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The newsletter Jakob studied were Cooking.com, Dictionary.com, Handspring.com, The Herman Group Trend Alert (weekly newsletter), Site59 travel newsletter (irregular publication frequency), Morningstar.com Technology Bytes (twice weekly), Economist.com (its weekly update not its daily news newsletter), Entertainment Weekly (daily), MSNBC.com (daily), and NY City Parks & Recreation daily plant newsletter. Plus, he didn't study but added some further data from the newsletters of JCrew.com, NYTimes.com, DailyCandy.com, and Overstock.com. (See http://www.nngroup.com/reports/netsletters/)

Of the ten newsletters he studied, only three were from publications and only two of those were daily. Three of other ten were purely commercial marketing newsletters and another three were e-mail versions of printed newsletters about topical niches.

So, general news publishers who are analysing Jakob's report of 23% reading rates and 27% unopened rates, should consider that 70% of those newsletters weren't from general news publishers and perhaps should adjust the figures accordingly.
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As for unsubscribe rates, the 26 e-mail publishing newspapers that I deal with, plus the information given me from Belo Interactive and from NYTimes.com, companies whose newspapers also do extensive e-mail publishing, show the unsubscribe rates to be in the 7% to 13%, compared to double or triple that for print editions.

Please don't compare results from the commercial marketing e-mails (either solicited or spam) with results from legitimate publishers.

"People get a lot of email. They don't have time to read a lot of text. Newsletters must be
designed to facilitate scanning. In our study, only 23% of the newsletters were read
thoroughly. The remaining newsletters were skimmed, read partly, or not even opened -- a
fate that befell 27% of the newsletters."

It was also interesting to note the observations about subscribers not unsubscribing for various
reasons, even though they no longer read the e-mail. The report states that there's urban
legend developing that an attempt to unsubscribe will backfire on the subscriber. That's not
urban legend; that's reaction to real experiences with unscrupulous spammers who poison things
for ethical e-mailers. I also wonder what percentage of folks set up a secondary e-mail address to
collect newsletter traffic and then either don't check that channel any more often than they would
visit a web site, or never. (Uh-oh, that reminds me I have a neglected mailbox that fits that category.)