Conde Nast has made digital publishing headlines for some time as it’s one of the first major magazine publishers to create flawless and device-optimized digital editions of its family of magazine titles using Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite. These editions, available for a variety of smartphones and tablets, also come bundled for print subscribers, but can be had as stand-alone digital subscriptions.
Now, Conde Nast is turning to Amazon for help in managing these subscriptions. The publisher has now signed on to have its reader base initiate and renew their subscriptions through the online retailer, a sensible move considering that electronic retailing is what Amazon does best. Standard methods of subscribing will still apply for now, but the publisher hopes to transition to Amazon’s database for future readers.
During the initial phase of the partnership, subscribers can get six months of several Conde Nast titles–Vogue, Glamour, Bon Appetit, Lucky, Golf Digest, Vanity Fair and Wired–for only six dollars. The remaining Conde Nast title, eleven in all, will be added to the program at a later time.
An article for Reuter’s by Jennifer Saba outlined how this partnership came about, referencing a meeting between Amazon’s director of Kindle content Russ Grandinetti and Conde Nast’s president.
“‘We are using the partnership with Amazon to make purchasing and renewing subscriptions as easy as humanly possible,’ Bob Sauerberg, president of Conde Nast, said in an interview last Wednesday. ‘We want to go from selling print subscriptions to selling access to all our content,’ he added, referring to the introductory offer that allows readers to get online and print subscriptions bundled together for individual titles.”
Despite being one of the more innovative publishers in terms of jumping straight into digital, Conde Nast’s digital subscriptions still make up less than 5% of its readership, a move that it hopes to shift through the arrangement and through its similar subscription arrangement with Apple.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.