Magazines on iPad likely to charge at, or close, to newsstand price; or maybe not

Word on the street is that the Wall Street Journal is going to charge $17.99 a month to access its content on an iPad. But of more interest to readers of this blog is that it is widely expected that subscribers who want to read magazines on the tablet will be offered weekly, or monthly terms that closely relate to what a single copy buyer pays on the newsstand, according to a story on the blog Endgadget.

Sources told the WSJ that the April issue of Hearst's Esquire magazine (no stranger to new media) will arrive in downloadable format without advertisements for $2.99, $2 less than the newsstand price, and will include five music videos (each containing the phrase "somewhere in Mississippi," oddly enough) to take advantage of the device's multimedia capabilities. On the other hand, a full iPad issue of Men's Health with match the glossy's $4.99 price. Of course, as we heard earlier, publishers will be experimenting with advertising and pricing models to see what works so expect things to be fluid for quite some time after the April 3rd launch.