Times and Sunday Times to charge from June
The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced.
Users will pay £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription.
A pound? A day?
Seriously, NI just don’t get this whole internet thing, do they? I’ve no idea how much a physical copy of The Times is, but it must be around the same price. Why on earth would anyone want to pay that amount of money to get access to what is essentially a generic online news source when there are so many others out there available for free?
I know that papers like the Wall Street Journal also run a paid subscriber model, but that’s a far more specific market they’ve got going – people are more likely to pay to access that to get essential business info that isn’t available elsewhere.
Micropayments, guys. With the emphasis on the micro
On a similar-ish note, the lovely folks over at O’Reilly have been running a deal of the day on the ebook versions of their titles – $9.99 for an electronic version (pdf, epub, mobi) of one particular title each day. Now that’s a decent price point – charging a bit less than a hard copy for a pdf is missing the trick – I’d rather pay extra and get the physical book. But knock it down to $9.99 and suddenly i’m more likely to join in. I’ve bought four or five of them now, whereas I would have thought twice about picking up the full price book or slightly-less-than full-price ebook. All they need to do now is adopt the $9.99 model across *all* ebooks. 🙂
I use a combination of my HTC Android phone or just read the PDF on my laptop. Handy when it’s a programming-related title as you can flick back and forth between ebook and development environment.
Thoughts? Are you an ebook fan? What do you use to read your ebooks?
espresso coco 
{Nice|Great} – keep {it up|going} – enjoying the {posts|articles} alot.
I wonder if the £1 a day option is there just to make the £2 a week option look better value?
could well be – a pound a day seems like an extortionate amout to charge for access.