in online purchases grows, and the need to physically handle merchandise before purchasing wanes, particularly for commodities, a physical presence becomes less convenient for increasingly ADHD and privacy-minded consumers. Look at what online book sales are doing to the book retail industry.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galbi
Books, no matter how much the e-books devicer makers, electronic makers and publishers like to boast, are here to stay.
So Borders hasn't closed over 200 stores and filed for reorganization due to weakness in book sales? What was it then?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galbi
The same applies to magazines.
Magazines are worse than books because they're generally considered time-sensitive. While keeping a stack of magazines might be important to show social status or to pre-occupy patients in the waiting room, an increasingly green-conscious society is not as keen on tossing dead trees into the dumpster or lugging them to the mythical recycling center.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galbi
Hundreds of years of acclimation to printed press will not vanquish in thin air in a matter of mear 10 years.
I don't know what part of the globe you're at, but around here most people don't have hundreds of years of experience with anything, let alone the printed press. And with almost 20 years exposure to the Internet, and the visual quality of print finally being present in online media, another 10 years should close the book on printed media for general usage.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galbi
The print is versatile, requires no energy, flexible (moldable), can go through storms and still survive, be somewhat water proof (after it dries), be used as a quick umbrella during rainy seasons, folded into paper airplanes, can make origamis, used as a paper football, etc etc.
Paper FTW
Living in Florida, I can tell you paper doesn't survive rain nor hurricanes well and are a hassle to salvage as well as to transport and store when it isn't serving as your umbrella.
I agree paper offers a great deal of convenience and versatility, and as the publisher of a notebook app for the Mac I'm increasing its feature set for print/paper. But digital media offers more than an order of magnitude more convenience and versatility than print.
Comments
I always thought it was insane for a magazine to give away 30% of its sales to Apple, simply for selling through the App Store.
If I were the magazine industry, I would threaten to only support Android until Apple came up with a more reasonable fee.
That, of course, ignores the entire cost picture.
Let's say a magazine has an annual subscription rate of $15. If you have the same price on the iPad, Apple keeps $4.50 and the publisher keeps $10.50.
Now, if they sell the print subscription for $15, they have to physically print 12 magazines (if it's monthly) as well as mail 12 magazines. In addition, some percentage let lost or damaged in the mail and are routinely replaced.
Do you think that printing and mailing a dozen magazines is less than 30% of the retail price? If so, you're dreaming. Most reports are that printing and mailing costs are close to 100% of the retail price - and the publisher's profit comes from advertising alone. The e-version allows them to have a 70% gross margin.
You don't go visit the dentist?
My dentist and my doctor no longer have magazines... apparently they pass too many germs around. It's a different world.
I see it like I see my former profession as a photographer. Film, negatives, darkrooms... all things of the past except for the few who savour it as a symbol of quality from days gone by..
Hey Hermit, no sarcasm intended when I say I fully sympathize with the above. I was never a pro but did spend a lot of time doing my own B&W stuff in a little closet in my garage. Had a lot of fun with that old (and, for me, very expensive) Beseler enlarger back in the day.
"But since November (2010), the company (B&N) said more than 1.5 million magazine subscriptions and copies of single issues had been sold on the Nook Color."
and this:
"Hearst, which publishes O and Cosmopolitan, is selling tens of thousands of subscriptions on the device each month."
Considering that B&N has probably sold far fewer than a third as many NookColor's as Apple has iPad's, ( http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/03/29...ks-color-sold/ ) the results from the two articles I linked surely supports the argument that the Nook so far makes a better platform for the magazine publishers, delivering more results per unit sold if we go by these reports.
If the NookColor has less than a third of the iPad user base, and more than 1.5 million magazine subscriptions and copies of single issues had been sold on the Nook Color. the percentage of subscribers must be damn high, like 120% maybe?
They're probably quoting figures for total subscriptions for ALL digital media.
Or else this:
Goldman Sachs estimates that Barnes & Noble "now has a 27% share of the e-book market, to Amazon's 58% and Apple's 9%" and goes on to say that "The Nook has 22% of the e-reader market, compared with the Kindle's 67%. According to the report, the Nook color e-reader, introduced in October, generated 64% of the company's hardware sales in the most recent quarter".
is just a whole load of cow dung or the 1.5 million figure is distorted.
I think iTunes still sells less albums (12 songs per album) than CDs. It's just that iTunes is the single largest distributer of music.
Either way his argument fails because labels who want to maximize sales are selling CDs and digital downloads.
And that's why I think a syndicate agency model is what's going to work for magazines as well.
Time will come when people don't want an entire magazine of what the editors thought you should read this weak or month. People will want articles that THEY want to read, and ONLY those articles.
A good example is TRVL for the iPad.
Because Apple doesn't do any hosting, distribution, and collecting sales data is a sore point. Publishers want that. it does do purchasing but the publishers can handled that.
Is that a fact?
When you are downloading music, software, books, magazines, they are not located on Apple servers?
I would tend to agree that publishers want sales data. They always had access to that but nothing says that cant be worked out in the user agreement when you purchase a subscription.
If the NookColor has less than a third of the iPad user base, and more than 1.5 million magazine subscriptions and copies of single issues had been sold on the Nook Color. the percentage of subscribers must be damn high, like 120% maybe?
They're probably quoting figures for total subscriptions for ALL digital media.
My wife has at least three of those 1.5 million.
Altho putting Cosmopolitan and Family Circle on the same page just seems wrong.
BTW, why would 3 million Nook color owners buying 1.5 million magazines/subscriptions be any issue for you? That's only one of every two owners.
Way to jump to extremes. :roll eyes:
How much of a markup do stores put on printed material? Less than 30%? Do you also refer to publishers as giving away their sales when B&M stores mark up their printed items?
Stores could probably live with a lower markup if they charged each customer $500 for the right to shop there.
Apple do many things well, but this is not one of them. In fact it's awful.
Remember the days when the dot-coms were threating to send ALL brick and mortars businesses the way of the dinosaur?
Guess who is still standing?
Brick and Mortar stores.
In Australia, 38 book stores have closed recently due to unprofitability...
http://www.smh.com.au/business/hundr...303-1bgfx.html
ebooks emagazines will not be mainstream as long as we dinosaurs from the industrial age are still around. After we're gone the new generation that only knows the information age, will treat the printed books like a collectible at best
In Australia, 38 book stores have closed recently due to unprofitability...
http://www.smh.com.au/business/hundr...303-1bgfx.html
true that! Here in the US borders is gone and Barnes and Noble is up for a firesale and the new buyer is only interested in the nook.
I get it that the printed books will be around for a while, but it's not the future.
I always thought it was insane for a magazine to give away 30% of its sales to Apple, simply for selling through the App Store.
What's the price for print costs, distribution and reseller's cut?
true that! Here in the US borders is gone.
Only closing 30% of their stores.
Not surprising to me. Before you can subscribe to Popular Science on the iPad, you've got to know Popular Science is on the iPad.
I never knew it until I read this article, and I'm in the iBook Store and the books section of the App Store all the time.
iBook Store doesn't even have a "magazine" category. Neither does App Store. You can search directly for "Popular Science", but unless you're thinking about "Popular Science", you're unlikely to stumble across it.
Yeah I agree with you for once. We need Magazine rack section, preferably in iBookstore.
This dude apparently did too much LSD in the 60's and fried his brain.
Yeah, i love CDs, and haven't yet embraced digital downloads? but even i understand that the CD's days are numbered.
Newspapers, magazines and books are all dinosaurs, and dying even more rapidly than the music industry. The handwriting is on the proverbial wall. Change is afoot.
Totally off-topic, but having seen the Pink Floyd Immersion Sets, I think if CDs have to go, they ought to go out with a bang like that!
Even Nick Mason said that this maybe the last time they can milk the cash cow via the physical format, so they want to release these immersive sets!
That's becuase it's costly to open a physical store.
If we actually have an open internet, the cost of opening a competing web store to sell digital magazine would be much lower, which means the digital store (in this case Apple's app store) shouldn't charge nearly as much. But obviously, this is not an open OS so that's why Apple can charge the local-monopoly price. Same for Android (which is not really open either).
Like Playboy Magazine did with their WebApp sold through their "store".
Why do we "need" what we already have?
The co-founder of Rolling Stone can't roll with he times and responds to change with "sheer insanity and insecurity and fear." What ever happened to the green goal of a paperless society that embraces trees?
it only matters to them if it's not in your industry.
Yeah I agree with you for once. We need Magazine rack section, preferably in iBookstore.
Glad we agree. I'd just say they need a "magazine" category in both stores. There's a lot of magazine apps in the App Store. They're just nearly impossible to find unless you know about each individual app ahead of time.
And they need sub-categories as well. Today, I can go into a brick-and-morter book store and find the magazines that I'm looking for, not matter if what I'm looking for is a science mag, a politics mag, a comic book, a bride mag, a mens fitness mag, etc. And I can do it in less than 15 minutes even if I've never been in that particular store before. By contrast, searching for things on the iPad is an exercise in futility.
They also need something that fills the function of the magazine rack, where I can easily scan the magazines available to see if something I wasn't thinking of at the time catches my eye.
Finally, Apple needs to realize that the problem we're talking about here with magazines exists for _all_ of their items for sale in all of their stores, not just magazines. It's nearly impossible to find anything in their stores unless you know about it ahead of time.
Which is why I've been saying _all_ of their stores need a serious upgrade in their organization and search capabilities.
Absolutely true.
Remember the days when the dot-coms were threating to send ALL brick and mortars businesses the way of the dinosaur?
Guess who is still standing?
Brick and Mortar stores.
The same analogy applies here.
The reason why the dot-coms failed going up against brick-and-mortar stores was because they thought they were going to change people's shopping habits. But it was obvious that online shopping didn't present anything new in buying when compared to physical presence as people bought using mail order, telephone sales, etc. via catalogs for over 100 years. That's how Sears became the largest retailer back in its day.
After the dot-com bust, when retailers' online operations were operational, who's businesses suffered as the economy recovered? The catalogers.
Don't listen to VCs and entrepreneurs talk about what the next big thing is. Check with customers first. Always.
But don't consider brick-and-mortars free and clear yet. As trust in online purchases grows, and the need to physically handle merchandise before purchasing wanes, particularly for commodities, a physical presence becomes less convenient for increasingly ADHD and privacy-minded consumers. Look at what online book sales are doing to the book retail industry.
Books, no matter how much the e-books devicer makers, electronic makers and publishers like to boast, are here to stay.
So Borders hasn't closed over 200 stores and filed for reorganization due to weakness in book sales? What was it then?
The same applies to magazines.
Magazines are worse than books because they're generally considered time-sensitive. While keeping a stack of magazines might be important to show social status or to pre-occupy patients in the waiting room, an increasingly green-conscious society is not as keen on tossing dead trees into the dumpster or lugging them to the mythical recycling center.
Hundreds of years of acclimation to printed press will not vanquish in thin air in a matter of mear 10 years.
I don't know what part of the globe you're at, but around here most people don't have hundreds of years of experience with anything, let alone the printed press. And with almost 20 years exposure to the Internet, and the visual quality of print finally being present in online media, another 10 years should close the book on printed media for general usage.
The print is versatile, requires no energy, flexible (moldable), can go through storms and still survive, be somewhat water proof (after it dries), be used as a quick umbrella during rainy seasons, folded into paper airplanes, can make origamis, used as a paper football, etc etc.
Paper FTW
Living in Florida, I can tell you paper doesn't survive rain nor hurricanes well and are a hassle to salvage as well as to transport and store when it isn't serving as your umbrella.
I agree paper offers a great deal of convenience and versatility, and as the publisher of a notebook app for the Mac I'm increasing its feature set for print/paper. But digital media offers more than an order of magnitude more convenience and versatility than print.
Paper serves its purpose. But claims it will continue to be the primary rendering and distribution medium for content in the face of superior formats are as defensible as Palm's marketshare in the face of the iPhone.