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The Sun Launches Innovative Digital Paywall

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The Sun is currently Britain’s largest newspaper and has the highest dedicated readership base. The company is launching a new digital subscription package today that turns their online website into a Paywall, where you have to take out a membership to read their articles. What is very exciting, is how the Sun is taking a departure from the standard way news companies make money online and doing some fairly innovative things.

The Sun is not focusing exclusively on digital, although it does offer a low monthly rate to subscribe to their website. Instead, they want to promote the fact that they don’t want to sell less newspapers to get some quick digital sales. Instead, every issue of the newspaper will have a code that can be redeemed to get a free digital edition of the paper or read the news within their official mobile apps. If you redeem 20 codes in any given month, you are being given the next month for free. Derek Brown, digital editor at the Sun, told us: “We’re not becoming digital first, we realize that we still sell a lot of newspapers every day – we don’t want print readers to feel that they are missing out on something.”

Subscribing to the digital newspaper, is seemingly going far beyond just getting news on the website. Readers will also get access to the Sun+ Goals app. It will show highlights from all 380 English Premier matches all season, making them available at 5.15pm on Saturday, five hours earlier than the BBC’s Match of the Day. FA Cup rights will be added in 2014. The other major component is called Sun+ Perks. It promises at least £200 of savings and giveaways each month such as music and eBook downloads.

The Sun is doing some fairly excellent things when it comes to launching their new digital subscription packages. The average news agency is just selling access to the internet websites and not giving free access to their news apps. The Sun, instead of doing what everyone else is doing, is blazing their own trail and taking the “companion” approach to mobile.

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  • MaskedHypocrite

    “One of the pleasant new updates to the Kobo Arc firmware is the shifting of the Android toolbar from the bottom of the screen, to the very top. In most file manager, games and other apps, most of their UI and button controls are at the bottom of the screen.”

    Er, that was standard with the original Jelly Bean update from March 21st, nothing new. And it is a very bad thing. Hate having to squint to try and make out what the time is and what the notification icons are. Also, can no longer adjust brightness or toggle wi-fi from the notifications area, now have to go into settings – not good when you want to do so on the fly. Also can’t toggle off notifications globally, now having to go into settings to toggle each app individually.

    The centering of the Back/Home/Recent buttons means I can no longer comfortably reach them with my thumb – it becomes painful, actually, and impossible in landscape mode – so now have to use my other hand to access those buttons.

    Unfortunately, they won’t give us root or an option in the settings so we can change the **single value** in build.prop needed to change back to the tablet layout. My 7″ tablet is NOT a phone and should not be using the phone layout.

    Frankly, the Jelly Bean update (which has had other faults – my battery life’s down to maybe 2/3rds what it was under ICS), and what they’ve been doing with the ereader firmwares, has definitely soured me on ever getting another Kobo device.

  • Paulyputsimply

    Usually like your articles etc. but this one is confusing and incomplete. As already reported, you confuse updates from March with this firmware and do not really list the new updates/improvements. Surely with a 300 MB update there are other fixes / updates worth noting???