Hot on the heels of Amazon’s new Matchbook program, which aims to facillitate your access to ebooks of print titles you own already come this story about Time Warner’s attempts to ‘unbundle’ the print from the digital.
As the article explains, subscribers to print magazines like ‘People’ have for some time been able to enjoy free access to the digital version as well.
No more. Under the new app-based digital model, they’ll have to pay up once their current subscriptions expire. There are an array of new subscription options including print-only, digital-only, and a $100+ ‘V.I.P.’ version. And the writing is on the wall that other Time Warner mags will be following People’s lead.
Will readers really pay that much for access to celebrity gossip? We’ll see! My gut tells me Amazon is more on the right track than Time Warner is, but I could be wrong. What I do know is that if this backfires on them, we won’t have to wait too long for them to change their minds again. Keeping the customer trumps everything these days.
