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Sony E-Reader to Offer Wall Street Journal Subscriptions
CommentsVPA / December 17, 2009
From THE WALL STREET JOURNALSony Corp.'s electronic reader will offer subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, the latest in a series of moves by publishers and consumer-electronics companies to loosen Amazon.com Inc.'s hold on the embryonic e-reader market.
Sony announced Thursday morning that it will sell subscriptions to the digital edition of the Journal as well as a daily summary of news events available only to owners of the Sony device. In addition, users will be able to subscribe to a daily summary of news stories and columns from MarketWatch.com, which like the Journal is owned by Dow Jones & Co.
The Journal summary will cost $5 a month on top of the $14.99 monthly charge for the digital edition of the paper, while a subscription to the MarketWatch product will cost $10.99 a month.
The Sony reader will also be the exclusive seller of the digital edition of the New York Post, set to launch in January. That product will cost $9.99 a month. Both the Post and Dow Jones are owned by News Corp.
Over the past year, newspaper and magazine publishers have been working with various partners to create a digital reading experience they think will be superior to the one offered on Amazon's Kindle, which currently is the clear leader in the e-reading market. For example, Hearst Corp. is developing an e-reading device as part of a comprehensive service for selling digital versions of its newspapers and magazines. Gannett Co.'s USA Today and Pearson PLC's Financial Times are working with Plastic Logic Ltd., maker of an electronic reading tablet.
A number of newspapers, including the New York Times and the Journal, sell subscriptions on the Kindle. Sony says its device, the Reader Daily Edition, will offer a more intuitive newspaper-reading experience to go with features like a touch screen that lets readers take notes and look up words on the e-reader's dictionary. The Sony reader is scheduled to go on sale before the end of the year.
Some magazine and newspaper executives also are unhappy with elements of their financial arrangement with Amazon. It's not clear how Sony and its new publishing partners will split subscription revenue. But News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has indicated that a partnership with Sony would include other favorable terms, like sharing the names of subscribers, which Amazon doesn't do.
In anticipation of the release of a number of more sophisticated devices, many publishers have been developing digital versions of their publications as well as a common platform for distributing them on the next generation of e-readers and other hardware like Apple Inc.'s iPhone. That is the aim of a joint venture recently formed by News Corp. and four magazine publishers: Time Inc., Condé Nast Publications Inc., Hearst Corp. and Meredith Corp.
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