GQ & Vanity Fair Leave The iPhone & Raise iPad Issue Price - Game Over?

The iPad, despite its success, hasn't quite been the savior the publishing industry had hoped for. As we reported many times, iPad magazine have been lacking and failed to attract a lot of public. Yet, if you thought that would motivate publishers to lower their prohibitive prices, you couldn't be more wrong. As reported by AllThingsD, Conde Nast has now decided to bump the prices of two of its publications:

GQ and Vanity Fair used to offer readers who’d already bought a single digital issue a discount on subsequent purchases. But it’s doing away with that next month. So effectively, loyal readers of  GQ on the iPad will see prices go from $2.99 to $4.99 an issue, while Vanity Fair will go from $3.99 to $4.99.

It's apparently part of a bigger initiative as they're moving to new publishing tools (the same they use for Wired), but a lot of people are feeling this might have something to do with Apple's new subscription plan as well. As a reminder, Apple will be enforcing in-app subscriptions more closely comes July. If Conde Nast wants to stay on the iPad, they will have to follow Apple's new rules and rising their prices is the only way to guarantee their present revenue/subscription. Either way, this is unfortunate, and will certainly not help their bottom line. Bad news too for those of you who happened to enjoy reading Glamour, GQ or Vanity fair on the iPhone as Conde Nast is also discontinuing the iPhone version of these publications for the time being. We have a feeling this won't affect too many people, but it's still a loss. Any thoughts? Share them in the comments!

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