Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Print is Alive! It Just Costs $16! Ouch.

DAVID EGGERS, THE AUTHOR and editor of McSweeney's literary magazine, is pushing print. He helped launch a massive newspaper in San Francisco last weekend. It features in-depth reporting, mag-style writing, double-truck graphic spreads, cartoons by famous artists, a separate magazine, and a 96 page book review pullout.

It's a one-time deal. For now. And it costs $16.

Would you pay more for a supposed higher quality product? If it only came out once per week, or once per month, would you pay $16?

4 comments:

Joe said...

I was hoping you heard about this. I was going to send it your way anyway.

I would, and do. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is a consistently gorgeous product with great content... well-worth the $55 subscription. This might be the best thing they've done. I would hope people would pay $16 for something like this once a month. There's nothing else like it!

I would hope though, that there'd be something comparable for less money. Knowing McSweeney's, they probably didn't sell TONS of ads and definitely not to any big spenders like Comcast for example. This could be a model, and it could be cheap. A publication would only have to lose a little bit of the integrity McSweeney's has.

Don Hoegg said...

I'd absolutely pay $16/month for a book like that.USA Today annual subscription is well over $100 anyway, so why not?

Wafai Dias said...

I don't think that I would pay $16 but if it has good information then I would consider it.

Rosella Eleanor LaFevre said...

It sounds like a wonderful product, but at this stage in my life I could not pay $16 for even a "massive" newspaper. I almost died the other day when NYLON cost me $5 and change. If I had a job, sure I'd consider paying that. But at this stage, I just absolutely cannot afford such an expense.