I’ve told them repeatedly, asked via twitter, emailed and called customer service, and nobody is interested in giving me an answer. Nobody is interested in understanding that they’re insulting their customers when they give them the finger and ask them to pay for, effectively, a second subscription because they want to read their web + tablet subscription on their phone, which has a smaller screen than EITHER. Most businesses give discounts for buying more services. This is the only one I’m aware of that actually jacks the price up with the more you buy.

I simply don’t care about introductory offers.

I don’t even really care what the total bill is. I’d like to subscribe to the NYTimes. I just don’t want to be insulted. (nor do I want to scrape a dead-tree edition off of my doorstep every morning and drop it in the recycling without reading it; been there, done that.)

This is well stated in the “Take my Money HBO” campaign. Highlighting how media companies are just so backwards…If all reports are correct, better pricing would significantly increase HBO revenue… (and reduce piracy no doubt)

I have always been a fan of transparent pricing and generally believe its the best approach. As a long time Marketer (Digital) I’ve recently taken a strong interest in Economics.

One of the things I’ve been looking into is theories of asymmetric information and price discrimination. This article featuring JC Penney “fair and square pricing won’t work” highlights some real world issues for business’s not “trying to rip you off”.

I’d be interested in the numbers/details in the newspaper examples above – i.e what’s the a$10 double dipping worth to them as an aggregate? and how many people accidentally continue the subscription etc..

Its disappointing if this is really the world where deliberate mis-information is the best way to maximize profits.

Poke around in there to configure scheduling and retention and formatting policies to your liking, but they update weekly, and it’s as near a complete version of the magazine as I can tell, though I’m not a reader of the print edition, to be able to say for sure.

The short of it is that Calibre will grab the RSS feed, and format it to an ebook format of your choosing. You can schedule downloads for daily or weekly, though you have to leave Calibre running to do that or schedule it, or run it as a service, or what have you. There’s a bunch of other scripts for other newsfeeds as well, including the NYT, but that requires a password which I haven’t set up from my subscription yet. The Economist is one of the better working ones, bringing down the cover as well as the contents.

Who else remembers AvantGo?

Hey NYTimes, ever heard of emailing a receipt to someone like modern companies started doing in the early 2000s?