A pioneer in electronic newspaper delivery, the Sankei Shimbun announced Wednesday it would be offering a new electronic version of the newspaper that closely replicates the look of the print version.
Called NetView, the new electronic edition will be available Oct. 1. It is being priced at a mere 315 yen ($2.83) per month, substantially less than the 2,950 yen ($26.47) it costs to have the morning edition delivered monthly, or the 2,100 yen ($18.84) it costs to subscribe to the Sankei’s current electronic version, Sankei Web–S.
The Sankei can offer NetView at such a low price because users can only view that day’s morning edition. No archives are available for searching; nor can articles be saved. They can be printed, however.
Still, there was apparently considerable dissension within Sankei as to whether NetView could be profitable at such a low price. According to Shizuo Kobayashi, head of the Sankei’s digital media division, as quoted by CNET Japan, “Much content on the Internet is offered for free, and users tend to resist paying for content. So we decided that we could just get away with pricing it at 315 yen.”
The Sankei is targeting the new electronic edition particularly at young readers.
Though TV listings, stock prices, and full-page ads have been eliminated, NetView looks exactly like the Sankei’s paper copy. Even ads appear just as they are printed in the paper edition. Content unique to the electronic edition includes video and sound files. Created in Flash, NetView can be viewed using any Web browser.
The first Japanese newspaper to create an electronic edition, the Sankei in 2001 launched Newsvue, which like NetView, attempted to copy the exact look of the paper edition. For a monthly fee of 1,995 yen ($17.90), users could print, search archives and jump to related articles. According to CNET, Newsvue never took off, partly because it required a special Acrobat-like viewer to read it, and because it had been launched before broadband was widely available. Sankei discontinued Newsvue in March of this year. (For a description of Newsvue, see Japan Inc.’s “A New Way to Read the Morning Paper”.)