READERS REALLY LIKE ELECTRONIC EDITIONS.

With momentum on electronic editions building seemingly every day -- the new publisher of USA Today said last week the nation's largest daily would launch a new e-edition in August -- a new survey suggests that most readers really like digital delivery.

Texterity Inc., A Southborough, Mass. maker of software for magazine digital editions, said its April-May survey of Texterity users indicates that 90 percent are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the digital edition of their business or consumer magazine.

The company said that 92 percent of the digital edition users read their issue within a week and 52 percent read it immediately or the same day and that move than 91 percent "take one or more actions when reading advertisements or articles."

BPA Worldwide, a non-profit circulation auditing service for business magazines, sanctioned the survey of 33,784 users of Texterity's software.

Texterity said that the "big three" reasons for using an electronic editorial were "environmental friendliness, ease of saving and convenience of searching" and that the usage crosses all generations and both genders.

David Hunke, in a meet-the-press event last week in New York City, told reporters that USA Today would relaunch its electronic edition in August, reducing the price and changing technologies.

Hunke, who until April was publisher of the Detroit Free Press (like USA Today, owned by Gannett Co. Inc.) and chief executive of the Detroit Media Partnership (which is the joint operating agreement for the Freep and the News) said the new electronic replica edition would be priced around $10 a month, versus the current $14.

The publisher said the paper was still determining whether subscribers to the print edition could get the e-edition free or whether they would have to pay extra, as is the current model.

Hunke also told the gathering that he regretted that the paper had launched its application for Apple Inc.'s iPhone for free. "I'm not sure we realized what we had," The Associated Press quoted him as saying. "I think that's a value readers will be willing to pay for."

In the last ABC period, USA Today had but a mere 1217 average weekday e-edition subscribers (versus 2.1 million print subscribers), so obviously the business model and the technology could use some tweaking.

Print Get the Mag Weekly Updates