Sports Illustrated's All-Inclusive Print/Digital Subscription Plan

Excerpt from Mashable: ... "At a press event in New York City Friday, Sports Illustrated and parent company Time Inc. announced a new subscription plan that spans the web, and several major mobile and tablet devices — excluding, notably, the iPhone and the iPad."

Make special note of the last phrase above...it spills forth an intriguing issue discussed in some of my previous posts of late.

Although this post is interesting and informative (if I do say so myself) on it's own...please read my yesterday's post on Publishing/Writing: Insights, News, Intrigue Blog (Time, Inc. Tells Apple iPad:‘Screw You!’), and the links therein, for more juicy background.

From Mashable by Lauren Indvik:

Will Sports Illustrated’s Subscription Plan Rescue Digital Magazine Sales?

At a press event in New York City Friday, Sports Illustrated and parent company Time Inc. announced a new subscription plan that spans the web, and several major mobile and tablet devices — excluding, notably, the iPhone and the iPad.

To subscribe, Sports Illustrated readers will need to elect one of two subscription options at si.com/magazine (see below), and then download the apps through the Android Marketplace. Google will take an undisclosed cut of sales, Time EVP and Chief Digital Offer Randall Rothenberg said.

The subscription options are as follows:

Print/Digital Bundle: Print delivery plus full access to web content, and apps for Android-powered tablets (currently only the Galaxy Tab) and smartphones. Costs $4.99 per month, or $48 per year

Digital Only: Full access to web content, and apps for tablets and smartphones running Android. Costs $3.99 per month

Current print subscribers will have free access to all digital properties through the end of their current plan. Those who prefer to read Sports Illustrated on their iPhones or iPads can continue to purchase and download single issues of the magazine through the apps [iTunes link] designated for each device.

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Remember, you can get Writers Welcome Blog on your Kindle at http://alturl.com/xymdy

E-Books Outsell Paperback Books on Amazon

E-books and e-book pricing are on the fast track. It is estimated that e-book sales will reach over two billion (that's with a "b" not a "m") by 2013, up from 313 million in 2009 (Yankee Group research firm).

Mach speed, indeed, best defines e-book growth!

And this is good for business owners, as well as writers and authors, as it presents an opportunity for business types to offer a value added service (published books, journals, papers about their products and services) to their clients across many retailer sites and platforms while making extra income simultaneously.

But writers/authors are uniquely benefited in that e-books and their ease of publication have busted down the constrictive city walls of traditional publishing and exposed the wide open publishing prairie to go write and play in, so to speak.

This from Mike Phillips of Website Magazine:

E-books Becoming Big Business

Research firm Yankee Group estimates that the U.S. e-book market will reach $2.7 billion in sales in 2013, up from just $313 million in 2009. That's good for a growth rate of 83 percent, above even paid mobile apps, at 72 percent.

Already, Amazon claims that Kindle e-books now outsell paperback books on Amazon.com. This is great news for authors but they are not the only ones who can benefit. One of the advantages of e-books is the efficiency in which they can be published. Websites such as LuLu.com and CreateSpace.com (Amazon) make it quite easy to publish an e-book across multiple retailer sites on any topic. For business owners, this presents an opportunity to offer yet another added value to their customers and even add revenue along the way.

Expertise in any industry can be used to create an e-book in short order, then sell that material or use it as a promotional or cross-sell incentive. Amazon recently announced Kindle Singles - e-books in the range of 5,000-30,000 words. This could mean publishing white papers, how-to's or even re-packaging a series of blog posts around a particular topic as an e-book. Kindle Singles are currently selling anywhere from $0.99-$2.99, in most cases. Amazon typically takes 30 percent of each sale.

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Self-Publishing Pulling Big Money for Some

Ever wonder what happened to all the great stories that died before self-publishing came into it's own? Oh, when I think of the waste!

Back in the traditional publishing heyday, when we had dictators and self-appointed "experts" that knew just what everybody else wanted to read (and what they thought would sell)...some actually granted a few (damn few for what they should have been publishing) aspiring authors an audience with King Publication, himself.

Here is another example of an obscure but aspiring author, Amanda Hocking (pictured), who, after trying to no avail for traditional publication, embraced self-publishing and found success by selling 164,000 copies of her books in 2010.

Now don't get me wrong, it does take talent...and a hot genre...and blessings from God...and magic stardust...and ad infinitum!

Here then is Amanda Hocking's story By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY:

Authors catch fire with self-published e-books

You may not know her name, but Amanda Hocking and others like her are riding the comet of digital publishing.

Fed up with attempts to find a traditional publisher for her young-adult paranormal novels, Hocking self-published last March and began selling her novels on online bookstores like Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.

By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads.

More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books.

"I can't really say that I would have been more successful if I'd gone with a traditional publisher," says Hocking, 26, who lives in Austin, Minn. "But I know this is working really well for me."

In fact, Hocking is selling so well that on Thursday, the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list.

A recent survey shows 20 million people read e-books last year, and more self-published authors are taking advantage of the trend.

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REAL Push-Button Publishing

Holy shitswowki! A 10-year old company, Really Strategies, Inc., has broken through the next-level-tech-publishing-ceiling and designed a system that seamlessly ingests Word documents and automatically converts them to XML. More than that, this system offers output to all major publishing formats in 70 languages without changing a publisher’s existing production systems...AND it performs all this in literally seconds...figuratively speaking.

The system is dubbed RSuite Cloud. It will improve content management systems (CMS), increase production and decrease costs!

Talk about putting a Speedo workout suit on your editorial and production workflow tasks!

Great details here by Barbara Brynko in Information Today, Inc.:

RSuite Cloud: Push-Button Publishing

Publishers today are scrambling to keep profits up, costs down, and users happy. But keeping a secure foothold in the information industry isn’t easy, especially with the increased demands of changing technology and multichannel delivery.
“Some publishers are very good at managing technology and some are not,” says Barry Bealer, CEO of Really Strategies, Inc. That’s one of the reasons the company rolled out its latest product called RSuite Cloud, a cloud-based, push-button publishing system for print and digital products. It’s designed to automate the publishing process, offering output to all major publishing formats in 70 languages without changing a publisher’s existing production systems. “This is for the publisher, whether big or small, that doesn’t have a large in-house staff,” says Bealer. “You don’t have to manage the service; it’s all in the cloud.”

During Really Strategies’ 10-year history, the company has continued to meet the changing needs of its growing list of clients, including IEEE, Oxford University Press, The McGraw-Hill Cos., and The New York Times. And during that decade, the company also expanded its global reach from its headquarters in Audubon, Pa., to offices and development partners worldwide, from Australia to China and points in between.

In the past year, Bealer says Really Strategies has fine-tuned its mission, “which is really about accelerating publishers’ revenue and profit growth by providing better content management.” The bottom line: “If you can’t get your products out, you can’t generate revenue or profits,” he says. “But if you have the right technology in place, you can create new derivative products literally on the fly.”

RSuite Cloud was created with better content management in mind. It joins the company’s two other solutions: RSuite CMS, a content management system designed specifically for publishers, and DocZone, an end-to-end SaaS XML content management system for technical publishers.

For Dan Dube, senior vice president of cloud solutions at Really Strategies, RSuite Cloud is nothing short of revolutionary. “What we’re talking about here is revolutionary,” he says. “Our differentiator is the automated production of a multilingual tool that will print an ebook completely online.” Although there is some standardization in the process of preparing content in RSuite Cloud, publishers can literally push a button to generate an ebook in 70 different languages within seconds or minutes, he says.

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A Reborn Nation of Readers!

God bless e-readers! They just may be our nation's salvation from a very dangerous dumbing-down period.

The recent mass availability of economical e-readers has sparked young adults and teens to devour e-readable media and re-introduced many of the old intellectual classics (as well as new knowledgeable and intelligent word-fare) to an excited and hungry audience.

E-readers are common riders in backpacks, purses and briefcases...AND this is good!

It's good for our future as a country as well as for those who write and publish and/or will be doing so in the future.

This from Julie Bosman of the New York Times:

E-Readers Catch Younger Eyes and Go in Backpacks

Something extraordinary happened after Eliana Litos received an e-reader for a Hanukkah gift in December.

“Some weeks I completely forgot about TV,” said Eliana, 11. “I went two weeks with only watching one show, or no shows at all. I was just reading every day.”

Ever since the holidays, publishers have noticed that some unusual titles have spiked in e-book sales. The “Chronicles of Narnia” series. “Hush, Hush.” The “Dork Diaries” series.

At HarperCollins, for example, e-books made up 25 percent of all young-adult sales in January, up from about 6 percent a year before — a boom in sales that quickly got the attention of publishers there.

“Adult fiction is hot, hot, hot, in e-books,” said Susan Katz, the president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books. “And now it seems that teen fiction is getting to be hot, hot, hot.”

In their infancy e-readers were adopted by an older generation that valued the devices for their convenience, portability and, in many cases, simply for their ability to enlarge text to a more legible size. Appetite for e-book editions of best sellers and adult genre fiction — romance, mysteries, thrillers — has seemed almost bottomless.

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When You Merge Newspaper Format With Web Capabilities What Do You Get?

What do you get with subject merger? A complex content, digital newspaper that updates in real time and in 3D clarity and color just to name some benefits.

Believe me, this concept was inevitably coming anyway...BUT, Rupert Murdoch's Daily was the first to materialize.

It won't be the last.

As far as I can interpret, the Daily will only be available through the iPad...This could be a problem that grows down the road. I suspect that future digital newspapers will be apped out so they can be accessed on all devices.

It will be interesting to observe the success of the subscription concept and rate
(99 US cents a week or $39.99 a year). Will the Daily be the future business model that will save newspapers?

Rob Spiegel of MacNewsWorld writes this (picked up through E-Commerce Times):

The Daily on the iPad Could Ring In New Publishing Era

"The Daily is an innovative showcase for what a newspaper can do in the modern tablet era," said tech analyst Azita Arvani. "It is an explosion of all types of content in a stunning layout. The Daily app design is very Applesque: beautiful and intuitive. ... You can flip the paper around like a newspaper, watch videos, etc. ... I think we have seen the future of the newspaper. It looks good!"

Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (Nasdaq: NWS) hope to revolutionize the way readers experience the newspaper. On Wednesday, News Corp. unveiled and launched its iPad-exclusive digital "paper" called The Daily. Held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the launch was hosted by News Corp. Chairman Richard Murdoch and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) Vice President of Internet Services Eddy Cue. The Daily will integrate different forms of media, including, text, video, audio and social networks.

The Daily will be free for its first two weeks and then 99 US cents a week or $39.99 a year. The publication includes advertising . The Daily will collect subscription dollars through a new platform for subscriptions in iTunes.

The publication contains a carousel of tiles representing different stories. Readers can shuffle unread stories and read in random order. Professional audio readings of top stories are available, so it can be used like a radio. Top stories are hosted by an anchor.

Breaking news is delivered throughout the day to subscribers. The Daily will take advantage of iPad technology by presenting HD videos and 360-degree pictures. Users will have the ability to share articles to Twitter, Facebook and email. They can also opt to view Twitter feeds pertaining to stories. Other sections include customizable sports, weather, games and crossword content.

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More on Apple's Dictatorial Asininity

Please read my two posts on the Publishing/Writing: Insights, News, Intrigue Blog RE specific Apple issues with publishers' content management for background on this post.

Apple is further restricting access apps for other than Apple devices (e-readers, tablets, etc) to read mags and newspapers to be offered through their iStore...even to the point of forcing some to have to buy Apple's own iPad tablet if they want to read the iStore offerings.

At least, that is the way this humble boob interprets the situation.

In my past posts, referenced above, I discussed Apple's outrageous fee (30%) charged to publishers who want to sell their content through the iStore, AND the fact that Apple did not want to share the subscribers data with the publishers...A BIG mistake.

Me thinks Apple is getting too big for it's britches...and they should stick to selling devices and not messing with content and all it derives.

Wonder if Apple's deal with Rupert Murdoch's "The Daily" has influenced the "money-grabbing" messy management?

Apple is definitely not the only kid on the tablet block anymore (and probably doesn't even have the best tablet computer!) with the introduction of Motorola's Xoom among others.

I believe Apple is managing itself into the cellar...and they will need a completely "new device" to start over again. They are taking the bite out of their own apple!

Matt Kinsman, managing editor of FOLIO magazine, has more details RE Apple's tightening grip on content sales:

Apple Rejects Sony Reader App, Tightens Grip on Content Sales
From now on, all in-app purchases must go through Apple.

Apple has reportedly rejected Sony's reader app from the App store for selling content within the app and letting customers make purchases outside the App store (such as within the Sony Reader Store, according to The New York Times.

From now on, all in-app purchases have to go through Apple, according to Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division. "It's the opposite of what we wanted to bring to the market," Haber is quoted as saying by The Drum. "We always wanted to bring the content to as many devices as possible, not one device to one store."

The news comes the day before Apple and News Corp. are supposed to debut News Corp.'s new digital magazine The Daily, and many observers predict Apple will use that opportunity to unveil a new subscription system.

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