Wednesday, 4 April 2012

Royal Mail price increases

Just realised what a huge effect on magazines the latest Royal Mail price increases are going to have.

It's not pretty.
Everyone in the UK is aware of the 14p increase on a second class stamp. I'm bulk buying in advance to protect from the price rise there, what I hadn't realised was the effect to sending Jupiter abroad.

From 30th April to send a single issue of Jupiter abroad the costs are going to increase like this:
42p extra to send a single issue to Europe
82p extra to send a single issue to America

This is going to have a huge effect on subscribers from abroad. There's no way we can absorb such a large increase. I'm afraid prices will have to rise. I haven't worked out by how much yet, this has literally just hit me, but I think it's going to start signaling the end of paper magazines flying around the world. Electronic publications will be the winners it seems.

If you like your magazines printed, get your low cost subscriptions while you can!

Ian

4 comments:

Colum said...

I've just subscribed to jupiter, but best of all would be if I could get it in .epub format so I could view it on my kobo ereader.

I think jupiter is available on kindle, but the epub format is readable on more devices. Would it be possible to set up emailed subscriptions in .epub format? This would solve the postage problem for at least someof your overseas readers.

Colum

Colum said...

took me dozens of tries to get the captcha right, maybe that's costing you commenters?

Ian Redman said...

Not sure what you mean by captcha.
Regarding epub format, we can certianly make that available in the same way we offer pdfs.

I think Royal Mail have put the nail in the coffin of UK printed magazines flying out to every corner of the globe. It really will push more people into electronic copies.

Ian

Simon Kewin said...

Ian,

By captcha he means Google's hideous double word verification. As well as being discriminatory against robots, it's also bloody awkward to use!

Not good about the Roral Mail price hike.