Fee likely for Times's news via iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Fee likely for Times's news via iPhone

boston.com

11 pointsFluidDjango8 comments

I'm ready to pay for access to newspapers via electronic means. If I could get a Kindle DX in the UK I would buy one and use it for magazine and newspaper subscriptions. I think it's the perfect way to get access to recent material like this.

I would prefer to continue buying physical books because I like having them around the house (except for technical books which have a limited shelf life). That way I can read them again, give them to people, etc. I like the serendipity of looking at my bookshelf and rediscovering.

But I don't keep newspapers or magazines. If I need access to their archives I'll pay for it. If I could subscribe for a reasonable fee on a DX that would be ideal.

At the US prices for magazines and newspapers I can imagine subscribing to much more content if I had a DX. But the killer publication for me would be The Economist.

For the skeptics, consider books that are availible free online but sell well (Practical Common Lisp comes to mind). People are paying for the distribution method, not the content.

I have real doubts whether this payment model is going to work for Times in future. As a consumer of their info it is right now a PITA. [ I'm open to seeing what ease and cost/benefit emerges with future micropayment processes. ]

The conventional wisdom seems to be (becoming) if you start out offering something for free (as they do now), it's going to go hard for you if you begin charging.

I disagree. I've written off the times because of their terrible website usability (full page ads, pop-ups, attempts at forced registration).

I'm assuming the product in there is good on some level since they have such brand cachet, but I don't care to deal with getting at because it such a pain. If they made it an enjoyable user experience, I would probably pay for it because I know that it is good.

I'm not so sure. If they provided the information content of the paper, including crosswords and other things they currently charge extra for, allowed me to format the daily information dump in the way I see fit, and reduced the number of pixels taken up by ad-space (specific to iPhone app here) while charging substantially less than daily home delivery for that package, I'd likely bite.

Instead, I suspect they'll simply re-wrap the current app in an ongoing subscription charge and call it a day. Then wonder why nobody bites (aforementioned Safari access will most likely still be there, after all). It's the strategy they chose with ill-conceived (and abandoned) the Op-Ed paywall, and I imagine it's more or less the same path they'll take again because it seems safer to them.

The NYT's content is generally very good, so I have no argument against paying a subscriber fee. Their iPhone app is another problem though- it's definitely the buggiest iPhone app I've used and needs a lot more stability before I'm willing to pay a subscription for something which crashes 1 out of 3 times I use it and has blatantly broken features.

Couldn't iPhone users just go to www.nytimes.com in their phones web browser and circumvent the fees?

They could, but in cases like this ease of access is everything.

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