If you’re excited about the Apple Tablet because you want to ditch your Kindle and carry around an all in one tablet/ebook/Iphone OS based device, you’ll probably be  interested to know that books are rumored to be suggested for release at less than premium pricing.

How less than premium? According to the Wall Street Journal, hardcover bestsellers will come in from $12.99 to $14.99, with a few titles offered lower at $9.99.

According to their report, the publications in question, at least at this point, specifically involve HarperCollins books. Also according to the report, Apple will take a 30% cut, leaving approximately $10.49 per book for the publisher.

If the price rumors do indeed turn out to be true, it would put a premium price on Apple’s offerings when compared to Amazon and Nook offered ebooks. The real question then is, will they let users import books bought from other stores, or just stick it to their tablet users.

There is a few things to keep in mind, while those prices are sought by Apple, they will apparently let publishers set their own pricing, just like they do in their Apple Apps store, with Apple taking their 30% cut regardless of pricing. They may also get around “digital delayed copies” with their pricing structure which would bring top books to their platform more quickly.

Hopefully in 24 hours the hype will finally come to the foreground and we’ll get answers to this rumor and the several dozen others we’ve experienced over the last several months. [The Wall Street Journal]

As a native Long Islander, I was amused when Newsday, our local paper, waded fearlessly and without irony into the ice-cold waters of charging for news on the internet.

I don’t know anyone who has ever paid for a physical copy of Newsday. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I thought they were passed out free on the Long Island Railroad until I was about eighteen. Even in high school, in a year full of stoners, everyone was totally too good for Newsday and favored the New York Times when they could afford it. Still, Newsday felt they would be able to charge for access to their poorly designed and annoying to navigating site, done in dark blue with white print- and not at a bargain rate, either.

Back in October, Newsday decided to charge $5 a week (a week!), or $260 a year for access to news about the Hamptons and Massapequa. And how many people do you think availed themselves of that fantastic offer? 10,000? 1,000? 100? Try 35. Not 35,000, 3,500 or 350. 35 people were interested in paying for access to Newsday content. That’s like, not even half of a single car on a rush hour train from Babylon to Penn Station. Fail.

In fairness to Newsday, a large portion of Long Island has access to the paper without having to pay the online fee. 75% of Long Islanders have either a subscription to Newsday itself, or subscribe to Cablevision/Optimum and are comped access to the site. But that figure of 75% has not been broken down into paper subscribers versus those who get freebies with cable, and most telling is the fact that traffic has dropped significantly since the paywall went up:

According to Nielsen Online, traffic has fallen since the paywall went up. In October, the web site had 2.2 million unique users. After the paywall went up that total fell to 1.7 million and 1.5 million in November and December, respectively.

While I like to mock the very public failure of my very local newspaper, the numbers are a cautionary tale to others who think a pay-for access model (and a ballsy one at that) is going to work any differently in this market. Newsday will continue to hemorrhage funds (the site redesign ahead of the paywall cost $4m) until they realize no one on the internet is going to pay for content they can get for free elsewhere. Unless you’ve got something very unique with a completely dedicated base of readers, it will fail. Spectacularly.

[Observer via Gawker]

The New York Times has announced that their services will go behind a paywall, however their “pay to read” model won’t go into effect until 2011. They’ve also announced that the system will include a “metered model” which will allow users to read a certain number of articles each month before any charges will be required.

New York Times Chairmen Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. voices his confidence in the companies new approach, stating:

“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’ extraordinary, professional journalism. Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

Given the reputation of the New York Times they may just be able to pull off the multiple level model by providing users with access to various stories and then hooking them into a pay based model, although only time can tell if this oft-failed attempt can actually succeed.

The Times have also reported that exact details about the plans payment structure will be revealed over the next few months, which leads me to believe that specifics are still being worked out.

While the move may help the New York Times gain money from paid subscriptions, it will also more than likely kill their web authority among bloggers and other forms of new media. As Mashable’s Stan Schroeder points out, no website will want to link to an article only to get complaints from readers that their link doesn’t work, which could occur if that reader has read too many NYT articles in any given month.

With other companies, including Hollywood insider Variety going live with their own pay based models, at least the folks at the NYT will have time to determine what works and what doesn’t. If history repeats itself however, it could be a long and bumpy road for their new model.

The study indicates content illegally republished on third-party sites gets two-and-a-half times the traffic, on average, that the original and official version does. The most extreme cases, it says, happen in stories about cars, travel, and movies. Dupes of those sorts of stories were found to get as much as seven times the traffic as the originals.

The report (PDF), conducted by Attributor Corp., suggests online publishers are losing out, on average, on $150,000 in ad revenue from those unauthorized online copies. Some bigger Web publishers could stand to lose as much as $1 million a year, it claims.

So can publishers really take advantage of this information, or is it just a reminder of how much they’re getting screwed? The obvious implication is stepping up copyright enforcement, and it’s worth noting that Attributor — the group that did the study — is a copyright enforcement company, so it may have had its own reasons for doing this research. (The company sells software that hunts down copyright violations on the Web.)

Attributor also suggests the idea that companies could “figure out a way to mine advertising revenue” from these stolen copies. It’s a nice concept, sure, but I don’t know that the sort of blogs that are outright stealing content will be open to the idea of an external company placing ads on their pages.

If someone can figure out a way to make that happen, though, they’ll be not only a millionaire — but also could be credited as being the genius who gave struggling mainstream media companies a new lease on life. Think it’ll happen?