Be Excellent To Each Other

Oh right. That's a bit irritating seeing as Stanza can do it.

Is anyone actually planning to buy one beside me?

Bundlebox can get you the 16GB Wifi version delivered to the UK for £465.20.
I'm waiting for the release of the actual UK launch price before I take them up on it.

Yes. The more I think about it the more I realise I really want one, and it would be perfect for my habits.

Especially now this thread suggests a hard wired lock rotation switch, and the ability to import your own ebooks to iBook .

That said, having bought a laptop I won't be able to have saved up for one till probably Xmas and so by then I guess it would be best to wait for the second generation.

I'm flip-flopping between "WANT" and "WAIT FOR V2".

I would guess that is expensive.

Confirmed by Apple, incidentally; not a rumour.

Of course there is a fully featured iPhone ebook app (Stanza) which also allows the import ePub format ebooks. Note that this doesn't mean that all ebooks are going to work; notably, DRM protected ones from vendors other than Apple aren't going to work.

Definitely. I'm after the base wifi model.
It would be fun to get one from the US if anyone is over there, especially if if works out a lot cheaper.

I'm waiting for v2, partly because I'm skint, and partly because I want to see what the new iPhone does come summertime. I don't want a giant version of the current iPhone and a dinky new thing that does loads of extra cool shit.

Do you have to shake it to reboot?

I think you're getting it confused with babies.

Any more than two shakes is a wank.

Etch-a-sketch.

Do you like camping outside Best Buy?

Two days my brother in law was outside in his tent for the Ipod.

Clever man uses cleverness; estimates 150,000 iPads were pre-ordered on the first weekend. He goes on to claim there'll be somewhere around 1/2 million pre-ordered or reserved at launch day. Not bad going for Apple.

Tracking by order numbers really pisses retailers off. A couple of years ago, the various glastonbury forums were tracking registrations for tickets by unique ID number and it was noted that they were increasing very slowly. This was originally denied, and the number suddenly started increasing far more quickly - largely because they had moved from sequential numbering to (I think) factors of 9. GFL still denied low demand, right up until two days before the festival when they finally sold out, 3 months later instead of the normal 2 hours after they went on sale.

Geeky Flickering Lampshades.

Wow.
Dunno if this can possibly be true.

It says something about how Apple is perceived that it might well be.

They should've made them sign an NDA for the NDA.

Steve Jobs himself says this will be fixed, apparently.

Good. I'm forever leaving my email app in one of my many accounts' subfolders, then having to back out through several levels of folders just to see which account received new mail. Chore.

Pricing for content is becoming leaked. (http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/25/adv ... -firms-up/)

Informal poll. For magazines you already buy on paper, how much, compared to the cover price, would you pay for iPad versions?

I have a knee-jerk aversion to paying for this stuff that actually makes little sense. I buy Empire almost every month for whatever it costs; £3-4 or something. I read it then chuck it in my recycling bin. The experience of it being on paper isn't all that compelling; why shouldn't I take out an electronic subscription?

hmm, I think they'll need to remember they are competing with the internet on the iPad.

That said, I only ever buy magazines when I'm going on train journeys. And then very rarely, so I'm not much of a mag fan.



That seems very reasonable. Sizeable discount to take account of the vastly reduced overheads and having no adverts puts it far ahead of reading on websites.

Of course the best magazine would be an iPad version of NewsRack stocked with all my favourite sites. (which I've settled on as the best RSS reader for the iPhone - and has a tremendous offline mode)

What I want is for Marvel/DC to pump out their comics onto the iPad. I never read comics as £2 to read something in 5mins to then never want to read again (nor throw away) is just silly. But 59p a time and they would get plenty out of me.

I will immediately disagree with there being no discount for an online version, given the overheads of switching to digital media are vast, regardless of content quality. Same as I disagree with e-book pricing.

I never buy magazines as a rule but might be tempted to do so if they were neatly accessed on the gadget.
The pricing should be lower though, as it should be for e-books.

Are they, though?

The most outstanding magazine writing I recall in recent times was the 25 page Alien retrospective in Empire a few months back. It was thousands and thousands of words, had new interviews with most of the key cast and crew of all four movies, with plenty of production pictures and whatnot. I can't think of any websites that do writing on that scale. I also can't think of a way to make a website that does writing on that scale be profitable. And I don't want writing like that to disappear.

It's a conundrum.

You're confusing me here. You're disagreeing that there should be no discount? The overheads of switching to digital are vast? Surely you start off with everything in digital form, then actually transfer it to physical?

Oops, that was a pretty fucked up sentence there.

The savings in overheads of keeping it digital are great, I meant. I disagree with digital and physical products sharing the same price.

Ah, that makes significantly more sense. And I agree.

Isn't the rule of thumb in the paper magazine world that the cover price pays all your costs, so you break even on the physical product, and then profit from the advertising? In which case, as Apple give 70% of the purchase price to the magazine publisher, they are immediately up.

Not if it means they sell less paper copies, though, as it's a downward spiral from there.
[edit]Assuming they don't advertise in the iPad version

Yes they are. They are producing a very different type of content, but are still trying to sell it on a device that can access the internet and all the content there.

Big retrospectives are awesome, and what they should be doing, but the news sections and so on in magazines are even more redundent when the device you are reading them with can be a couple of months ahead of them.

Selling magazines (with ads I guess) at the same price as the paper copy suggests mens health at least are not grasping what they are competeing with.

That said with the tiny amount of copies that most magazines sell, they may do just fine.

Aye, the prices are far too high. But that said, I really like the idea of advert free magazines. As it's been said, the cover price basically covers cost and the ads generate the revenue.

I would love to see magazines free from the crutch of having to have adverts. Hell it could lead to the holy grail of a bias free games mag!?!.

Also, with no need for adverts, and 70% of all sales going into their pocket, then it seems very flexible. Tiny niche topics can charge more and so on...

This is the greatest idea Beex has ever had.

It would be very expensive to wipe your arse on an iPad if you ran out of shit roll.

Magazine 1 - iPad 0

Productions costs vary greatly from magazine to magazine. There are all kinds of things to take on board, from projected sales volume, paper weight/quality and printing quality. It's usually a fairly good assumption that the single biggest overhead a magazine can have is it's paper bill.

It's wrong to assume that cover price meets the production costs and advertising is the gravy, however. Models vary from country to country. In this country, newsstands sales usually account for up to 90% of a periodicals sales, with only a small amount being sold by subscription. In the US, those figures can be reversed with some titles enjoying the bulk of their sales from subs. Bear in mind that subscription copies are usually significantly cheaper than the retail, but they're a far more powerful marketing tool for selling space to advertisers because you know who's buying your magazine.

HC works for Bauer Media working on their listings titles - really low rent, very little advertising but big profits from volume sales and they don't get effected by recessions as they're not reliant on ad sales to make money. And theyir mags are cheap, but they outsell pretty much every other magazine in the UK with combined sales over their two weekly titles of 1.7m copies a week. I suspect that a lot of monthly titles are hoping they make money from the newsstands sales as well as advertising, I'm not sure what the cut off of circulation figures is to make a magazine profitable - I think a glossy perfect bound would need to shift >60k a month and not have a ton of expensive staff to make a decent profit. There are obviously mags that sell less and still make money, but they're either fashion wank mags like Dazed and Confused who don't pay any of their contributors and most of the staff are trustafarians, or seriously niche titles with higher than usual subscriptions percentages.

Now, having said all that, I would definitely buy magazines or newspapers on the iPad but I would genuinely not buy them if they're going to charge anything more than 60-70% of the newsstands price and less if you're subscribing.

Thinking about it, what would be a fair price for a yearly subscription to a Daily newspaper? 20p a day?

52 weeks
5 papers a week
260 issues
20p a day is £52 a year or £4.33 a month.

I'd consider that.

That's what the Sun costs in print. I think 10p is closer.

That's some expensive virtual toilet paper. I suspect the Sun literally has no value in electronic form.
I'd be more than happy to pay £5 a month for the guardian though. That's how much it costs at the moment and I *only buy it on Saturday*

The Sun isn't worth it to you, but to say it's not worth it at all is clearly very daft.

Well I am being snobbish, but I still suspect that if you take the printing price off the cover price of the Sun you'll be left with nothing, or close to nothing.

The Sun (and most of the downmarket tabloids) are just one long stream of paid for advertising anyway.

I am late to this discussion, so I don't know if this is of interest to you any more, but here's my experience and thought.

I do not buy many magazines regularly, but I do have a subscription to a Future Publishing title called 'the knitter'. Yeah yea.

Anyhoo. The cover price is £5.99.

£5.99 x13 (issues a year) = £77.87

A print subscription for 13 issues costs £58.40, but an electronic subscription costs £70.60, more than £12 above the price for a print subscription and very little saving on the cover price. Now, the thing is, i think that digital subscriptions fail in the same way as digital downloads do when compared with their physical counterparts.

I might have the choice to buy a physical CD for £10, or a digital album for £9. There may be a slight saving on the digital copy, but it has no resale value.

As far as the magazine is concerned the same problem arises. The re-sale value of this magazine, even for the most recent issues, is pretty high, with issues often reaching £8-10 on ebay, and issue 3 in particular usually fetching £30+. The Knitter promotes its digital subscriptions quite rigorously, and I know a few folks that have taken them out, but the re-sale value is nil. You need special (and really blinkin' clunky) software to read them on your computer and can only be accessed on a restricted number of devices to avoid sharing.

What's more (and this may be more specific to knitting magazines) to get any great use from the magazine you have to print sections of it (as a knitting pattern for a jumper may take 40+ hours to knit, and you don't want to keep referring to instructions on-screen) so you then have to print the appropriate parts anyway. Also, most knitters like to take their projects with them to knit along to whilst they are travelling or on lunch breaks, and in other places that they won't be able to access their digital copy whilst a magazine slips easily and comfortably into a bag.

I think that the price for a digital subscription to this type of publication would have to be significantly cheaper than that of the cover price and a decent amount cheaper than a print subscription to make me consider purchasing one.

Well, it's out. Most people who have one seem happy with it, but then most people willing to drop $500+ on a device they've never seen are also predisposed to like Apple kit. I've read most of the tear down reports, geek analysis, and reviews, if anyone has any questions.

This tickled me, from Windows fanboy Paul Thurrot:Whilst he might be right, there's also a big chance that bolded quote is going to come back to haunt him.

Also, it's made of battery. Numerous reviewers are showing 12-13 hours of video playback. I'd have killed for one during my last transatlantic flight.

Link us do please.
Teardowns and excitable box opening stuff.

Brilliant unboxing video: http://vimeo.com/10657964
(Yes, really, brilliant. Yes, I agree, unboxing videos are incredibly dull. Watch it and see what I mean.)

Teardown: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/1

It barely charges over USB: http://www.neowin.net/news/the-ipad039s ... ing-caveat

Yes, that's a huge battery, it will charge but take a while off 2.5W - standard USB.
(well, about 10 hours, so still OK overnight).
Thanks.

Nerd Razzle.

The iPad's CPU and RAM assembly is very compact but very expensive. But the iPad has a fair bit of space in it! So why not use cheaper parts? People are seeing this as a possible sign the iPhone v4 will have the same CPU as the iPad. This seems like good reasoning to me.

Any word on UK pricing?

Nope. Which is very odd. Still a vague "late April" release date too.