The Wired iPad app is dropping in price. The first edition of the app cost $4.99. Conde Nast are dropping the price by a dollar which knocks 20% off the price taking it down to $3.99. It’s not a huge saving by any means, but at least it’s a little cheaper than it was before.
The reason the company are changing the price appears to be related to experimenting to see what price point works the best. The June issue that cost $4.99 sold 95,000 digital copies at that price. Perhaps the new version will sell more, we won’t know till this time next month.
Conde says it will be experimenting with digital magazine pricing for months to come. But Wired editor Chris Anderson, who wants us to know that he doesn’t control his magazine’s sales price, makes the common sense argument: Digital editions should cost less than physical ones because there’s no distribution cost.
A few new features include a built in browser that lets you tap on links and not be kicked out of the application. When purchasing the magazine now, you get a free “wrapper” as the company like to call it, and when you load that up you can purchase issues of the magazine from within the application.
The July issue is smaller in size although this isn’t due to technical changes, but rather it just being a smaller issue. It weighs in at a hefty 340MB still vs the 550MB of the June issue. Wired say that Conde and Adobe [ADBE] need to work out how to shrink the magazine down a bit to make it easier to subscribe to digitally.
It’s an impressive application although the price tag could be holding a few people back.
Via: All Things D
This update is a massive disaster. It deletes your June issue from your iPad forcing you to re-download it (over 400mb).
Then to rub salt into the wounds the in-app downloading is buggy. It took me 3 attempts to get the July issue which would simply stop downloading after around 300mb. Onto my 3rd attempt to get my June issue back with these attempts failing around the 400mb mark.
Nearly 2gb of download.
I can seamlessly get movies over 1gb from the iTunes store, but Wired can not deliver 400mb.
The new v1.1 does NOT fix the downloading issue.
I just bought the July Edition and am trying to download it for the 9th time. The download always seems to stop at 267.9mb I’ll try one more time and then I’m deleting the application, that’s just outrageous.