Exact Editions

Pristine Praise

2011-11-12T05:49:00.003Z

Pristine Classical (the world's leading historic recordings site) have written up the experience of using Gramophone magazine on the Exact Editions platform. The full editorial is here, and we quote an extract in which Andrew Rose explains how the iTunes Newsstand interface, and the Exact Editions digital magazine platform works for him:

The iPad's news stand is a simple little app that Apple have recently built into the operating system. When you first touch it an empty set of shelves open up on the screen, just begging to be filled with reading matter. Fortunately there's a handy button to take you straight to the news store, where you can buy individual issues or full subscriptions to a variety of magazines and newspapers from around the world. Once you've bought one of these (and most offer a free trial issue to get you started) the magazine cover appears on your shelf.

Actually the shelf thing is a brilliant bit of nudge-marketing that really makes you want to fill its empty shelves, and so now I have four publications sitting there ready to read, including Gramophone at an annual subscription price which was around half the usual international rate. My daily paper - for which I now have the iPad subscription - is delivered as if by magic overnight while the iPad is asleep, ready to read when I get up in the morning. My Gramophone turns up on time every month. And because of the nature of my Gramophone subscription I can also read the same content on my web browser on any PC, and - at last! - copy and paste Rob Cowan's reviews directly into this newsletter rather than either scanning the text or retyping it. I've also been gifted every back issue going back to August 2010...

So as a user what's it like? Well, what you see is what you'd get with the print edition - every page in full colour (including all the ads). When you hold your iPad vertically the screen holds a full page, when you hold it horizontally it spins around to fill the width of the screen, making the writing bigger but requiring you to scroll the page down to read the full text, something that can be a bit of a nuisance is a story runs along a number of columns. In the vertical view this isn't an issue though the text can be a little on the small side - but then you can quickly and easily pinch and unpinch the screen to change your level of zoom, thereby resizing the text to suit both you and the page layout. The contents page has coloured links over the page numbers, allowing you to jump straight to an article, and you can also run a text search across the entire issue - which is how I know for sure that there are four instances of the word 'Pristine' in November's issue, of which three refer to us. There's also a little "page flick" button, enabling quick "flicking" through thumbnail representation of the pages, a button that takes you straight back to the contents page, and one other control button, which switches to a two-page view, for those with better eyesight than me! All in all it looks good, it's easy to read, it turns up on time, and it's saved me money and shelf space. What's not to like? (Pristine Classical Newsletter November 2011)

Rose goes on to explore the advantages and the options for independent music publishers who might want to sell magazines through iTunes. His view "And if you happen to be a magazine publisher who thinks this isn't for you, you really must read on..."

It intrigued me that this very positive review of the process of transferring well designed and graphically rich magazines to a digital medium should have come from someone with deep expertise in the business of transferring digital sound to online media. Maintaining the fidelity and the richness of the print experience is still a real challenge. As is the problem of fidelity and authenticity in sound recordings. The review is also timely since this week Exact Editions is now unveiling a portal through which publishers can explore for themselves the digital services that can enable magazines to achieve the best digital quality and access that we can provide. Magazine publishers who think that Andrew Rose may be on to something should turn their browsers to https://publisher.exacteditions.com/ and upload an issue of their magazine to conduct private trials with the platform whilst they consider the solutions proposed for their magazine. Either as a web edition, as a complementary service for print subscribers, an app solution for iOS or Android. And for many magazines all of those options will make sense.

Apple's Newsstand and Skeuomorphs

2011-11-11T08:14:00.005Z

Apple's Newsstand was introduced with iOS5 and it is defined as 'a custom newsstand for all your subscriptions'. It puts all your periodical subscriptions in one place, a Newsstand, a folder, that 'lets you access your favorite publications quickly and easily'. At this stage it has three particular advantages for the user: first, it does the sorting for you and puts your subscriptions in the one folder, collecting them together on the iPhone/iPad (many of us are lazy about arranging apps); second, apps which are handled through this route will update automatically in the background when a new issue appears -- a big plus since many magazine apps are very slow to upload; third the front covers of the current issues are shown on the shelves of your newsstand, a fact which makes these apps rather more interesting and appealing than most app cover artwork. This is an especially strong point for magazines, many of which have outstanding cover designs.

This is all a fairly straightforward matter of iOS plumbing and 'issue management', but I just mentioned the Newsstand's 'shelving' and one of the most obvious features of the Newsstand is that it is presented to the user as a wooden, pine, racking system. Here is a glimpse of mine:

This is a classic instance of Apple's 'skeuomorphism'. Skeuomorphism, originally a term from archaeology, is type of ornamentation where the design or look of the object helps the user to understand the function of the device or tool. Greeks made bronze jugs and vases that looked as though they had been made from coiled pottery, with curious twists and patterns, because these derivative ornaments helped the user to know which bit to grasp as the handle and how to direct the spout. iOS5 and its apps are riddled with skeuomorphism -- some of which goes over the top. Much of it incredibly helpful: paperclips that indicate an attachment, soft calculators that work like calculators, brushes that brush, cameras that have buttons and dials etc.

The fact that the newsstand is a pine shelving system is helpful skeuomorphism because we know how to arrange items on a shelf, we know how to 'read' a shelf, we understand that the objects on the shelf will remain 'there' on both phone and pad and we know that can pick up one, or several of these objects and dive into them. All of this maps the functionality of shelved stuff straight into our collection of subscriptions. All is well and good.

The problem lies elsewhere. The metaphor of the 'personal shelf' works well enough for an individuals collection of 6 or 60 periodical subscriptions. But it provides no help at all when we come to the other angle on Apple's new newsstand. The newsstand is not just a way of organizing an individuals collection of subscription, it is a new classification within the app store for periodicals which are consistent with the distribution and access rules that pertain to the individual-facing, personal newsstand within an iOS device. 'Newsstand' is a new and rather unusual category within the iTunes store itself, and only the apps which would work on the 'pine-shelf' personal newwstand appear there. A lot of newspapers and many magazines have not appeared in newsstand yet, perhaps because the developers have not yet got round to it, but others are not there because they never will be. Apps like Flipboard or Zite which aggregate magazine content will not be going into the newsstand, nor will news apps that are based on real-time newsfeeds (there is still a seperate 'news' category for apps which are not in Newsstand). The 'newsstand' within iTunes is not a section for all newsy apps, it is a category for periodical subscriptions which meet some very specific criteria. All existing print periodicals could be transferred to it provided that the publishers develop an app which matches these criteria, so it will soon be an enormous emporium of periodicals. In fact what iTunes now needs is some sort of virtual kiosk, which would allow the prospective purchaser to float past and search thousands and tens of thousands of prospective periodical titles that might be purchased. For this task the pine-shelved personal newsstand is no good at all. We need a very different metaphor for the mega-kiosk that Apple's iTunes magazine store is rapidly becoming.

I suspect that Apple will soon be wishing that they had chosen a more flexible, and a more scaleable skeuomorphism for their magazine collection that the individual selects for herself. A carousel or a cascade of front covers that could be more easily translated or analogised to the requirements of the global kiosk. Google a month ago put up an example of the kind of carousel interface that might work well for a global range of magazine titles.

Final thought: I have never liked the pine bookcase metaphor at all. I would never put my printed magazines on such a shelving system -- its too reminiscent of a dentist's waiting room. If Apple decides that it was the wrong skeuomorph, perhaps they should smash up the pine bookshelves and turn them into kindling?

Magazines that just work

2011-11-09T10:51:00.002Z

Adweek has a nice piece on how the magazine BusinessWeek appears to be thriving. It has changed its name to Bloomberg Businessweek (is that really better?) and has a newly invigorated editorial and design approach.

So far, the Bloomberg money has bought signs of life. Businessweek has bulked up to an average of 66 well-designed editorial pages that offer a level of global business coverage not found among other weeklies. Ad pages are up 21 percent year-on-year for January through July, the rate base will soon be raised from 900,000 to 980,000 (approaching Forbes’ 1,020,000), and subscriptions are up 12 percent. The magazine now loses, according to Adweek sources, between $20 million to $30 million a year. (Josh Tyrangiel Means Business -- Adweek)

Bloomberg bought the magazine from the McGraw Hill company for $1 in October 2009.

The magazine also has a respectable app for the iPad, though I suspect that its not (yet) a key part of the revived magazine's business strategy. I find their app clever, but a bit too fiddly and confusing and its not on Apple's Newsstand which suggests that Bloomberg have not yet worked out whether they see it as an integral part of a digital magazine strategy or more of a trial balloon. But the resuscitation of the core magazine is a good story for the magazine business. A new owner has been bold enough to take a fresh look at the editorial mission, has seen the need for investment in editorial content and design quality, and the magazine is a lot better than it was 2 or 3 years ago. This week it has a tremendous article on Apple's extraordinary strength in supply chain management, investment and logistics. Now that they have the core magazine working really well, they can consider how to make it a digital success.

It could be that there are a good many magazines out in the market which are suffering from tired ownership (McGraw Hill had no real rationale for owning a consumer-facing business magazine). There are some excellent editorial and content propositions that could be revived by fresh investment and owners committed to developing subscription audiences. This will become a positive story for the magazine industry in the near future as publishers realise that digital magazine audiences can be very large and can be reached very efficiently through the iPad and other web devices.

Amazon and Apple in Asymmetric Competition

2011-09-28T10:17:00.002+01:00

Today it is widely expected that Amazon will launch a 'next generation' Kindle. The rumor mill says that it will be called the Kindle Fire, it will be running an Amazon controlled and adapted version of Android 2.1, it will be priced 'competitively' a bit lower than the basic iPad, it will have a smaller form factor than the iPad (7") and may look much like the Blackberry PlayBook, but above all it will be a new and better way of consuming the books, films, music and other digital media properties that Amazon successfully sells to its large consumer following.

Many observers think that Amazon has perhaps the best chance of competing with Apple in the 'tablet space', which increasingly looks as though it might otherwise become an Apple preserve. As David Streitfeld in the New York Times points out, one of the reasons that Amazon has a chance is that it is not a straightforward competitor but an asymmetric competitor. The tablets that have abysmally failed to compete with Apple so far (and its a long list: Blackberry, HP a fistful of Android efforts) have failed because they have been competing head-to-head the level of hardware with a device that in every case, however serviceable the hardware, abysmally fails to match the content and software eco-system (its all about the apps) which sustains and grows Apple's market. Amazon will position its tablet not as a device that matches the iPad in specification and function, but as a better conduit to media resources and media consumption. Amazon does have a very significant content mix that it can channel through its device. In the books area it has a stronger and deeper selection than Apple, and although it may be lagging in its selection of music and film, it has nonetheless a respectable harvest. Books is a key strength and with its successful eInk Kindle track record Amazon has the potential to migrate millions of book lovers (and their purchased libraries) to the new platform. Apart from Apple no other media/tech player has anything like Amazon's content reach (not Google, not Facebook, not Microsoft or Sony).

But the competition will be intriguingly asymmetric "because Apple sells movies, music and books in order to sell devices. Amazon sells devices in order to sell books, movies and music. Apple has never faced an opponent with such a vastly different strategy." (New York Times 25.9.2011)

In fact the competition is deeply asymmetric in a number of ways. Amazon already provides access on Apple devices through its Kindle app, the chances are that Amazon will try to maintain the compatibility between its eInk-based Kindle app on the iOS platform and its native Kindle Fire app software. That could get to be complicated, it could inhibit development of better native-Android reading software, but this is an asymmetry that gives Amazon market reach. There is no chance that Apple will provide access to iTunes or to iBooks on an Amazon tablet app. Amazon would probably not allow that, and Apple certainly would not want that. If iBooks were to get a lot better, perhaps through taking advantage of hardware or system features, that would put some competitive pressure on Amazon's lead with eBooks. Asymmetric also in that Apple will stick to its 'agent' or facilitator role, whereas Amazon will act more as principal (Amazon is in fact becoming an eBook publisher). Apple will continue on its policy of levying a distribution tax from content that uses its iTunes marketplace (30%). Amazon will seek to maintain and re-introduce its 'merchant' role, wherein it can exploit and require deep discounts from publishers developers. Amazon will not lightly give pricing power to its publisher partners (its rules for the app market give Amazon the right to discount to zero!). Apple does give developers and publishers more pricing autonomy, because Apple knows that it will attract more developers that way and will sell more hardware and grow the ecosystem. Ironically, Apple will be able to move much more quickly to cloud-based services (Apple has struck deals which permit this streaming management of content with the permission of the music majors and publishers). Amazon will be more 'stuck with' a distribution and download model in which bits and megabytes are moved from server to device and copied to personal lockers. Ironic this, given Amazon's second to none services in cloud computing. Netflix (Amazon WSC's biggest customer) has been streaming film from Amazon cloud computers long before Amazon has the music majors signed up to a streaming approach for consumer music.

In fact the competition between Apple and Amazon at this point looks so asymmetric that one doubts that either side really needs to win a knock out. Mutually assured co-existence will be enough. Amazon will have an apparent success on its hands if it can migrate the majority of its existing and growing Kindle market to a better tablet Kindle Fire. It doesn't need to compete with Apple at this stage in the provision of the widest and richest form of app market. It has a lot of negotiating and catching up to do before it can hope to challenge Apple in music and film, and it is not interested in the new post PC computer market that Apple has in its sights. Apple may not mind Amazon getting further success in the books market (as Jobs said people don't read books anymore). The incidental benefit for Apple of a perceived to be successful Amazon tablet is that this 'success' will severely compromise and complicate Google's struggles to move Android from success in the smart phone form factor to successful tablets. If the first acceptable Android tablet is one in which Amazon have forked the operating system and taken control away from Google we can expect further fragmentation and frustration in the Android eco-system. Apple should be rather pleased about that.

From my standpoint, the most interesting area of conflict that now opens between Amazon and Apple is the one which touches on magazines and newspapers (and of course that interests us most at Exact Editions). It seems very likely that Amazon will have a strongish hand in the periodicals space for its new Kindle, and it will be very interesting to see how the Amazon commercial model for those periodicals works out. I doubt it will be easy to get an entirely satisfactory magazine/newspaper digital experience on a 7" tablet, and there will be some challenges in then moving a suboptimal experience to a 10" device in 2012, just about the time that Apple brings out its likely iPad 3. We live in interesting times!

Forking the Business

2011-09-19T09:33:00.003+01:00

Reed Hastings the inspirational founder of Netflix just owned up to a big mistake in running his business (see his video apology here) and announced that in consequence of this misstep and failure of communication he would split his baby in two: Netflix (the old name for the new business) which would now solely be concerned with selling digital streaming video to consumers on a subscription basis, and Quickster (the old business with a new name) which would be solely concerned with shipping DVD's to customers who wish to have films on DVD.

In software parlance he is 'forking' the code base (the assets of Netflix and the employees will be divided between the two new businesses), and he is duplicating the customer base (users will have two accounts where they had one before) and he is potentially setting them against each other.

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. An Explanation and Some Reflections.

This does seem like a pretty drastic change to a business that has been steadily evolving towards a streaming mode of delivery for film and TV. I hope it works out for the Netflix businesses and its customers, but it certainly seems risky.

It is worth thinking about these drastic manoeuvres because a similar distribution challenge faces the magazine industry as digital delivery becomes more important. Will it be necessary for magazine publishers to split their editorial, development and design teams, their commercial and sales efforts to build separate digital and print-based work-flows and subscription operations? Some magazine publishers are working now with separate editorial and design workflows? Will this result in an inevitable split between subscribers for print product and for digital editions? Can magazines afford this duplication? Do consumers want two products?

At Exact Editions we are convinced that such a split cannot work, is ruinously expensive and results in sub-optimal solutions for print subscribers and the digital audience. Perhaps magazine publishers have been too mesmerised by the possibility that magazines as digital resources on the iPad could be something completely different from the print object (and perhaps not quite honest enough about the talents that they have to produce something completely different and digital, some ghastly interactive apps have been the result). The key thing that magazine publishers have going for them is that they already (in many cases) have a strong and renewable subscription relationship with their print audience. Actually most music producers, film companies and book publishers would die for a situation in which they had a direct billing relationship with the digital audience. Magazine publishers have no idea how lucky they are. It is therefore vital to transfer this subscriber relationship to the digital sphere as soon as possible. Print publishers can do this because it can be very simple and straightforward to offer those print-subscribers who want it a digital subscription as a complementary part of their print subscription. Enfranchise the print audience as quickly as possible.

Consumer magazine publishers are in an extraordinarily privileged position because they 'own' their audience (subscribers who come to them direct) in a way in which very few consumer media operations are able to match (music, film, book and TV producers all struggle through not being able to bridge the gap directly between digital product and digital consumer). From this standpoint the concession that Apple has given to magazine publishers is extraordinarily important.

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs Apple Press Release Feb 15, 2011

Although magazine publishers do realise the importance of 'owning' their digital audience, very few of them have yet made the transition that the prevalence of the iPad/iPhone and the army of Android devices affords to them. Relatively few magazines yet have 2% of their subscription numbers through digital subs. By Christmas 8% of the US consumer magazine market will have access to their own iPad, and 4% of the UK audience will be similarly placed. Surely it is time to get those subscription offers in place? No need to fork the business for that.

Financial Times Tablets

2011-09-02T02:54:00.004+01:00

As a regular FT reader I watch their digital development with real interest. Paid Content has been following their strategy and has a note about the reasons why the FT has now withdrawn its app from iTunes.

Two months after the deadline for compliance hit, it’s now clear The Financial Times and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) can’t come to a compromise over the new requirement that in-app subscription payments must go through iTunes Store. The paper’s iPad and iPhone apps have disappeared from iTunes Store. Apple says the FT took them down to comply with its new terms. Financial Times Apps Finally Pulled from iOS Paid Content

The FT has a really excellent HTML5 app designed for the iPad (and other tablets?) and subscriptions for this app can be purchased directly from the FT web site. Note that the headline is misleading, the FT has not pulled its app from iOS, the app actually works fine with an excellent touch-interface on the iPad. What has happened is that the app cannot be bought or distributed via iTunes. The reason for pulling out of iTunes? Well, it apparently isn't primarily about the 30% commission that the FT would have to pay for all subscriptions sold through iTunes:

“(Giving away) thirty percent of subscription revenue isn’t something we celebrate, but that was secondary actually - we already pay other distributors and agents; newsagents take a cut. Central to our whole strategy and all our aspirations is to have that direct relationship with the reader.” John Ridding CEO FT, interviewed by Paid Content, August 8, 2011.

But this is still hard to understand, because the newsagents and other distributors who sell the physical product not only take a cut, in aggregate much more than 30%, they deliver readers who have no direct relationship with the publisher. Refusing to sell subscriptions through iTunes and refusing to participate in the shortly to be launched Newsstand within iTunes is de facto hiding the publication from the 200 million people who have an iTunes account. The FT has lots of costs to get on to physical news stands but good product placement within iTunes is pretty much free for the publisher, so why turn that away? Sure some loyal readers who have purchased an iPad will be willing to go to the FT's web site and sign up directly there, through the Safari web browser, but everyone who has an iPad has an iTunes account and knows how much easier it is to use it to buy a subscription within iTunes than to transact with a web site using a credit card. The FT's move away from iTunes makes no sense in the context of customer acquisition, especially since Apple now allows publishers to provide free for subscribers access through an app. Apple has also stepped back from requiring that publishers who sell subscriptions should offer the best price in their iTunes sub. If the FT wished to promote digital subscriptions which include free access to the app, and at a lower price to direct subscribers who have given their demographics to the publisher, there is nothing now in the Apple rules to prevent this. They could have in-app purchasing within iTunes, but no reader demographics, and off-iTunes direct selling with complementary iPad access to those subscribers who complete the demographic form. Anonymous readers via Apple, and 'engaged' subscribers via their own transactional system.

The FT's stance in this matter is so puzzling that I wonder if there is some hidden explanation. One that occurs to me is this: the FT will have spent some time developing its HTML5 app and the service that delivers it. It surely will have done this because the FT expects there soon to be a range of media consumption tablets of which the iPad is merely the foretaste. So the publisher would like to manage the way in which subscriptions are handled across all platforms, collecting similar information from Android, Windows and iOS platforms on similar terms. That this may be the main concern is shown by this remark:

“You have to think about the customer - life is going to get pretty confusing if you have to have a different sign-on with all the different device manufacturers. John Ridding CEO FT, interviewed by Paid Content, August 8, 2011.

Sure there is a certain logic to this approach: the FT is going to do everything the FT way. This is a 'consistent' way of looking at distribution channels from the publisher's point of view, but it is an extraordinarily un-customercentric way of looking at the market. Suppose every publisher develops apps in a similar fashion. There is no likelihood at all that different publishers will offer their subscriptions on similar terms or have matching demographic requirements. So life is going to get very confusing for periodical subscribers who have to learn about the very different sign-on steps required from different publications. An approach that may appear to be simplifying matters for the publisher is vastly complicating the lives of consumers. One of the great advantages of iTunes for the customer and the publisher is that the terms and conditions for purchasing apps and subscriptions are pretty much standard. You know what to expect and its all very simple.

It will be interesting to see how the FT app plays alongside the terms and conditions that will be attached to the heavily rumoured Amazon Android tablet. Its hard to see how Amazon could keep an HTML5 app off the hardware, but it will be surprising if the publication is sold through the Amazon app store, because there is no likelihood of Amazon letting publishers collect all that demographic data that they would like to have from subscribers. So, rather than being a rebuff to Apple, perhaps the FT's stance in this matter is a statement of principle and a shot across the bows of the soon to be revealed Amazon periodical platform.

How much will it hurt the FT if they persist in their policy of not offering the app through iTunes? My hunch would be that iTunes availability with very modest promotional efforts could easily double the level of sales that they can achieve from a stance without iTunes. We are currently seeing a big step up in iTunes subscription purchases (mostly for the iPad). iPad sales are ramping up. There is a good chance that the FT app will go back into iTunes with 12 months. Apple will not have changed its stance, but the FT will have seen that it can work with iTunes and 'upsell' to customers who may have initially been reluctant to provide personal details to the publisher.

The Changing Shape of B2B Services

2011-09-01T05:55:00.002+01:00

In the last few months I have been hearing a bit about box.net, which seems to be a Dropbox-type of solution for corporations, so I was interested to read a somewhat lengthy interview at Business Insider with Aaron Levie its youthful founder and CEO. Here are a couple of smart points:

(On why the big office Suite products that bundle email, social, CRM, collaboration, ERP etc in a big coalition -- are not such a threat) ...If you go to the average company in America, that's not what they've implemented. They've implemented Salesforce as their CRM, Google Apps for email—a large number of them, in the millions—they'll be thinking of Workday or NetSuite for their ERP. Each of those companies is or will become a multibillion-dollar company just focused on that best-of-breed aspect of what they're trying to solve. With the Web, you can connect these properties together, you can connect this information together, so you don't actually take a productivity hit by having different services. There might be a slight management complexity, but there's new technology that helps with that,

....how we distribute our products is totally different from how Oracle and Microsoft distribute their products—we're direct to the customer, we're all over the Internet, you don't have to go through a whole network and channel of distribution. The way our applications are built—we release updates to our products every week. Microsoft takes 3 years to release a new product. So the whole DNA of our company is completely different. That will take some time to cycle it into Oracle and Microsoft.

(On why its not a problem selling into corporations that have pre-existing agreements) ...That [agreement] will expire and the customer will be ready to jump when it does. Companies that keep customers captive because of contracts aren't always the hardest to disrupt. Ultimately, it doesn't create a great customer-vendor relationship. There's a lot of fractures in the market where that exists. Business Insider August 26

These thoughts chimed with mine because we have in the last few months been seeing some RFPs (Request For Proposal) from larger magazine companies that we would love to work with and are to an extent already working with. It seems that the major magazine companies are now fully realizing that that they need a comprehensive digital magazine strategy and the Chief Information Officer who is often (but not always) charged with framing the strategy is inclined to look for a single contractor and a comprehensive solution from one supplier.

The perplexities we have with RFPs are quite instructive. The RFPs that we see are almost always too detailed (in one case 12 features are required for iPad app deployment). They omit crucial elements (no mention of search, subscription terms, or compliance with Apple iTunes policies in one RFP). They envisage a solution that is much more expensive and more front-loaded than one we would supply. They underestimate the absolute necessity of instant and rapid improvements to web or app services (an RFP that asks for timetables between software releases and 'support policies' for previous releases is thinking in years and quarterly release mode, when app developers need to plan month by month and web solutions have to respond within days to a new requirement). An RFP that covers the range of options that a digital magazine strategy now needs to address is fundamentally flawed if it does not take advantage of a modular development and deployment strategy. RFPs often have a 'completion date' in mind. Remember that this is a consoling fiction (put there for the benefit of Finance Directors and CEOs), successful digital development does not complete but builds for the next stage. Modular development and deployment can be guided by an RFP but it cannot be ruled by it.

We will continue to see RFPs and we will continue to dutifully respond to them, but we are increasingly finding that a bottom up strategy works best for us and the larger companies that we are working with. This means:

Start with one or two magazines
Start with one or two modular services (universal subscriptions or branded iPad apps for individual magazines)
Work with a contract which allows the publisher to give notice on the service whenever they choose. Software as a service means that the service can be terminated by the publisher/customer whenever they choose. In the medium term a service provider does not build a good relationship by 'keeping customers captive' with an exclusive contract.
Continue to develop and improve the services in response to environmental changes (iOS 5 or Android or Twitter or HTML5 or whatever comes along next....)
Minimise up front charges and have the accent on 'shared success', which means payment by results.
Respect the needs of the end-user first and foremost, and then provide close attention to the requirements of the publisher or the content owner.
Don't try to do everything and avoid customised solutions for individual publishers. That principle guides scaleable solutions but makes it hard to cater to individual RFPs!
Focus on the resources and integration that we can provide through web services (ours and those provided by other companies: Google, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Apple and yes Salesforce and Box.net)

In short the API and the app store matter more to our publisher partners than the RFP.

Now that Google is a Phone Company...

2011-08-16T09:34:00.002+01:00

Will it also become a tablet company? Google plans to buy Motorola Mobility, the mobile phone part of Motorola, for $12.5 Billion and a $2.5 Billion breakup fee (what Google has to pay Motorola if the deal does not go through). Shrewd comments on the strategic reasons for the acquisition are coming from MG Siegler and Florian Mueller.

This is a big deal -- a lot of money, and a lot of employees and mind-share. Google says that they are going to run Motorola as a separate business, but they are going to own one of the big phone makers and it will condition the way that they and all their competitors and collaborators look at Android. One of the interesting consequences of such a big shift is that it will lead to everyone in the technology space re-assessing their position in relation to Google and to other competitors. The wash from this wave will be felt even in the shallows of the digital magazine space. I offer three predictions from this perspective:

This deal makes it more likely that there will soon be a competitive Android tablet. Soon means "not very soon", but one year to eighteen months from now there will be a much better successor to the Motorola Xoom, which was one of the better Android devices but nothing like good enough.
The first good-enough competitor for an iPad that comes from this alliance will be a low-end Google tablet, one that is very good with all standard Google stuff (Maps, Gmail, Google+, Picassa etc) but it will not be strong with consumer media. Google is too far behind to develop a decent competitor for iTunes in the next two years. So Google will increasingly push for free media and web apps for paid stuff, their development and engineering talent will focus on the hardware integration for a device that is brilliant with web services, web apps and the web. Google/Motorola will be in a good position to produce a competitor to the iPad which is not like the iPad, and which is not dependent on media licensing and app developers. A tablet for commodities and utilities at $99. Digital magazines will work well on this device as web apps, but the tablet(s) will not be tied to an e-commerce solution or an app store. This deal does nothing to remedy Google's weakness in retail and support and direct consumer experience.
So this makes it less likely that iTunes will face an effective Android competitor for media consumption. The wild card here is the strongly rumoured Amazon Android tablet. Amazon need this as a replacement for their eInk Kindle, but I wonder whether Amazon regard Google's embrace of Motorola as a helpful step or an increased threat? Is there still scope for a Google/Amazon alliance against the Apple dominant media player?

About one thing I am sure: Apple are happy. Apple will not see the Google move as a significant threat; Apple strategists will be thinking that Google is boxing itself into a challenging situation and undergoing an identity crisis: running a manufacturer, trying to align developers, losing existing allies, facing increasing regulatory concerns, channel conflict and patent wars. Google now has a lot of problems that Apple has largely solved.

Apple Knows Plenty

2011-08-10T04:31:00.004+01:00

Apple is poised to become the biggest company in the world by 'market capitalisation'. It maybe briefly inched ahead of EXXON yesterday in chaotic market trading, but it will very surely be well ahead of the pack by the end of the year. Apple's sales and profits are rocketing and the value of the company is still being significantly underestimated by the markets.

The remarkable fact is that although Apple is now a large company by any standards (annualised sales of over $100 Billion) its profits and its sales turnover are still growing at an amazing rate. Big companies can be very profitable, and big companies can sometimes grow revenues quickly, but Apple is doing both of these things consistently, quarter by quarter. As can be seen in this chart produced by Horace Dedieu

For fuller discussion of the chart see Asymco's note on Apple's growth scorecard for second quarter 2011. In Asymco's deadpan style these sales and profit growth stats are dubbed merely"exceptional" or "very good". But Asymco is being too phlegmatically Finnish, it is frankly unprecedented for a company with annual sales of approaching $100 Billion to be growing year on year at 82% (and in the preceding quarters 83%, 70%, 67%, 61%, 49%, 32%, 6%). You have to go back to Q3 2009 to find the merely respectable figure of 6% annual growth!

The crazy thing is that there are some very strong planks in Apple's growth strategy that we still cannot infer from reported figures. Only Apple knows, or can guess, how strong a part of the growth story will come in the next decade from the sale of music, film, books, and apps all coursing through iTunes and all generating a 30% turn for Apple. This IP-derived cash will become an important part of Apple's revenue streams and even more of its profits, because the marginal cost of selling more digital media through iTunes is very low.

We dont know much about Apple's revenue from apps in iTunes, but we do know, from a press release, that Apple had cummulatively paid out over $2.5 Billion to app developers by July 2011, which means that Apple has retained $1.1 Billion from its share of sales of apps through iTunes (over the 4 years that apps have been for sale in iTunes). At the iPad 2 launch event in January Apple had announced 2$ Billion in payments to app developers, so it is probable that Apple sales from apps will comfortably exceed 1$ Billion in 2011.

Buried within these gross figures, that are reported in bald outline, there will be an amazing amount of detail that is available to Apple only. Apple now has a good deal of insight on the relative buying patterns of owners of iPhones and iPads (now 150 million and 30 million owners in each case). Apple has a lot of information on individuals buying habits for music, film, and for apps, for games, productivity tools, ebooks and magazines and newspapers. Very little of this information is aggregated or understood outside the confines of Cupertino. It would be very interesting to know what the average iPad owner spends on media in the first quarter or the first year of 'ownership', on games, music, ebooks and periodical subscriptions. If the 'average' iPad owner spends $6 per annum on magazine subscriptions through iTunes there is already an annualised market for nearly $200 million in magazine subs. That figure may be too high at this stage when there are so many 'experimental' magazine apps out there doing their publishers experiments. But it is not outlandish to suppose that periodical subscriptions spending could soon head towards $10 or $20 per owner, which will mean that the market will soon be measured in billions. It would be informative/encouraging to know whether expenditure on various classes of media tends to increase or flatten out? There is a widespread belief that app purchases tend to focus around the very low prices on the Apple pricing matrix: 99c or $1.99. That stands to reason, but many publishers and developers would like to have more information, more guidance on pricing at higher levels for more sophisticated offerings. I suspect, and we have smidgins of data that bear this out, that iTunes is now selling relatively big ticket items well (by 'big ticket' I mean items priced at $15 or over, even $50 and over) Apple does not currently have a way of guiding developers and publishers on these issues: except through reporting sales on specific apps -- which Apple does well, promptly and fairly, in my opinion.

I suspect that the information that the market-wide information Apple now has on some of these issues is both quite surprising and also of minimal use to Apple's competitors. So I expect that Apple will find ways of conveying more information that will help to guide the deliberations of its developers and publishers.

From the snail's eye view that we have at Exact Editions one can say with confidence that Apple's potential for revenue generation through iTunes and the app store in particular is extraordinary. Here are four things that we have learned since Apple introduced its automatic renewals within iTunes:

(1) Renewals are good. We have limited data (less than three months) but there are indications that subscriber renewals through iTunes will be over 75%, possibly over 90%. Month by month. If annual renewals are also good, Apple's and the publishers revenues from digital magazines enter a virtuous spiral.

(2) Any special interest consumer monthly magazine with a paid annual circulation over 10,000 print subscribers will make good money from deploying a branded app in iTunes. The revenues from iTunes, even after Apple's commission, taxes, and Exact Editions development charges, will significantly exceed the costs (there must be some exceptions to this rule of thumb, but we have not seen them yet). A magazine that has 10,000 subscribers in print will find 1,000+ subscribers in the 200 million consumers that have iTunes accounts. Next year that proportion will be higher, when there are 250 million iPads.....

(3) The gap between appreciation of magazines on the iPad ("I love my magazine") and appreciation on the iPhone is widening ("the page IS small"). Most iOS magazine apps are being bought by iPad owners. The new iPad 2 is also clearly better than its predecessor for magazines. We think that the iPad 3 may mark another step change, especially for highly visual magazines.

(4) A significant proportion of users who subscribe to a magazine in iTunes will choose the expensive option of a 12 month sub, rather than the easy option of a 30 day sub. Though all our publishers offer discounts for annual subs when they price their subscriptions for iTunes, in nearly all cases the reward for the 12 month sub is small -- 10/15%. So we have been surprised to see 20%, 25% even 30% of subscribers opting for the bigger ticket (it varies with different magazines). Surely the adoption rate will be even higher when magazine publishers decide to start experimenting with promotional annual subscriptions in iTunes. This is excellent news for publishers who wish to maximise subscription revenues on the digital side, it is very good news for Apple also, though it is going to be another 9 months before we start to find out how good the annual renewal rate in iTunes is!

So What is the Business Model?

2011-07-29T15:15:00.006+01:00

In looking to the promising digital future for magazines it is essential that publishers separate out two questions:

What is the best consumer format for digital magazines?
What is the appropriate economic model for the digital magazine business?

These are very different questions. But the answers that we come up with are going to have a bearing, the one on the other. And vice versa. The magazine publisher has to get both right!

Over-simplifying wildly, there are currently three views on the appropriate format for digital magazines battling for the attention of the consuming public.

In some ways the simplest solution involves converting the magazines existing web site into an RSS feed which packages the contents of the web site for delivery in through a browser or an RSS aggregator. Many of the early magazine and newspaper apps were in effect re-packaged RSS feeds. In this view, digital magazines should aim at maximum topicality and a streaming delivery through which each story (or article) is delivered to the audience in a self-contained capsule, when it is ready and whenever it is updated, in a continuous flow. The RSS format has been leveraged and improved upon by Flipboard (Zite and Pulse are aggregators in the same category). This is a radical format change as a consequence of which the print magazine loses the 'rigidity' both of the 'issue' and of the 'page'.
More of a 'half-way house' is the trend to develop digital magazines which although they drop the 'integrity/rigidity' of the printed page, maintain the edition-driven, periodical, grouping of the dated issue. Magazines which are delivered as digital editions to the Kindle have this re-flowable format and step away from the pagination of the print magazine, they probably also 'lose' the advertisements which form a part of the print version, but they continue to adhere to the serial clumping of the magazine associated with a publication date, and temporal sequence in the magazine archive. We can think of these re-flowable digital magazines as similar to ebooks. It is no accident that magazines delivered through Amazon's Kindle (a dedicated ebook reader) have this structure. But there are plenty of similar ebook-like apps in iTunes. The Economist's iOS app is a good example.
The alternative model for digital magazine deployment, works from the supposition that consumers really want a virtual magazine. The digital magazine retains its print 'look and feel' with pages and settled issues, but the magazine becomes a virtualised object, at once familiar and flexible, browseable, searchable and linkable; a magazine which can be read on a mobile phone, a web-connected computer, or a tablet in analogous ways as the print magazine would be read as a physical product. Declaring an interest: this is the route to digitization employed by Exact Editions, but also by Zinio, and with some variations by Adobe. Commentators sometimes refer to these solutions as 'PDF magazines' or 'Page Turning' solutions/platforms, but such characterizations miss the point that virtualised digital magazines can be much more than mere replicas. Because they are virtualised replicas, they can have layers of additional purely digital functionality superimposed on the replicated structure. Obviously 'search', enhanced 'linkage' and integration with web services, multimedia elements and episodes can be stirred into the format and tablet-specific interactions work well on a digital object.

There really is no uniformity of opinion about which of these models for digital magazine delivery is the most suitable and attractive. Speaking for myself, as you might predict from my statement of interest, I have a strong preference for the virtual magazine model (type (3)), but I also enjoy Flipboard and can see why some readers may prefer an Economist-style app. We may also feel that the RSS magazine solution works better in the format constraints of a mobile phone, and in contrast the virtual magazine, which needs to handle fully designed pages, plays to its strengths within the scale of an iPad.

Consider this: if the best format for a digital magazine were a completely settled question, we should not be seeing so many experiments with differing formats and delivery services. It should also be noted that all three types of format are the subject of steady evolution and improvement: RSS-style, ebook-style, and virtualised page-based, digital magazine readers are all getting better. It is not as though the magazine industry has decided with a herd-like mentality that one digital format is clearly the winner -- whereas the book publishing industry, by contrast, appears to be reaching a consensus that ebook formats (such as for the Kindle or for ePub) are a settled choice.

Since there is a certain amount of confusion or disagreement about what digital format makes for the most pleasing and sustainable digital magazine experience, then it is hardly surprising that there is a lack of consensus about the appropriate business model around which magazine publishers should build their digital solutions. The problem here is that print magazine publishers (also printed newspaper publishers) have developed a twin track approach to revenue and profitability, through which advertising and sales (newsstand or subscription) both contribute. Magazine publishers are nervous about a digital future in which subscription sales would be the primary pillar of their magazine revenues. When a publisher looks at the digital distribution options for magazines in relation to actual or potential business models for a magazine business, the choices become rather constrained. The RSS model really has to be an advertising-led or even an exclusively advertising path for monetisation. The ebook approach clearly forces the pace on subscriptions, and since most ebook-style magazines actually drop the advertising component its actually inimical to the advertising revenue stream. Any play for digital magazines where ads and subs are driving the revenue line has to come up with a solution through which advertisements and subscriptions are working jointly through a digital medium. The virtual magazine looks as though it might carry this two track approach.

Ken Doctor, over at the Nieman Journalism Lab, has posted an intriguing analysis of the parallels between film distribution (as managed by Netflix) and the digital transition confronting newspaper and magazine publishers. In Doctor's view:

These economics of transition have a second, big piece for publishers that Netflix doesn’t have to worry about: advertising. With advertising accounting for 70 percent of newspaper revenues worldwide, the huge question for publishers is how much ad revenue they can make from purely digital customers. In the U.S, newspaper publishers know they make more than $500 a year on a Sunday print subscriber. With reduced digital product cost (like Netflix’s reduced cost of streaming), newspaper and magazine publishers won’t need the same level of revenue, but they will need a substantial part of what they are getting today. Those economics are just being modeled now in 2011, as the promise of higher-priced and higher-value tablet (and smartphone) advertising looks like it may be real and buildable.

Magazine and newspapers aren’t yet ready to more forcibly shift the audience in the direction of digital-only. The Newsonomics of Netflix and the Digital Shift.

Doctor reckons that the periodical business has perhaps one to three years to prepare for an accelerated shift to digital. I am not sure about the higher-priced and higher-value tablet advertising metrics that Doctor discerns, but from the rate at which iPad subscriptions are motoring there is a growing perception that the digital shift with magazines has certainly begun and it is subscription led, and iPad shaped.

Jazzwise a new app with Bonus Media

2011-07-22T17:44:00.002+01:00

We have a new app in the iTunes app store with some cool bonus media. I have also been experimenting with Google+ and Webdoc (first impressions: very useful and cloud-based) to see how we can give a few glimpses of the magazine apps that are coming through from us in increasing profusion.....

Some screenshots from the Jazzwise app. There is some music in the magazine app, but I have used the Webdoc tool to grab a fragment of Archie Shepp and Joachim Kuhn.

Disruptive Paradigms

2011-07-18T17:27:00.004+01:00

There is a fascinating confusion now reigning in the higher reaches of the Microsoft empire.

Steve Balmer and his team are convinced that tablets should be viewed as PCs, and that there is no need to put a mobile operating system on Windows tablets ("iPads and tablets are just a different form factor of PC"). They appear to have completely misread the reasons for the success of Apple's iOS and its iPhone and iPad devices. As Horace Dediu notes:

Summed up, the real challenge for Microsoft is whether they can keep their business model (selling OS licenses to hardware vendors) as PCs become more device-like. Not only is iOS setting the benchmark for performance but Android is potentially ready to take share if the market turns slightly more modular. Microsoft’s differentiation looks to be primarily its legacy of PC software. Asymco: is the tablet computer a new PC or Post PC?

Horace Dediu clearly thinks that Microsoft are completely missing the point of the shift to a Post PC model of computing: deep integrated development from hardware through system software to applications; a new model for developer engagement; and novel challenges for manufacturing and distribution in which incredibly high levels of device standardisation and reliability have to be met. All of this Apple gets, and Microsoft apparently does not get it. They are stuck with an outmoded paradigm and it is preventing them from engineering a competitive challenge. Microsoft will not build a competitor to the iPhone or the iPad because Microsoft thinks that its future lies, as its past successes have lain, in licensing its desktop operating system (and a separate mobile operating system) to manufacturers. Microsoft will not be competitive because Balmer does not want to be in that competition to build an integrated device that works across all device formats and layers media on applications, on transaction engine, on operating system and finely engineered and integrated device. And it may already be too late.

These shifting paradigms, are everywhere in the technological landscape. The shift from a PC oriented workstation to tablet and sundry mobile computing devices is just a particularly extreme and decisive example. I think we can see another disruptive paradigm shift working its way through the British newspaper industry this last week. The abrupt closure of the News Of the World was an extraordinary and rather shocking event. But as the ongoing fallout shows the real damage that is being done to the newspaper business is self-inflicted. The News of the World was paying bent investigators and cosying up to policemen because the business managers believed that it was only by delivering a stream of edgy/dodgy stories that they could persuade people to buy the paper. As the (mostly digital) competition got fiercer the methods became dodgier. Newspapers are hoping that their old business model can be replicated digitally, and they are not confronting the deeper problem which is that the package of business strategies and features that supported newspapers 10/15 years ago is no longer going to work (exclusives, classifieds, daily editions, ABC audits, bulk deals, tombstone ads, stock price listings).

Some magazine publishers are also desperate to hang on to the old business model in the hope that it will continue to work. Jan Wenner the founder, owner and publisher of Rolling Stone is such and had an alarming interview with AdAge a few weeks ago.

Ad Age: What's your take on selling magazines on the iPad and other tablets?

Mr. Wenner: It's the same pretty much as I've said about the web. The tablet itself is a really fun device. Some people are going to enjoy it a lot and use it. Some people aren't. On this plane one person's traveling with a tablet, one's not. There's a certain trendiness to the thing. And it's a great thing. But is it a good magazine thing?

It's a good magazine reading device, absolutely. And where it becomes more convenient to read the magazine on that, that's got the advantage. But that's more convenient only if you're traveling, if you're away from home. Otherwise it's still easier to read the physical magazine, which is widely available on newsstands, at airports, and everywhere. You can still subscribe to get it and get it on time. You still get all the value of the magazine.

I don't think that gives you much advantage as a magazine reader to read it on the tablet -- in fact less so. It's a little more difficult.

From the publisher's point of view I would think they're crazy to encourage it. They're going to get less money for it from advertisers. Right now it costs a fortune to convert your magazine, to program it, to get all the things you have to do on there. And they're not selling. You know, 5,000 copies there, 3,000 copies here, it's not worth it. You haven't put a dent in your R&D costs.

So I think that they're prematurely rushing and showing little confidence and faith in what they've really got, their real asset, which is the magazine itself, which is still a great commodity. It's a small additive; it's not the new business. (Jan Wenner interview with Nat Ives in AdAge, May 30)

Wenner is a smart publisher but he is too much like Steve Ballmer and he is failing to grasp the opportunity that a new paradigm will give him. He wants to carry on selling double page spreads for $60,000+ dollars to big brands ("They're going to get less money for it from advertisers."), as Ballmer wants to keep on selling $40 Windows licenses to laptop makers. But that may not be a feasible opportunity for a digital magazine. The iPad at least is shaping up to be a good proposition for selling subscriptions to magazines, but there is no guarantee that it will be as attractive to high-spending consumer brands and their advertising budgets.

I hope that Jann Wenner takes a closer look at the way iPad subs are working. Some magazines are making real progress on the iPad, and the simple truth is that you need to sell 3,000 copies, and then 5,000 copies before you can sell 50,000 and then 100,000 subscriptions. But selling copies is not the point, gathering iPad eye-balls is not really the point either, selling subscriptions is. Subscriptions can be and will be repeat business on the iPad. They will be a phenomenal business, outstandingly profitable for Apple and also a very good business for magazine publishers who have lots of advantages when it comes to selling subscriptions. Their product is a periodical (so repeat business is 'built in'), their product appeals to highly identifiable consumer niches, they already know how to sell direct to consumers (contrast with book publishers, music publishers and TV producers), their product can be delivered through multiple channels (including print). Consumer magazines are finding one part of their business (advertising) sorely disrupted by the internet and digital devices, but another strand to their business (subscriptions) appears to be ideally placed to work through the iPad and other tablets. Go for it!

Apple's Mega Newsstand

2011-06-28T09:53:00.003+01:00

At its World Wide Developer Conference at the beginning of the month, Apple introduced iOS5, a close integration with Twitter and its plans for a Newsstand within iTunes. There was a brief overview of the Newsstand service in the presentation and this mention in the Press Release:

Newsstand is a beautiful, easy-to-organize bookshelf displaying the covers of all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in one place. A new section of the App Store™ features just subscription titles, and allows users to quickly find the most popular newspapers and magazines in the world. If subscribed to, new issues appear in the Newsstand and are updated automatically in the background so you always have the latest issue and the most recent cover art. Apple Press Release, June 6, 2011

There is quite a lot yet to be decided about the precise shape and operation of the Newsstand but what we know looks promising. We know that its coming in the fall, which means that it must be near completion; we know that it will enable background downloading; and that it will present the front pages, front covers, of newspapers and magazines in a more topical and attractive way. We know that Twitter will be available as an omni-present system-call in the new iOS. We also know that Apple's newly introduced in-app subscription process, with automatic iTunes renewals is working well, many mainstream publishers have announced that they will support it. This is a separate but important development. We also know that Apple has relaxed its previously announced, but over-restrictive policies on pricing of subscriptions "outside" the App store. Apple will not be 'leaning over' and requiring publishers to charge no more for digital subscriptions on the web or on Android than they charge within iTunes. Apple is loosening up a bit.

This really could be the very best news for the digital magazine and newspaper industry. Here is why:

Apple sold nearly 20 million iPads in the year to April 2011. We do not know how many they will sell in the second year, but it seems reasonable to expect a very large number. Another 50+ million units seems probable. Three years after its launch the iPad could certainly have a 200/300 million installed base. That is scale.
Apple has decided to bring some marketing and retailing focus to periodicals within iTunes. This is what the Newsstand announcement really amounts to. Apple will arrange focus and in-store presentation and highlighting. It is as though Tescos or WalMart announced that they were going to have a big newsstand kiosk in a prominent place within all of their retail outlets. The Newsstand will be a sales focus and it will attract masses of titles. Since periodicals have never been aggregated and retailed at remotely comparable scale, it is quite hard to envisage the potential for a newsstand which has tens of thousands of titles in all the main languages. Apple would only be doing this if it considered that newspapers and magazines could be a big category. Apple is building a platform from which it can sell billions of news and magazine subscriptions.
It would appear that Apple will be going for a very 'format' neutral Newsstand. Apple has not said that all magazines and newspapers should have a specific file format, as happens with iBooks. It has not said that newspapers and magazines should or should not be 'interactive', though it seems certain that interactivity will be there (see most newspaper apps). This is ingenious because it allows/encourages publishers and developers to experiment with different sorts of delivery format. Apple is offering a sales platform, a payment platform, a cloud-based delivery and access platform. But it is not dictating the format or precise implementation of magazine services. This is ingenious in two directions. It encourages publishers with the advantages of a genuine platform (scale in distribution, and simplicity in payment and licensing for customers) but does not constrain publishers or developers in the services that they may offer. The platform does not appear to constrain the potential for innovation and diversity, except perhaps that these periodicals will of necessity have issues and front pages (even that limitation may be negotiable). Since magazines and newspapers have extraordinary diversity in their appeal and in their production processes, this is a masterstroke for Apple. And it is also clever in a second way since it enables Apple to be quite agnostic about how magazines and newspapers should be delivered. Apple does not have the heavy responsibility of managing content and dragging timely editions from publishers' workflow. Apple allows innovation within the iOS guidelines and will benefit (to the tune of 30%) from not having to do the experimentation or day to day content management on their publisher's behalf. Apple does not even expect to host the titles (as it does for iBooks).
Publishers will complain about Apple's 30%, and although I have some sympathy for the complaint, one notes that Apple's recent loosening of its pricing rules, has given publishers an enormous opportunity. Magazine publishers especially. Magazines know how to sell subscriptions to consumers. They have been doing that for years. Magazines have a business model which encourages them to sell direct and they should certainly use that to build direct relationships with their subscriber base. But they should also welcome Apple as the cornerstone of their digital promotion. Apple is not telling its book publisher partners or its music industry partners that they should sell direct. Furthermore, there is little chance that Jeff Bezos will echo Steve Jobs when he said: “Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing.” (Apple Press Release, February 15, 2011) Replace 'Apple' by 'Amazon' in that sentence -- and I am not sure that Jeff Bezos would even recognise it as grammatical, he would certainly stumble if it were included in the Kindroid press release.

There is only one thing clearly wrong with the Apple, iTunes, Newsstand as far as I am concerned. Do you think there is any chance that they could move away from that rather corny idea of presenting magazines on a pine bookcase? Would it not be better if the Newsstand felt more like an Apple retail store? Not pine, but steel, marble and clean, abstract lines. Putting tens of thousands on pine book cases makes no sense at all.

Now that Apple Owns the Tablet Space .....

2011-06-22T08:59:00.005+01:00

When the iPad was launched, there was a widespread view (and I shared it) that soon, and not more than a year or two later, there would be some highly competitive and lower-priced tablet alternatives for customers to choose from. The iPad had opened a new hardware category, but competitors would quickly crowd into this new opening... there would be lots of choice and most of it would not be for Apple hardware.

Whilst dissecting a review of one of the best Android competitor's to the iPad, Marco Ament notes:

Translation: Android tablets have managed to copy the iPad’s hardware well enough — the easy part — but have failed to provide good software and significant third-party app choice — the hard part. The Android Tablet Problem

For any 'head-to-head' competitor tablet to get into the market for a face off with the iPad there is the possibly insuperable problem that the new tablet lacks a coherent body of developers and of tablet-primed media. Apple has been building its iOS developer community and media resources for four years (arguably more). Apple has huge momentum and capability behind its iOS platform and this cannot be matched by any competitor. I don't think that a 'head to head' competitor to the iPad can emerge in the next five years. The competitive threat if it comes, will be from a completely new approach, an external threat not a mid-size device like the iPad. We should look to a paradigm shift as radical and disruptive as the iPhone/iPad surge that Apple has produced to disrupt the mobile phone and the laptop computer.

Harry McCracken reviews the state of iPad competition and concludes that it is very hard to see why anybody in the market for a tablet would buy something other than an iPad 2.

And yet no Apple competitor has started selling anything that clearly answers a fundamental question: “Why should somebody buy this instead of an iPad?” Sure, it’s easy to point at specific things that other devices do better (or at least differently) than the iPad, and some of the people reading this article can explain why they chose another tablet and don’t regret the move. (If you’re one of them, please do!) Still, sales figures for tablets show that when consumers compare the iPad to other choices, an overwhelming percentage conclude that the iPad is the best option. ....Instead of an iPad (Technologizer)

If the 'competitors' to the iPad cannot emerge now, a year after the first iPad was launched, why should it be feasible that the direct competition will be stronger in a year or two's time? The iPad eco-system is getting richer and stronger at an amazing rate and that is the problem any direct tablet competitor faces. The fundamental point about the iPad and the iOS range of devices is that Apple is not really selling a hardware solution; Apple is offering a software and services solution, and it is the whole package that customers are buying into. This is something which no competitor to Apple is plausibly positioned to challenge. Not Microsoft (they don't really do manufacturing), not Google (they don't truly understand selling), not Amazon (who are best placed to have a shot at it, but do not have deep consumer-device engineering DNA).

We will come back to Amazon in a minute. But first let us consider what are the consequences of Apple owning the tablet category for the next three, four years -- by which I mean that Apple has a good chance of being the supplier of most of the tablets bought for the plan-able future.

Apple will sell a lot of iPads and will certainly offer a modicum more choice (high-end, low-end, high-res, medium res). Moore's law says that Apple should be able to produce a sub $200 iPad for Christmas 2012. Apple will do that.
The degree of device choice will be constrained by the requirement that as many apps as possible should run across all iOS devices. So no new aspect ratio, but quad pixel density. The coherence and interoperability of the range of iOS devices is already another source of lock-in. That gets stronger as the differentiation within the range is gently increased.
The lead that Apple has in the deployment of apps for tablets will grow. Enormously, and become even more of an obstacle to 'internal' disruption from iPad-like competitors.
Android, or maybe Windows, phones may well provide very strong competition at the 'low end', at the small format end of the market. There will be plenty of apps for non-Apple phones. These non-Apple phones will also be well-placed to produce competitive applications which are not tablet-sized and which do not necessarily require the full range of touch interface.
Apple's competitors will increasingly throw their weight behind web standards and 'open' technologies.

Amazon already has the Kindle platform and has sufficient strength in books, music, film and periodicals to mount a competitive challenge to Apple with its likely Android tablet -- they need to launch it soon or Apple will own the holiday season device market in 2011. Amazon may be able to launch a somewhat credible Kindroid alternative to the iPad, but I think Apple has played a very clever move here in the last couple of weeks. It relaxed its e-commerce terms so that the soft Kindle can stay on the iPad/iTunes platform. This might have looked like a concession to Amazon (and to the millions of iPad owners who run the Kindle app on their iPad) but it was in fact an astute and decisive blow to the hardware side of Amazon's business. Not having your Kindle library on the iPad would have been a decisive reason for many Amazon customers to switch to the Android tablet that will soon be launched by Jeff Bezos. Now there is no compelling reason to buy the Kindroid, no reason not to buy the iPad which will hold your library. Apple will not be getting 30% from the sale of Amazon ebooks, but those books can be used on iOS and Apple's selection of music, film and apps is so much better than Amazon will be able to offer on the Kindroid. Apple will not be letting Amazon deploy film or music apps within iTunes either. So who has the upper hand in that trade? Apple never actually applied the e-commerce rules that it has just relaxed (they were meant to come in force at the end of this month). Perhaps they were told by lawyers that the proposals would attract monopolies sanctions, but rescinding/withdrawing them now was a stroke of genius and a sign of confidence. When push comes to shove, Apple owns the tablet space and there is not a lot that Amazon or anybody else can do about that.

Is Twitter Becoming the Web's Intentional Layer?

2011-06-01T09:02:00.007+01:00

Intentionality is a philosophical term of art, and it refers to or 'points to' the directedness or aboutness of much of our mental and linguistic activity. Of much of our action. But 'intentionality' has also been used by web commentators, John Battelle, for one, when he considers the extent to which Google is striving to build a method of search which captures the user's intent and which is at the same time harvesting and modeling intentions and desires:

The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data ......... This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. John Battelle The Database of Intentions, 2003 -- [at that time Battelle gave pride of place in his blog to Google, MSN and Yahoo. I think now he would pick Google, Facebook and Twitter, possibly Amazon and Apple].

My intuitive 'internal model' for thinking about the web is of a constellation of HTML, of piles of content; comparable, and yet exceeding, the largest libraries. But the web is also and quite distinctively a constellation of links, hyperlinks, and these links are intents. Every hyperlink is itself an 'intentional act', a referential act that is also digital, an act that annihilates distance and short-circuits context and time, taking us instantaneously, magically, to the target of the link's intention. Every link that our finger points to on an iPad is the shadow of the intentional act of the author of the link, and the harbinger/blueprint for the intentional act of each user who follows the link. Viewing the web not so much as a static docuverse, but as a dynamic aggregation of usage and process, the intentional power of the web comes from the way it charts and shifts the attention, the intention, and the focus of its users. Google is as much an instrument for choice and for cognitive intent as it is also an engine for search. However there is a case for treating Twitter as a special case, as especially pure and nakedly intentional. Tweets are all about links and intentions and Twitter is building a massive intentional superstructure through the discourse and activity of Twitter users. There are at least three sources for Twitter's pervasive intentionality.

Twitter's atomicity. Twitter's brevity hones the sharpness of a tweet's intentional aim. The 140 word limit forces directedness in tweeting. The character limit requires that the user targets with precision and clear reference the subject that is being tweeted. For a medium with such a narrow bandwidth, Twitter has been extraordinarily effective at finding ways of lassooing content with precision. Think twitpic and bit.ly. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you do not need a thousand words to reference a picture in a tweet. It is not possible to say everything in a tweet (Godel's theorem and The Whitsun Weddings are just too subtle and long), but there is no practical limit to the stuff that one can refer to or touch on with a tweet.
Twitter's asymmetry. Twitter in a deep way echoes the topology of the web, with the asymmetry of the follower/followed relationship matching the asymmetry of the hyperlink (that which is linked to often does not link back; just as I am more likely to follow Stephen Fry than he is to follow me). This asymmetry leads to a much more interesting network than the symmetrical relationships that were at the starting point of Facebook and Linkedin. Twitter piggybacks on the topology of the web (any url can be linked to as can any place on a Google map) but we should notice that it also escapes the web, since a good deal of Twitter activity takes place without the web, in apps, on SMS and mobile phones. Twitter's capillary vessels can run through the web, but they also allow us to wander off into digital by-ways that are beyond the web. This gives scope for broader digital intent and for a layer of crisp intentional communication which is not bound to the web, though it uses it.
Twitter's syntactic devices. Twitter has a repertoire of formal devices which allows users to harness and amplify the intentions of others. The 'follow' relationship is a primary mechanism of amplification, since the tweeter with a large audience is like a speaker with a megaphone. Following is certainly not the only basis for collective action in the Twitter domain. Users have plenty of other devices for amplification and message modulation: 'retweeting', recommendations, Twitter lists, locations, and hashtags are all mechanisms that enable and allow the Twitter user to deploy collective intentionality. It might be better to say that these are mechanisms that allow users to participate in collective intentionality in a new and inherently digital way.

We should be careful not to give excessive focus to Twitter -- which is just the epitome of many other social internet technologies that enable us to share and focus desires, perceptions, references and approval. But Twitter's pure and naked intentional quality defines its usefulness and attractiveness. There are rumours that next week will see Apple announce that iOS 5 will support system level calls to Twitter. If that happens we will see less talk about the iPad being merely a lean back device.

The Google Books Mess

2011-05-27T14:15:00.003+01:00

There were a couple of tell-tale signs last week that Google may be having some pain and problems with its vastly ambitious Google Books project. First, was the news that Google was pulling the plug on its corresponding, open-ended, plan to scan and database masses of historic newspaper archives. Second a report that Google was diverting all its programmers from its eBookstore and perhaps not vigorously pursuing plans selling eBooks.

The problem that Google has, is that there was huge momentum within the company towards its grandiose plan for a comprehensive universal digital library and this vision, with its accompanying class action settlement [ASA or amended settlement agreement] was decisively stopped in March by the opinion of Judge Chin (USDC SDNY)

While the digitization of books and the creation of a
universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would
simply go too far. It would permit this class action - - which
was brought against defendant Google Inc. ("Google") to challenge
its scanning of books and display of "snippets" for on-line
searching - - to implement a forward-looking business arrangement
that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire
books, without permission of the copyright owners. Indeed, the
ASA would give Google a significant advantage over competitors,
rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted
works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond
those presented in the case. (Opinion 22 March 2011)

Chin's decision is styled an opinion, and it might yet be appealed or revised, but most observers would tell you that it has pretty well stopped the Google project in its tracks.

Google has got a lot of figuring out to do:

Google is not out of its legal woes, although such a rich and powerful company can probably stall or out-manoeuvre the authors and publishers who are parties to the original suite in the USA. Yet Google will need some resolution to the case or it risks enormous damages for breach of copyright ($3.6 trillion according to one scholar).
Google will not find it straightforward to avoid legal actions in other jurisdictions. It has ongoing legal woes in France, and if some French publishers win substantial damages, many others will charge through these same gates.
Google is continuing to scan without permission millions of works which are not out of copyright on behalf of its library partners. So the liabilities grow.
Google will be required to deliver digital library services to some of its core collaborating libraries. The libraries of Michigan and Stanford in particular. To the extent that these services depend on copyright works digitized without permission Google remains at significant risk.
There will be increasing concern about advantages that may accrue to Google from the works that it has already scanned and databased, and which it may use in ways impervious and invisible to external actors. Perhaps Google will gain enormous advantage in the fields of search, automated translation and semantic technologies through private access to vast amounts of unregistered, unlicensed, copyright material. That putative advantage creates legal risks for Google from competitors and regulators.
Without a recognized and legitimized settlement Google cannot deliver services of general public benefit, and at some point Google loses good will. Without a settlement Google cannot even be generous.
Google has plenty of agreements with publishers and authors for the distribution, display and potential licensing of millions of copyright works. So it could be an active participant in the eBooks market, but it has been strangely hesitant and stuttering in recent years about its commercial activities. Almost certainly because Google's lawyers are anxious about the way such commercial exploitation may play against the unresolved matters in dispute. If Google carries on havering it will lose its opportunity in the digital books market, much as it appears to be losing its opportunity in the market for digital music.

I am not sure that Google has an easy way of stepping out of this mess. But it needs to find, or create through disruptive action, some solution.

The original goal of a universal library designed, built and maintained by a single technical player was hubristic and naive, driven by the enthusiasm and commitment of the founders (Page in particular who felt that he owed a debt to his alma mater, the University of Michigan). Google's best hope now would be to distance its involvement from the prospect of private gain and to place all works not public domain, and not explicitly licensed to Google, in the sole care and control of the public academic institutions from which the original works were taken, and to renounce any commercial advantage through its involvement in converting 'orphan' works. Google will have to pay the authors and publishers something (if only to cover some of the legal bills, that will otherwise be pursued to the bitter end on a contingency basis by the other side), it can afford to finance the first blocks of a Rights Registry, but it should be more open and more public, more consultative, in part foundation funded, than the original design. Google does not need and should not look for special advantages on rights and forward-looking business models. If Google were to do that it could help to promote the cause of orphan works legislation in a disinterested manner. Google needs to get legitimate, beyond all shadow of doubt, fast.

Google often likes to play the 'open' card, but it has been far too closed and 'private' over its books project. It needs to rethink the game-plan and its style of involvement. That way it will retain the good will of the library community and the reading public. By being highly generous and public spirited it looks after the interests of its shareholders also. Page is now CEO and he may need to bite on the books bullet and own up to a change of course, only be being much more open and generous can Google hope to make something like the Google Books project a reality.

Too many Hoops for Hulu for Magazines?

2011-05-18T08:38:00.005+01:00

Next Issue Media has launched a 'Preview Service' with seven magazines sold on subscription or as single issues. Next Issue Media has been called the Hulu for magazines and is the creation of Condé Nast, Meredith, Hearst, News Corporation and Time Inc. Only seven magazines currently feature in this Preview Service, but they are top drawer items: The New Yorker, Popular Mechanics, Fortune, Esquire and Time etc. The consortium is advancing on a narrow front both in content selection and in delivery channels, and at this point only the Android operating system, but no phones, and the only tablet device is the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Narrower still: since at this point the magazines are only available via the Verizon WiFi service and an app in the Vcast (Verizon) app store. But more magazines and more channels are promised for the autumn (more details at MediaMemo -- Peter Kafka).

There are plenty of difficulties in running consortia, and I take my hat off to the NIM team for getting something out of the door when all the backing companies will inevitably have very different views on how the terms shall be crafted, and wary of precedents being set. Perhaps for this reason they are at this stage offering 'monthly subscriptions' and 'single issue purchases'. Supporting two very different access/license models indefinitely could get very complicated. Its also complicated for consumers that, depending on the title, 'existing print subscribers are eligible for a free or discounted digital upgrade'. If a subscriber to two print titles gets free access to the New Yorker but has to pay a digital upgrade for his sub to Popular Mechanics, NIM's customer support lines will soon be red hot. Building a system that manages all this reliably, will not be a trivial undertaking. And the consortium will lose its way if the magazine access model is not standardised across all the titles served, when 100s of magazines are on offer. Allowing publishers to set the price of their services is one thing but allowing the publishers to set different access models and subscription rights is fraught with difficulties.

It is going to be a challenge for this Hulu for magazines to achieve the Hulu-style popular momentum that they will need to secure the continuing support of their backers. But they do have a chance, because their backers are strong media players, all with an interest in maintaining some leverage over other players who will be driving digital consumer acquisition. Having a 'tame' Android platform with some market penetration will be useful for all these publishers. But consider the range of devices that Next Issue Media will be playing with or against. These will include:

Apple for the iPad (in pole position)
Apple for the iPhone (not to be overlooked as its a somewhat different delivery proposition)
Amazon for Kindle
Amazon for soon to emerge Android App store (and likely Amazon media-consumption Tablet). Amazon may have several tablet form factors.
Barnes and Noble magazines on Nook and next generation Android tab
Android app store (ie the Google managed app store, with flavours for several levels of Android phone/tablet). Lets call this 6a, 6b, 6c.....
Blackberry Playbook platform (with its own set of 'Android' complications)
HP Web/OS (Next Issue Media say that they will support this before the end of the year)
Nokia/Microsoft tablets when they come...

We have at least nine different platforms right off the bat, and the chances are that there are several more, some with a significant spin that we don't know about yet, that could play a part in the digital magazine market next year. Who says strategic planning for digital magazines is a straightforward business?

Apple's Terms of Trade Finally Win Acceptance with Magazines

2011-05-11T10:53:00.002+01:00

Suddenly the dam seems to have broken and the major consumer magazine publishers are lining up for iPad editions sold on subscription through iTunes.

In the last ten days, Time Inc, Hearst and Conde Nast have all announced moves towards selling their leading consumer magazines as subscriptions on the iPad. They are also offering free iPad access to their existing print subscribers, a simple and very necessary step as we have been emphasizing for months.

In disclosing these new offerings the major consumer magazine companies have been stressing that Apple has been willing to make concessions and to grant flexibility (see reports of such by Peter Kafka at AllThingsDigital). I expect some modest concessions have been granted, but on matters of detail and to help with 'bedding in'. Apple has not had to modify its developer contract or bend on its commission terms. Apple has the whip hand and, more to the point, Apple will not make concessions on issues that put obstacles in the way of the successful operation of the iTunes service. Apple will not make concessions which force it to re-write its end-user license agreements. Apple will not make deals with magazine companies on its 30% commission when it has been completely impervious to the pleadings of the music publishers on royalty rates. The bald and uncomfortable truth for these giants of consumer publishing is that Apple is not going to do deals. Apple is not going to cramp the economy of iTunes for the sake of the magazine business. So what follows?

Magazines will sign up to the iPad service in a growing avalanche. Now that the big 3 of the US consumer magazine business have moved over to the Apple way of doing business, we expect that most major magazine companies will move over to producing iPad apps for their key magazines.
Within 12 months iTunes will contain many more iPad magazine titles than has ever been collected in one physical kiosk or emporium. Finding titles in such a rich product mix will become more of a problem. But magazines are better placed than most categories to thrive since magazine titles are (usually) so clearly branded and so distinctive.
The magazines in iTunes will be offered primarily on a subscription basis. Hitherto iPad apps were being offered on a single issue basis.
The major consumer magazines in all the major national markets will soon be offering iPad apps through iTunes and they will also be offering free digital access to their existing print subscribers. Magazines will do this because in that way they retain more control over their subscriber base and can avoid having all their subscription services handled by Apple. They retain, indeed enhance, the crucial relationship that they have with paying customers.
The prices for digital magazines within iTunes will be pitched at increasingly aggressive levels, Bloomberg Business Week costs $36 per annum. The Esquire iPad app will apparently cost $19.99 pa. Apple's pricing rules mean that international pricing will level-down to the best home market subscription offers (US subscription prices for consumer magazines are low in comparison to European prices).
These recent announcements have all been focussed on the iPad. Conde Nast and Time Inc are committed to producing iPad apps, it is not clear whether the iPhone market is being by-passed or merely temporarily left behind.
Android apps also appear to be taking a back seat. It will be interesting to see whether this week's Google I/O, now in its second day, has any mention of digital magazines. Not much sign of them in the opening sessions.
The apps that are being produced for the iPad bear a remarkable similarity to the print product. The idea that a magazine app needs to be something radically different from the page-oriented, highly designed and issue-based package that we all know, is losing ground. Most magazine publishers cannot afford to run two parallel design, production and editorial processes.

There is no question that the iPad is a very good device for reading digital versions of print magazines. The magazine publishers have, of course, realised this from the outset. They are now beginning to realise that Apple's terms for trade are not so bad. When Amazon brings out its Android tablet I suspect that these same magazine publishers may find that the Amazon terms of trade for digital magazines are just as unyielding, and perhaps in some ways worse than those that Apple have set before them. My first take on the Amazon app developer rules certainly caused me to blench.

Measuring Digital Engagement

2011-05-05T08:14:00.005+01:00

Mediaweek has a report on a lively panel discussion of digital magazine auditing at yesterday's PPA annual conference:

...during the ‘Magic Numbers’ panel session, Tye (James Tye, CEO of Dennis) called for industry measured data to be produced faster rather than waiting on the "perfect", multi-platform measuring solution for brands.

Tye said that despite the iPad "being around for a year now", Dennis has not been able to tell its commercial partners officially how many readers download its magazine iPad editions, such as Mac User.

"My worry is we have a system built on the past five decades, we need to build it faster and more reactive to what the customer want," he said.

"The iPad has been around for a year now, yet only now can we start to think about including it in our future auditing certificates", he continued. "As an industry I think we’ve got to learn to move quicker than that." MediaWeek 'PPA 2011: ABC under fire for 'five decades old auditing system'

Rupert Turnball, publisher of Conde Nast's Wired, also had some highly pertinent questions for the magazine audit organizations: "we are interested in measuring engagement and influence and the ability to amplify messages, and that's not measured at the moment." That is certainly something that advertisers and big brands are deeply interested in when it comes to digital media. The problem that the magazine industry faces is that there are plenty of solutions, and an increasingly perplexing range of digital advertising metrics (Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, Hitwise, Flurry etc), but none of them are specific to the magazine industry. Since none of the digital advertising platforms (Google, Yahoo/Microsoft, Apple, Facebook .... etc) are specific to the magazine industry, none of the digital audit tools that are evolving will be specific to the magazine industry. Perhaps the most useful role that the magazine-specific audit bureaux could now play is to recognise that there is no longer a sensible role for narrowly magazine-based audit functions.

Digital advertising is multiplatform and multipolar and so it follows that the audit role has to integrate with the best tools across the web and mobile marketplace. Digital magazines have extraordinarily rich potential for advertisers, and influencers, but the challenge is to find a way of demonstrating and leveraging this without resorting to the simplifications of the one page audit certificate.

Time Leads the Way

2011-05-03T08:36:00.002+01:00

According to the Wall Street Journal, Time Inc and Apple have reached agreement on the provision of free magazine content to print subscribers.

Starting Monday, subscribers to Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune magazines will be able to access the iPad editions via the apps, which will be able to authenticate them as subscribers. Time Inc.'s People magazine already had such an arrangement, but readers of most publications have had to pay separately for the iPad version regardless of their subscriber status. Time Inc in iPad Deal with Apple

This is a very sensible move, but it is not clear that Apple has had to give any ground. From the get-go Apple has made it clear that it was fine for publishers to sell digital subscriptions which include app deployment, and perfectly all right for them to supply free or 'complementary' app facilities to print subscribers. We have been pointing at this open door here and here and here.

At this point Time's 'free' app access is limited to print subscribers in the US, and Time Inc are not currently offering 'subscriptions' to customers who buy through iTunes. This has perhaps been the one point where Apple has granted Time Inc some leeway. Buying the Time magazine app issues one-by-one is a lot more expensive than buying an annual subscription from the publisher, since there have always been masses of 'bargain' offers for Time print subscriptions out in the market, all of which now include app-rights (for US subscribers), Time Inc is not strictly playing by Apple's rules. Not by a long chalk, since Philip Elmer-DeWitt, at Fortune, can buy a Time sub for 28c an issue, as opposed to the $4.99 per issue available through iTunes. My guess is that Apple's concession was to 'allow' Time a period of grace to get its subscription offering for iTunes customers in place in time for the June 30th deadline that Apple has imposed. Apple might just conceivably have offered Time a month or two additional grace period. But I will be very surprised if Time Inc has not totally fallen in with the Apple way of doing things by the beginning of September. Apple is not kidding around on its rules or its 30% commission. On its iTunes page Time says that 'subscriptions will be available later', though at the moment the app only enables single issue purchase.

Where Time leads, Hearst, Conde Nast, Meredith and the other big players will follow. Competitive pressures will ensure this. Print subscription revenues in the next few years are of major relevance to publishers who see their advertising revenues wilting. The other major consumer publishers will soon understand the tremendous incentive that Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated are giving to their print subscribers by offering complementary digital access on the iPad (these rival publishers will ruefully compare the brick-bats they are getting on their iTunes customer evaluations with the delight shown by Time's subscribers). At this stage the Time Inc circulation director will wonder whether he really needs to give Mr Elmer-DeWitt an Ultronic Multi-Functional Global Clock Radio when he is also throwing in complementary iPad access with the print bundle? At this stage the potential revenues from digital subscriptions begins to seem interesting and the cost of cheap clocks looks excessive. The second penny will drop when the consumer publishers realize that in offering complementary access to iPad users, they will inevitably have to offer a similar deal to Android users....... and finally, recognition will dawn that these are our customers before they were Apple's; not Android's, heaven help us not Amazon's, and accordingly we have to treat them well on price and access. We have to own them by serving them and recognising them and so long as these customers continue to want our print magazines we actually have an unexpected strength in the market. Time is leading the charge....

Conde Nast Needs to Redouble its Bets on the iPad

2011-04-25T10:45:00.004+01:00

AdAge is carrying a story that suggests that Conde Nast is pulling back from its out and out commitment to iPad apps. With hints and whispers that its initial forays have not been working too well. An anonymous company source opines:

"It's a shift," one Conde publisher said. "The official stance was we're going to get all our magazines on the iPad because this is going to be such an important stream. The new change is maybe we can slow it down. In my opinion it makes Conde look smart because we have the ambition, but we're not rushing."

"They're not all doing all that well, so why rush to get them all on there?" the publisher added. AdAge: Conde Nast Taps Brakes....

The piece has a sufficient concrete detail on Conde Nast's plans and intentions to suggest that the story stands up. So what has gone wrong? Nearly everything.

Conde Nast's mistakes can be divided between mistakes about the direction of the technology, and mistakes about the kind of success that digital magazines should be aiming at on a new tablet platform. First, mis-taking the direction of the technology:

For no good reason at all, Conde Nast assumed or hoped that Apple would back-track and embrace Flash before launching the iPad.
Conde Nast has relied too much on an alliance with Adobe and a fallacious confidence that Adobe's knowledge of the design and content management process in print production would somehow enable Adobe to come up with a winning magazine app work-flow. But Adobe's Creative Suite software solutions for building apps seems to be unreasonably cumbersome. Too slow and too complicated and in most cases the finished article is disappointing as an app.
Conde Nast (and most of the other big magazine publishers) have expressed the hope that Apple would gradually 'loosen up' and provide publishers with access to consumer usage data sufficient to support the existing advertising revenues that magazine publishers depend on. The idea that digital advertising revenues and metrics will be controlled by the magazine publishers is a major delusion (incidentally even less likely to be realized in the Android tablet market which many consumer publishers are gazing at fondly).

Although Conde Nast made some very rum bets on the technical direction that the iPad platform was headed; the worst mistakes they have made have been strictly publishing gaffes. Here are three:

It is tempting to think that you can charge your existing subscribers MORE for delivering an iPad app. Tempting but fatal. First, because your existing subscribers will feel that they ought to have free access to stuff that they have already paid for in print (see the comments on the iTunes page for the New Yorker iPad app). Second, because publishers who price their digital offerings as though they were competitive with their print offerings will lose print subscribers: if a publisher treats his print and digital editions as though they were 'substitutable' purchases and prices them accordingly, he will find that the market treats them as substitutable. Above all, publishers have to look at this from the subscriber's point of view. The point of having digital and print editions is that you capture your subscribers from two different directions, not that you force them to choose between print and digital.
Like most consumer publishers, Conde Nast have been looking at the apps market as though it was a completely new opportunity. When fundamentally a magazine app has to be the magazine, and this gives the publisher real strength if they can leverage the resources in their back issues and the archive. Far too many consumer magazines have ignored their archives when producing apps. Yet the archive is something that can most easily be given new impact and immediacy from a digital perspective. Since Conde Nast already has a fabulous archive for eg The New Yorker and Wired, they should have designed their apps to take advantage of this richness.
Conde Nast is still not selling its iPad apps on subscription -- now presumably as a mark of its displeasure with Apple for not providing sufficient access to consumer data. However much Conde Nast may be irritated by Apple's firmness/intransigence, it should be selling subscriptions to iPad and iPhone users, not selling one issue at a time. The iPad is most certainly and obviously a market for selling subscriptions. Music companies know this, games companies know this, film and TV companies understand this. Magazine publishers are good at selling subscriptions and they also know that it takes time to build subscriber momentum behind a magazine. If the Conde Nast management wastes two years from the launch of the iPad in not-selling-subscriptions their successors and heirs will pay a bitter price for this intransigence and this slow start.

Final thought. The next iPad, call it iPad3, will come out next year. The chances are it will have much better graphics and a screen with higher resolution ('retina display'). There is a growing perception that Apple is getting to a kind of 'escape velocity' with its iPad offering, so that competitor tablet platforms, lacking manufacturing volume and the pressure hose of iTunes, will find it very difficult to compete with Apple. The effective competition, when it comes, may well be from the low end, or from quarters other than the mainstream media experience epitomised by consumer magazines and iTunes. But Conde Nast wants to play at the high end, which is where Apple will probably be the strongest player for the next few years. Conde Nast needs to have its magazines on the high end tablet platform when it moves to the next level in 2012. It needs to wake up fast.

Consumer Publishers - What Apps Can Do For Them by Emma Bradfield

2011-04-13T12:21:00.002+01:00

This was the title of a seminar I attended at the London Book Fair yesterday, presented by Ros Wesson. Ros highlighted the interesting shift that consumer publishing has made from a B2B to B2C model through apps.

Whereas previously, publishers were protected from readers’ reviews by a buffer, consisting of book distributors and sellers, the advent of the App Store has moved them to the front line, in direct contact with users and their make-or-break verdicts.

Although this sounds terrifying, it is a small price to pay considering there are no printing or shipping costs involved with apps. In fact, being so close to your audience can be turned into a positive. App developers can receive feedback directly from their users, such as on iTunes or via email, and this can be used to inform future app updates.

Indeed, Exact Editions encourages feedback from its subscribers. We’ve had lots of enquiries asking for the ability to sync more than one issue for offline reading and about the possibility of an Android app. These are just two examples of subscriber feedback which we will be implementing shortly.

As Ross suggested, positive iTunes reviews can then be used within the app descriptions themselves to encourage further app installations. There’s nothing like ‘consumer-quoted confidence’ to generate a buzz around an app and five star reviews should be used as valuable marketing collateral both within iTunes and without!

Are Magazine Apps like Games on the iPad or more like Books?

2011-04-12T08:17:00.004+01:00

Bloomberg Businessweek produced a pretty effective and straightforward app for the iPad earlier in the week. And it got predictably mixed reviews from the magazine app critics. Grudging and faint praise, at best. Here are some typical gripes from Techcrunch:

It is a perfectly serviceable magazine app. But it is underwhelming. There are no extra photos beyond what’s in the magazine, or even much in the area of additional multimedia other than a video intro every issue by one of the editors about how cover they chose the cover, and a couple audio interviews to accompany columns by Charlie Rose and Tom Keene. Erick Schonfeld Bloomberg Underwhelms with iPad App (Demo)

Erick Schonfeld's reaction here is very typical of the criticism that magazine apps tend to attract. The critics seem to assume that a magazine app should really be something else. Its got to be more than a magazine. Heck, otherwise what is the point? No extra photos, not enough additional multimedia, just the magazine..... It is as though the magazine app needs to be specially designed and uniquely conceived for the iPad platform. In much the same way that computer games need to be adapted and versioned for the hardware platform on which the game will be played.

We should look more closely at this question of what else a magazine app ought to be, other than the print magazine. But, first, consider how unusual this approach is. Content publishers do not, for the most part, look at the iPad and say, "How can we become something completely different on this device?" Hollywood does not think that films on the iPad need to be a qualitatively different entity from the film that one might see in a cinema or via a DVD. The point is rather that via the iPad the consumer gets an experience which is in someways pretty much as good as having the art-house experience (or not quite as good as, which is why we still like going out of an evening). Book publishers are not expecting books on the iPad to be qualitatively different from the books that get published on paper. Can you envisage the fury that would result if the Stieg Larsson books were not the same in their iPad editions as they are in print? Throw in an extra chapter? Have an extra deviation in the plot, an optional app-loop with more time in Australia or Poland, or additional detail on how to apply or remove tattoos, handcuffs, ride motorbikes etc? Publishers and readers are pretty sceptical about iPad app books that merely chuck in various bits of video/visual over-matter, or even passages with the author reading the book. These so-called 'enhanced editions' have something of the air of cosmetic surgery. Messing the book up is not going to do anybody any good, the sag lines show up pretty fast. Why should we not expect magazines on the iPad to be magazines? Just as we expect films to be films? The Exact Editions platform does support and facilitate bonus media for publishers who wish to make their magazines more interactive and use multi-media elements, but it is not clear that this is what readers expect from their apps. Most magazine publishers are sensibly enough avoiding the gimmicks, but many self-appointed app experts, consider that magazines should be something different. Qualitatively better on the iPad and radically different.

There are things magazine apps can do better than print magazines, for the most part these are qualities that come from having a digital magazine. They are not specifically iPad/appy tricks and affordances. And Bloomberg Businessweek certainly gets some of these things right:

The app carries with it an archive of previously published issues
The app supports search across the archive
The app is free to existing print subscribers (for its loyal customers the iPad app is a jolly good bonus -- making that work for your readers is simply good publishing)
The app has significant potential for sharing and commenting (email, Twitter and Facebook)
Bloomberg provide real-time news and share price feeds linked to mentions in the articles, for all the major corporations with stock ticker labels.
This is an app with the potential to grow and evolve in interesting ways

Bloomberg have done a pretty good job with their first iteration of the iPad app of the magazine. Bloomberg Businessweek should not be judged by the standards of Angrybirds or Mad Skills Motocross. There are some problems (yes, mistakes) with the Bloomberg Businessweek app, but a lot of magazines would do well to take a good look at the solution they have come up with.

Amazon, Apple and Google

2011-04-04T07:35:00.002+01:00

John Naughton has a terrific column Amazon's new Cloud Drive Rains on everyone's parade in yesterday's Observer:

"Impetuosity and audacity," wrote Machiavelli, "often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve." If you doubt that, may I propose a visit to the upper echelons of Apple, Google and Sony, where steam might be observed venting from every orifice of senior executives? If you do undertake such a visit, do not under any circumstances mention the word "Amazon".

.......

Behind the scenes in the US, though, there has been frenetic activity, with Apple, Google and Amazon racing to get into the streaming business. Apple has cloud services, customers who are used to paying for music, a good range of mobile devices but no licensing deal for streaming. Google has terrific cloud services and millions of Android devices but no music store customers and no licensing deal. Amazon has cloud services, a music store, paying customers, a terrific e-commerce operation, and access to Android devices. But it also had no licensing deal with the record labels. John Naughton Observer, 3 April, 2011

This last sentence is not exactly right. Both Amazon and Apple already have digital distribution deals with the record labels; its just that Amazon's existing digital distribution deal is in crucial respects rather better and more permissive than the Apple deal. Ironically, and again crucially, Google does not have an agreed license, though it has been negotiating hard for months and the Amazon chutzpah may well make it harder for Google to get the deal it badly needs. Amazon has been selling digital music since 2007, so it does have a licensing deal with the labels and the Amazon deal is actually rather more favourable to streaming than the digital distribution deal that Apple was granted some years earlier. The crucial point about the music distribution deal that Amazon has, is that it allows Amazon to sell and deliver 'unencrypted' MP3 files to consumers -- and Amazon's new Cloud Drive is just allowing consumers to store their files in the cloud, rather than on a hard disk. Amazon already has a license to distribute (most) music to consumers through the web in a form in which music can easily and simply be stored in an individual consumers 'music locker'. Amazon's license with the record labels, is not ideal, but it is workable for streaming music and gives Amazon good leverage. It is not ideal because, Amazon's rights are currently restricted to the US (or in practice restricted to the US where individual content shifting is explicitly approved by the courts), and because without more leeway from the licensors Amazon may have to maintain individual Cloud Drives for each consumer (it would be more efficient to have individual libraries where common tracks were represented by 'tokens' rather than full copies). Apple, on the other hand, has distribution deals with the music labels which are explicitly tied to Apple's commitment to encrypting music in the way that is proprietary to Apple, and which limits music to devices recognised by the Apple DRM. Apple, we should assume is still significantly hobbled by these agreements. Having to encrypt all 'streaming' music in the DRM specific to iTunes is the major factor delaying Apple from introducing the 'cloud based' iTunes that it knows that it ought to be offering. A music streaming service needs the freedom for music to be delivered to a device as many times as it may need to be played, but Apple being lumbered with 'Fairplay', its download-tracking, DRM for iTunes clearly needs some permission, some wiggle room, from the music companies for this to happen. Amazon came along much later with its request for a music distribution deal, and the music companies were so desperate to have some competition for Apple that they agreed to Amazon's terms which give them more scope for internet-based distribution.

One irony of this situation is that the roles are reversed when it comes to books. For books, the Amazon distribution rights are more clearly dependent on their commitment to DRM and to a proprietary format. Amazon was the innovator in the ebooks space and Apple was playing catch up, so the publishers were less insistent in their negotiations with Apple on the requirements for DRM. The Apple iBooks standards are less proprietary, more open to industry standards than the Kindle. Apple seems to be cast (perhaps unwillingly) in the role of bad cop for music, whereas Amazon is looking like good cop in the music sphere and 'bad cop' for books. Google would love to be playing the role of good cop in both markets, but it is not clear that it has the necessary leverage. It needs to come up with a proposition for the record labels, that is good for consumers and wrong-foots both Apple and Amazon. That may not be easy.

Why Magazine Apps Have to be Subscriptions

2011-03-29T09:19:00.005+01:00

The major consumer magazine publishers are backing themselves into an extraordinary corner with their reluctance to engage in subscription transactions on iTunes. Conde Nast for example will be selling magazine issues as apps, one issue at a time through iTunes, requiring existing subscribers who want to read their magazine on an iPad to repurchase an issue to which they may already have access through a print subscription. That the customer already has a print subscription counts for nothing. In fact, things get worse. To judge from the help pages, in iTunes, customers who have bought one of the latest issues of a magazine through the iPad, may be asked to 'repurchase' a previous issue that they had already bought for their iPad, to go through the motions including keying in their iTunes password, but they will not be charged for it. The problem that Conde Nast have created for themselves here, is that they do not have a way of knowing whether or not someone has previously bought a specific issue of the magazine, because the previous purchase was made through iTunes and Apple, not Conde Nast, keeps track of iTunes customers. Conde Nast are trying both to sell single issues, through iTunes, AND meet the expectations of users who should have access to earlier issues when they buy a new number. Conde Nast are by no means the only consumer magazine publisher getting their knickers in a twist over this. When there really should be no problem at all. All subscribers to a magazine should have access to the magazine for the term of their subscription through all available means.

The first point that we should notice is that Apple themselves takes the view that if a customer already has access to content, they should have access to it on their iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone. This is not controversial it is just good customer relations. Furthermore Apple makes absolutely sure that a customer who has access through their iTunes account to content on one Apple device, has access to that same content on the other devices connected to the same account (exceptions of course if the content cannot run on the other devices). Apple, in other words, takes the view that subscriptions are fungible across Apple devices: up to five devices per iTunes account. Why on earth have consumer magazine publishers not taken a similar view, why not grant that customers who subscribe in print should also have access via their iPad? Magazine publishers should view personal subscriptions as fungible across print, web and digital devices. Magazine publishers must do this if they want to retain any hope of continuing to control their subscriber data. Magazine publishers generally have a very good picture of who their subscribers are, they have databases that carry up to the minute information on subscribers, so granting them access through an iPad app is not a tricky issue. Is it not a kick in the teeth for your existing print subscribers when you tell them that they have to buy another subscription, or another single copy sale, to read their magazine on the iPad? Will it not be another kick in the teeth when customers are told that they have to buy another subscription for their Android phone/tablet? Or their Web O/S device? There will soon be many customers with Android phones who also happen to have iPads. If there is going to be a competitive tablet/mobile out there in a few years time (at the moment Apple looks like the only game in town, but we can hope for competitive variety) it will be incumbent on publishers, or purveyors of content subscriptions, to offer platform-agnostic subscriptions. Apple is unlikely to extend the hand of subscriber friendship to Android, so the publisher has a privileged position in this battle of platforms selling subscriptions that cross hardware boundaries. Look at the success that Amazon has been having with ebooks by straddling hardware solutions with the Kindle.

The second point to note is that Apple have said that it is perfectly OK to provide free access to print subscribers from the iTunes platforms.

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. Apple Press Release 15 February 2011

And of course, newspaper publishers are working in this way (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Times and the Financial Times all reward their print subscribers with free access to the web or app versions of these papers). As indeed are most of the magazine publishers who deliver branded iPad/iPhone apps with the Exact Editions platform.

It may be said that these major consumer magazine publishers are taking this extraordinarily unfriendly position in relation to their print subscribers (similar policies are being pursued by Hearst, Time and Meredith -- consumers are being expected to buy single issue iPad apps even if they have valid print subscriptions), because they are trying to 'protect' and defend their print subscriptions (those numbers are vital both for the income generated and for the circulation base which attracts advertising revenue). But this is clearly nonsense, print subscription numbers are going to be strengthened and defended if print subscribers are also enfranchised for the iPad and other tablet editions that are no doubt coming. Trying to persuade your loyal subscribers that they should pay for the same content twice over is a losing proposition, and it is certainly adding grievous insult to injury to encourage those who have paid twice over, that they need to go through the motions of a 'repurchase' one more time. Small compensation indeed, that the customer who has already paid twice for an issue will not in re-syncing his previously purchased single issue, be paying three times over. Apple, at least, knows better.

Amazon tackles Apple

2011-03-29T08:08:00.005+01:00

"Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Amazon Cloud Player for Android. Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloudand play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free." from Amazon Press Release 29 March, 2011

This is going to be a protracted and complex tussle and Google will join in. Doesn't look as though there is going to be an iPhone app, but the Amazon Cloud Player for Web will presumably work fine through any web page...... Safari has a role.

Are we laying odds on the outcome? I think of the web as the mat on which these wrestlers are having their match. Chances are that the web wins in the end. The audience are the audience.

World Military Wrestling Championship (via Wikimedia commons)

P.S. The man in blue may look like he is going to lose. But that was not the outcome.

Apple's Magazine Newsstand

2011-03-21T08:49:00.004Z

There are strongish rumours that Apple is preparing to launch a magazine-oriented, specialist Newsstand solution, similar to iBooks. The rumours gained some credibility when Mike McCue, Flipboard's founder, made the suggestion at SXSW in an interview with Kara Swisher. I havent seen the interview but the Guardian had a report:

I have no inside information but wouldn't be surprised if Apple did their own newstand similar to iBooks......

We are assured that McCue has no inside information, but McCue sits on the board of Twitter; Apple and Twitter are surely talking, Flipboard is highly regarded by Apple and there can be little doubt that an eBooks/iBooks style of magazine kiosk would be very advantageous for Flipboard and for Twitter. Indeed there might be strong synergy between a free and promotion-oriented Flipboard giving access to magazine subscriptions generated by {iMagazines, or iKiosk, or whatever Apple choose to call their mooted storefront}. So, maybe Mike McCue was flying a kite or tugging its string. It would be very helpful to Flipboard if there was a stronger and more reliable stream of 'ebook style' magazine issues channeled through iTunes, rather than the indigestible and quirky chunks of Adobe-Illustrator apps that seem to be favoured by the large consumer publishers. I don't think Apple is likely to be very happy with the Adobe-InDesigned efforts that we have seen so far.

Co-incidentally there was a slightly different rumour in Gadget Daily News, that Apple might be aiming to encourage a bit more standardisation and reliability in the digital magazine space by developing some magazine publishing templates. According to Gadget Daily News this will be 'implemented by the end of the year'. Maybe. Maybe not. I doubt that it would take Apple anything like so much time to develop such a tool if it decided to build it.

What are the key problems that Apple might wish to tackle to improve the position of digital magazines in iTunes? There are principally three issues that could be addressed:

Distribution
Presentation
Production

Which if any of these problem areas is it likely that Apple may be planning to address? I think we can dismiss the distribution solution straight away. Apple believes that it has built a perfectly reliable and usable digital magazine distribution system already. The latest move to introduce a new system for in-app subscriptions to magazine content is all that is needed. Apple considers that with the iPad, the app store, the 200 million iTunes accounts, and the new subscription system, it has done enough for magazine publishers already on the distribution front. There is, admittedly, another perplexing digital distribution system to be solved (building digital magazines that can be distributed painlessly via iPhone, iPad, Android, WebOS, the web, etc, etc as many viable digital channels as possible), but Apple is not going to do anything about that.

The presentation problem is another matter. The variety, illogicality, diversity and plain bugginess of many magazine apps is rather shocking. So, it is quite possible that Apple is working on some standards or templates that may bring a bit of order to the chaos. Apple may produce some exemplar iTunes solutions which show how well digital magazines can work as iPad apps (cf the Garageband app that they produced for iPad 2). But I am not convinced that Apple's investment in digital magazines will go much further than that. It doesn't need to, because Apple has already built and 100% owns the best digital magazine platform, the iPad. Furthermore the rules of its distribution and e-commerce system require that digital magazines sold through its service pay a 30% commission to Apple, so there is really no need to invest heavily here. This has always been the strong point in the Apple position. It owns a platform that other parties wish to play on. There is a lot of innovation and experimentation going on in the digital magazine space on iOS devices and Apple benefits from this whatever the outcome.

It is when we get to the last problem area: production that the chances of Apple intervention are most unlikely. Consumer magazines are still produced in an immensely complicated, labour and design-intensive process, under considerable time pressure and with very diverse inputs and requirements. The workflow is still very much in thrall to a print output. Developing new databases for content management and high-design work-flow is not the kind of business that Apple wants to be in. The diversity and chaos of publication-oriented content management is even worse in the newspaper business, so we can conclude that it is most unlikely that Apple will build solutions that are intended for this kind of intricate deployment. Apple is not going to build a tool which takes high-design print-oriented inputs and explodes them into multimedia apps. Apple may have been willing to take a friendly look at the way that News International was building its bespoke-for-the-iPad Daily app. It is not probable that Apple's software engineers are going to spend time figuring out how the New York Times manages or streamlines its manifold production issues.

So Apple may show us how some magical magazine apps will work, but if they do, the chances are that the fireworks will be highly specific to the iPad. They may involve intimate and innovative use of the touch interface, the gyroscope and new sensors in the iPad 2, or 'social' effects through Twitter, Facebook or Facetime. If Apple is going to do something with magazines it could be highly innovative if they exploit the capabilities of the iPad 2. If they do that they may add another twist to the distribution dilemma facing magazine publishers: should digital magazines now be designed primarily or even exclusively for the iPad? Or should they also be designed for access and use through other devices and above all through the web? Apple has a huge lead in the tablet market-place and it will use that lead to develop the primacy and superiority of iTunes content. Raising the bar on the expectations and 'quality' to be found in iPad-specific magazines is one way of making the 'distribution dilemma' faced by the magazine publishers even more acute.

iPad Usage is Shooting Through the Roof

2011-03-16T07:47:00.003Z

We yesterday introduced a straightforward way for our publishing partners to access Google Analytics reports for any of the individual titles that we host for them. Data is available in the amazingly atomic detail supported by Google Analytics, for each title, issue, and page. Also, Google makes it very practical to select specific date ranges, whereas the data we had previously collected from our own logs was lumped together in coarse monthly buckets. The traffic data is aggregated for each magazine, so there should be no privacy issues. Furthermore, each publisher has access to his own data, and stuff that is generic or 'cross publication' is not reported via the Google system. The data spigot for each magazine can be switched on as soon as a publisher sends us their Google Analytics code.....

I love the way Google Analytics can provide flexible geographical breakdowns of the data it aggregates:

33 visits from Bari and 71 from Bologna.

Whenever we collect data on our users we are surprised by the extent to which the iPad is making such a big difference to the digital magazine business. Here are a few data points:

In the last year we have had more visitors to our website from iPad users than from the iPhone (this time a year ago there were no iPads anywhere outside Apple)
These iPad users read/access twice as many pages as iPhone users
The iPhone usage has also shot up in the last year. Six times as many visitors this year as in the previous 12 months.
iPod usage is also significant and is at about the same level as Android usage. Much smaller than iPhone use but, surprisingly, slightly more sticky (both Android and iPod are slightly stickier than the iPhone)
Blackberry and Symbian use is low, and Windows barely registers (guess that is Windows 7?)
Our aggregate visits from mobile users (March 14, 2010- March 14 2011) have increased more than 10 times from the previous year (1000%+)
Looking at one particular magazine which has been quite popular on the iPhone/iPad, it has had over 20,000 freemium app downloads in the last year and roughly one in 6 of those freemium downloads has led to a sale.
We regard 1 in 6 as a good conversion rate. The conversion rate for different magazines varies enormously.
Price is a big factor in the conversion process.
iPad sampling has marginally outdistanced iPhone sampling. This is really surprising since there must be at least 10 times, perhaps 20 times, as many iPhones as iPads in the market for this particular magazine (which has mostly a UK circulation).
We do not yet have relative conversion rates but we would expect the conversion rate to be significantly weighted to the iPad -- we know this from smaller samples.

I guess it is possibly worrying that Google know so much about our system, our traffic and the usage of our publisher's digital assets. Google know so much about all of us. But they do make it easy for web site owners to find out what they know! Apple must have just as much detail on the use of the apps we provide for iTunes, but like all other Apple developers we have access to very little of what Apple must know about the usage of apps.

On the other hand our publishers are now in the position that they have access to what Google know about the digital distribution of their magazines and something of what Apple know. Google and Apple are pretty much ignorant of the other guy's data. At Exact Editions we see it as our task to help publishers get their digital magazines on as many platforms as possible and to maintain an overall control of that distribution and data. That ultimately gives publishers a position of some strength.

Jobs and Lyotard: How Magic Flummoxes

2011-03-14T11:39:00.002Z

I first began to wonder whether Steve Jobs has been reading Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard when he introduced the first iPad. Now that we have his presentation of the iPad 2, I am more than ever suspicious that Apple have been tracking late twentieth century Parisian cultural philosophers. Lyotard has been especially influential on Apple through his articulation of the concept of Post-Modernism. An analysis of Steve Jobs's presentation will show that we have some straightforward correlations between the Jobsian postulate of the Post-PC device and Lyotard's elaboration of Post-Modernism.

First, we should note that the "Post-PC" landscape is not a denial of the PC, or even a commitment to the replacement of the PC. This would be a crass misunderstanding: PC's are not gone, they are overtaken and in certain circumstances no longer appropriate. But they are still with us. Please note: Apple makes perhaps the best PC, certainly the strongest brand of high-end personal computer; Apple's shareholders know this and treasure it. Apple will not remove the Macintosh from the market. Nor did Lyotard reject modern and contemporary forms of art. Lyotard's espousal of 'post-modernism' was not rejecting 'modernity' or the modern, but he was attacking an ideology of 'modernism' and an aesthetic that goes with it. He was highly selective and preferential in his espousal of particular styles and forms of contemporary art, architecture and literature. The Post-PC landscape, situates and deprecates the merely PC landscape, but it does not reject personal computers they are given particular emphasis and and non-exclusive value and appreciation. Some of the other stuff becomes more important in a post-PC landscape. Much as Lyotard advocated and championed the work of Duchamp, Barnett Newman and Cezanne, Steve Jobs will have us be quite picky about the Post-PC PCs that will make the grade. The Post-PC environment is one in which we will use many devices to provide computational resources, including personal computers, even laptops like the Macbook Air, built by manufacturers who know how that landscape works.
Second, we note the highly charged and symbolic meaning that Apple attach to the 'magical' qualities of the iPad and other iOS devices. Apple devices are not 'magical' in the sense in which witches potions or sorcerers' spells are magical. Apple's devices are not mysterious or mythical, since 'magical' is no more a supernatural term for Apple than 'the sublime' was a theological term for Lyotard. Jobs's 'magic' and Lyotard's 'sublime' are both core values, with a primarily aesthetic and emotional freight. There is in both cases a preference for arresting and startling simplicity, lightness, abstraction, thinness (?) and functionality. The magic of the iPad works on us as the sublime simplicity of a Newman abstraction startles us. We are lost for words if not 'flummoxed' (an anglo-saxon concept, alas not immediately available to Derrida or Lyotard). Magic should flummox but it does not break the laws of physics.
Third, the Apple way of cultural transmission with iTunes is designed to provide a form of universal e-commerce and controlled accessibility which reinforces and deepens the commoditization of culture that Lyotard charts. iTunes precisely targets private performances, individual choice and the reproduction of all media forms (music, digital games, TV, film, photography, books, magazines and newspapers) in personal 'libraries': "the disintegration of narrative elements into “clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous language games." (a sentence taken from Aylesworth'e excellent article on Postmodernism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Lyotard foresaw and wrote the script for the loss of narrative focus and this post-modern move, exemplified in iTunes and the app store, to globalised and yet individually targeted mechanisms of cultural exchange.
A deeper look at the post-modernism of Apple's post-PC universe would need to consider the fundamental role of the independent developer and especially the API which both engenders and controls the activity of developers, apps and the digital performance of those apps in customer use. All of this commercial software superstructure co-incides with the Lyotardian annexation of the theory of performative speech acts so that language and cultural activity is both constrained and enabled by 'speech acts' and 'performative' social action.

Do we think that Tim Cook is boning up on Foucault, that Jonathan Ive has his head buried in Umberto Eco, and that Steve Jobs having absorbed Lyotard will move on to Deleuze? Of course not. But we do think that the theories of some of these post-structuralist philosophers is playing out in a curious fashion in the evolution of our information technologies. One of the least 'Parisian' elements in Apple's universe is the corporate insistence on control, selection and vetting which veers towards prudishness and amounts in effect to a form of censorship. This vetting of apps and publications for standards of taste and obscenity would have been completely inimical to most French philosophes of recent times. I don't think Lyotard would have approved. But he would have understood.

The Post-PC Digital Magazine

2011-03-07T12:08:00.004Z

Steve Jobs got some attention last week with his claim that Apple, unlike most of their competitors, was now working mostly in a Post-PC world

I've said this before, but thought it was worth repeating: It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.

And a lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they're looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies. And they're talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs.

And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach to this. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.

And we think we're on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in the organization to build these kinds of products. (Apple Event: March 2011)

The iPod, the iPhone and the iPad are all, in Jobs's view, Post-PC Devices. Apple has a particular vision of a Post-PC computing environment, and at some stage it will be challenging to deconstruct the vision with which Apple is building its Post-PC system.

But right now, it would be worth asking ourselves a Post-PC digital magazine should behave.

A Post-PC digital magazine should be immediately accessible to a reader who is familiar with the print magazine.
If at all possible it should be 'magically' the same magazine, but in some indefinable ways better.
If a Post-PC digital magazine subscriber has a subscription to the print magazine they should also be entitled to access their magazine subscription on the iPad (this is one of those magical properties). If Conde Nast really thinks that Pre-PC subscribers will be happy to pay additional prices for Post-PC issues of the same magazine, they are living in a universe where tablet PCs have styluses. Quite clearly out of touch.
The Post-PC magazine should be better in some 'definable' ways also: it should be searchable; it should link to appropriate web resources (urls, email addresses, YouTube, iTunes etc); it should be browsable, bookmarkable, likable (in the Facebook sense) and Tweetable.
A Post-PC digital magazine should be a publication in which some advertisers will want to advertise (but I am not sure that I see how Apple thinks that magazine advertising in digital magazines could work). Digital magazines should be good places to advertise because they will attract specific and definable audiences of committed consumers. So there needs to be a Post-PC way for those connections to work....

There is plenty of work to be done as we put digital magazines on the way to being completely "Post-PC" publications. But Apple itself has some digging to do in getting itself into a thoroughly Post-PC posture. See "Dear Apple: You’re not “Post-PC” until you cut the cord".

How Will the iPad Shape the Magazine Market?

2011-03-01T09:16:00.002Z

JP Morgan estimates that 48 million tablets will be sold this year, and 80 million next year (with a value of $35 billion). The chances are that Apple will still be shipping a majority of the tablets sold next year (we still have not seen a credible competitor in the market), and certainly dominating the market this year and next. Apple has a very strong position.

Apple may not be the only game in town for much longer, but the lead is so significant and the tablet charge so powerful (denting the sales predicted for desktop, laptop and notebook PCs) that we predict that all major consumer magazine publishers will bury their concerns (real though they are) and succeed in offering most of their magazines as apps through iTunes. Since Apple's iTunes will have an audience of perhaps 100 million tablet users, spending perhaps $5-20 per month on apps, by the end of 2012 they will be stupid not to do this. Since Apple's dominance is unlikely to last (at some point competitive platforms will emerge for iTunes) many publishers will view their Apple embrace as strategic and temporary. But they will embrace, they will engage, and some features of the iTunes/iPad eco-system will shape the digital magazine market in significant and predictable ways:

The market will be very global. iTunes is more global and more widely accepted internationally than most other digital marketplaces (Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody, Spotify not to mention Hulu or Nook). In consequence magazines that appear as digital apps will find that they have a broader digital audience than they have been able to attract in print. This will be a particularly potent effect for strong niche titles (think: cycling, knitting, poetry, chess, mountaineering, green and music magazines).
The globalisation of the market will also benefit magazines in all other major languages. Since iTunes with its 18 languages is already more multilingual than all the other digital marketplaces mentioned above.
Price will matter. But the pricing situation in iTunes will be ameliorated by Apple's introduction of a system of recurring subscription payments for digital content. iTunes has been hugely more successful at monetising apps at the level of 99c or $1.99 than at $5.99 or $9.99. It is much easier to sell an app in iTunes at 99c, than at $9.99. It has simply been unfeasible to sell annual magazine subscriptions through iTunes at 'normal' subscription prices, because iTunes customers do not like spending $19.99 that way. iTunes is frictionless and easy for users just so long as the prices keep their head down. The great advantage for a magazine or periodical publisher is that the Apple system will make it easy to sell weekly, monthly or quarterly subs at prices which are 'bearable' to the lightly gliding fingers on the iPad touch interface. By offering customers renewable subscriptions Apple is leveraging itself out of the rather cheap 'sweet spot' in which most app sales have been stuck.
The frequency of magazines may also be subtly shaped by the way we interact with our iPads. Weekly magazines seem to work well with the iPad -- is it because we tend to have device in our hands fairly regularly? Partly because of the pricing mechanism (weekly subs can be pitched lower than monthly subs), I suspect that weekly magazines will have a surprising comparative advantage over monthly magazines. The digital weekly on a tablet that you use intensively at weekends may be a stronger vehicle than the print weekly which arrives a day late and has in recent decades looked increasingly challenged as distribution and print costs rise.
The extraordinary strength of magazine brands will play to the strengths of iTunes. Magazines are known by their titles (usually) and their brands are associated with their titles, their covers and their graphic style. All this can work well for magazine publishers and they will rapidly realise that the huge benefits that come from being securely branded and cherished in iTunes even compensates to some extent for the pain of the Apple 30% levy on all subscriptions sold through iTunes.
Because magazine publishers are the guardian and creators of the brands associated with their magazines they will be especially sensitive and active in ensuring that their brands are well represented on tablet platforms, so whilst they will all embrace the iPad they will all be looking very anxiously in the direction of an alternative and complementary digital technology.

Apple's Powerful Position

2011-02-23T08:26:00.002Z

It seems as though the blogosphere is only now waking up as to how extraordinarily powerful Apple's position with the iTunes/iOS/iPhone/iPad stack is. Apple's critic's (and in this case the most effective critics are significantly long-time supporters) are concerned that Apple is over-reaching: the objections are focusing not on the level of Apple's commission (though plenty of people think that 30% is too high) but on the way that Apple's rules appear to reach through to 'regulate' the way in which its partners can price services outside the iOS platform. Marco Ament,

A broad, vague, inconsistently applied, greedy, and unjustifiable rule doesn’t make developers want to embrace the platform. Subscriptions and the new in-app purchase requirement Marco Ament.

And another shrewd critic

If I am interpreting this correctly, I can’t bring myself to see it as reasonable. Not only do businesses have every right to price their products on the open market as they see fit, .........
I also don’t see how it’s even remotely enforceable. Are Apple staffers seriously going to check every vendor website for sale prices on a regular basis?

I think a great deal of this drama could go away if Apple dropped section 11.13 ....... (about pricing away from iTunes).... Your prices on your store are your business; just don’t be a jerk and advertise the difference all over ours. About This Whole Subscription Hubbub Matt Drance

John Gruber, usually very loyal and positive about Apple, notes at Daring Fireball that he agrees entirely with Drance.

It is unlikely that Apple will do much about this hullaballoo, except perhaps to clarify that the rules are not going to be enforced in an aggressive and over-reaching way. The trouble is that it is not obvious how they can be enforced in a clear and unarbitrary way and if there is too much fog and vagueness that could be a real bane for Apple developers. It is almost inconceivable that Apple will back off the 30% commission (the music publishers have been griping about it for years), so we had better get used to it.

There is another feature of the Apple infrastructure that needs to get some critical attention. The available prices. The App Store Pricing Matrix has 85 levels (99c to $999.99) and ranges across currency bands ($, Can$, Aus$, UK£, Yen etc). The matrix could be host to a few problems which someone in Apple needs to think about:

Will this pricing matrix become the default pricing regime for all cultural services and software? If the rules say that a publisher has to price stuff outside iTunes at a price equivalent to or higher than the Apple pricing matrix, is that not going to appear in a very poor light when the regulators come and investigate?
Are Apple sure that there is not scope for a price level beneath 99c or 115¥? Is it 'offside' for a developer to offer 49c or 99¥ specials? The 99¥ price 'looks' pretty good to me. No restraint of trade investigation will like the Apple rule which says that virtual stuff is either sold at 99c or given away. Apple may not want to sell apps at less than 99c, but if Disney want to do 49c apps off its own e-commerce system, why not?
Then there are prices at the high end, off the Apple scale. There are B2B magazines with extraordinarily high personal subscription rates. There are excellent, technical, specialist and very influential magazines (finance and law) sold on subscription that cost as much as a safari holiday, many of these will work well as iPad applications. At the moment the Apple matrix does not stretch to those subscription levels (for the annual sub). I suppose that the publisher can at least comply with the rules by offering a monthly sub at $299 (weekend in Paris), but should it not be feasible to offer an annual sub at $2,999 (7 days in Kruger National Park)? There may be few takers at the high end, but Apple is not averse to 'high ends' that will attract a 30% commission.
The really devilish problem is that currencies move. I don't think that the Apple app pricing matrix has yet been revised, but at some stage it will need to be. The Australian dollar will shoot through the roof, or the British pound will sink like a stone. When that happens and the prices in the Tesco downloads store start jumping as a direct result of a new Apple Matrix that will be a political hot potato.
Worse still, when currencies move (they do) and the matrix has to be rearranged, there will be enormous disruption to the 'self renewing' subscriptions in the iTunes ecology which Apple has now introduced. Prices will not self-renew if they change. This circuit-breaker is very correctly a rule in the Apple pricing system to protect consumers. At some point the matrix will become very misaligned with the real world of fluctuating currencies and Apple will push through some revisions. Revisions which may be mildly annoying to consumers but hugely damaging to developers who have come to rely on renewals.

Some of Apple's critics write as though the company had room to duck and dive. Such criticisms are misguided, Apple's project is so well integrated and so interdependent that it can not turn on a sixpence. Whilst many consumer magazine experts are complaining about Apple's rather meticulous oversight of app developers and some big companies are hanging back, reluctant to sell their magazines through a system that gives them little consumer data, there is every sign that iTunes and the next generation iPad will continue to excite the market. If the Apple critic wants to look for a silver lining in this situation, she can rely on the fact that an extraordinarily successful marketplace with huge momentum and profit margins approaching the 30% commission, will attract ferocious competition. Somebody is working, in a garage, on a scheme that pulls the rug from under the 30%. The inflexibilities and rigidities in the rather large pricing matrix may be one point of attack.

Aligning app with print with web

2011-02-22T08:19:00.003Z

We learn a lot from support. Yesterday we had this message:

Really great job with the ipad edition!
I'm an old fan of the mag -since 1997- and is just marvelous to have it in this digital format. I have the XXXXXXX group at last.fm and a group at facebook with some people -if you like to have the admin pass to this communities please tell me, i think you'll do a better job to mantain it.

I'm a webdeveloper with 10 years in the field, i think the web presence could be more aligned with the print version -taking advantage of the digital interaction- and the overall image of the magazine. If you could be open to accept some suggestions i'll be happy to send you some of my ideas...

We certainly welcome David's ideas and appreciate his appreciation. The thought that really caught my attention is that the 'web presence could be more aligned with the print version -taking advantage of the digital interaction- and the overall image of the magazine.' Because this appears to be pointing to a deep strength of magazine publishing in a digital age. With clever design, good interfaces and solid platforms, it is possible for a magazine to be the same magazine (recognizably the same to its loyal readership) in the very different manifestations that it has in the app format on the iPad, in the rather different guise it may have as an iPhone app, or as an Android app (different again for phone or tablet), on the web, and of course in print. Through all these manifestations it seems that there is a key value to keeping the magazine aligned with the print edition/version. The magazine as an app is different from the print edition (so it is wrong to view it as a mere replica) but it is stronger if it is recognisably the same magazine, albeit an edition with greater interactivity, searchability and findability. Keeping the web presence aligned with the print edition and the app version(s) is a core value.

There is a natural temptation to look at digital technology as replacing analog modes. This is happening, but as the physicality of the print object is becoming obsolete it also seems as though we are finding ways in of reinventing and repositioning analog devices (books, magazines) as virtual objects in a digital framework. This is why books and magazines and newspapers are likely to survive as reading objects in a world of apps and digital reading systems.

Apple Launches its Subscriptions Service with the iTunes App Store

2011-02-17T09:24:00.002Z

Apple two days ago announced its content subscriptions service with a Press Release.

Subscriptions purchased from within the App Store will be sold using the same App Store billing system that has been used to buy billions of apps and In-App Purchases. Publishers set the price and length of subscription (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly). Then with one-click, customers pick the length of subscription and are automatically charged based on their chosen length of commitment (weekly, monthly, etc.). Customers can review and manage all of their subscriptions from their personal account page, including canceling the automatic renewal of a subscription. Apple processes all payments, keeping the same 30 percent share that it does today for other In-App Purchases.

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.”

Publishers who use Apple’s subscription service in their app can also leverage other methods for acquiring digital subscribers outside of the app. For example, publishers can sell digital subscriptions on their web sites, or can choose to provide free access to existing subscribers. Since Apple is not involved in these transactions, there is no revenue sharing or exchange of customer information with Apple. Publishers must provide their own authentication process inside the app for subscribers that have signed up outside of the app. However, Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app. In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

At Exact Editions we think this is an important development which will help to grow the market for digital magazines. Especially on the iPad. It will also have effects on the market for other subscription and content services: newspapers, film, music, TV and perhaps books. Some publishers and distributors in those markets have been complaining. But magazines are different, they understand subscriptions and know how to sell them direct. There is one particularly simple and clear point in the memo that is crucial for magazine publishers. It bears repetition:

Publishers who use Apple’s subscription service in their app can also leverage other methods for acquiring digital subscribers outside of the app. For example, publishers can sell digital subscriptions on their web sites, or can choose to provide free access to existing subscribers. Since Apple is not involved in these transactions, there is no revenue sharing or exchange of customer information with Apple.

In Steve Jobs's exact words:

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing”

The invitation is very plain. Publishers are being encouraged to produce branded apps for individual magazine titles, to market them within iTunes and to provide free access to their existing print and digital subscribers. Publishers who do this must provided an "authentication process inside the app for subscribers that have signed up outside of the app." This is the precise service that Exact Editions has been providing for our partner publishers since August 2010. The fact is that publishers (through the fulfillment houses and distribution houses that work for them) already know their market. They know who their subscribers are, and magazine publishers have proved pretty competent over the years at recruiting new subscribers.

Should publishers be more concerned about the possibility that Apple may be taking too much through the 30% commission it will levy on purchases made through Apple's e-commerce system, or welcoming of the fact that Apple enjoins publishers to keep 100% of the revenues from services which are being partly executed and delivered on the Apple platform? Publishers may be worried by the gravitational pull of the iTunes system, but one should consider this: if the gravitational pull is so strong, perhaps the sales will be also?

Maglet Losowsky and iPads Reclaimed

2011-02-15T08:07:00.006Z

Andrew Losowsky has peered into the glass of the iPad and decided that the world of magazine apps is half empty. So we feel it necessary to cheer him up a bit and fill the glass. Andrew pens his blog at The Hospital Club -- one of Covent Gardens best watering holes -- offering us a swig from the bottle in his first paragraph, a convenient summary of his position:

Twelve months ago, the magazine industry was shouting from the rooftops that the iPad was going to be their saviour - but it turns out that all those people lining up to buy one weren't doing it solely to pay for glass-coated editions of Marie Claire. Sales of maglets (magazines on tablets - geddit?) have been far below the costs of developing these apps, and public reaction has been underwhelmed at best. What went wrong? Six things, actually.The Truth Behind the Failure of iPad Magazines

But if you look at the six points he makes it would appear that the glass is really half full. There have been some mistakes - as is surely to be expected with an innovation as startling as the iPad - but there has also been some progress. Take a look at his problems

Publishers are Selling the Same Content Twice. This is clearly a big mistake. But there is no compulsion on publishers to adopt this posture (that they have done so, is largely the result of a separate battle that they have been fighting with Apple about the ownership of user-data). Some publishers, all those who work with Exact Editions, have opted to offer free iPad access to their existing subscribers. There is nothing in Apple's terms and conditions that says that publishers cannot do this, or that digital magazine access has to be sold exclusively through iTunes. Apple's mooted new system for in-app subscriptions will surely encourage more publishers to adopt this attractive way of selling subscriptions, though it may also require that digital/app subscriptions are sold through iTunes.
There are not enough iPads out there. Only 15 million in the nine months! Since Apple will sell perhaps another 40 million this year, and no market analyst predicted, prior to launch, that Apple would sell more than 7 million in the first year, this is a glass rapidly filling up before-we-can-get-organised, point. Come on Andrew this is surely a reason for publishers to get their skates on!
Maglets are competing with everything else on the iPad. Yes indeed, "....magazines no longer have the benefit of being at the centre of our cultural lives. They have to work harder than ever to grab our attention and force their way into our habits, a task that's all the harder when they reside on a fully connected device that contains the latest news from thirty seconds ago..." Which is also a reason for magazines to see if they can persuade consumers to use them on iPads just as they use them in their living rooms. Magazine publishers did not chuck in their hands when the TV invaded the living room, innovative publishers will see the iPad as a similar challenge. Glass half full.
Separate App Syndrome. I think Andrew misses a key point here. Magazine publishers have made a big mistake in designing magazine apps as though each issue was a separate app. This is a valid complaint, but not the point that Losowsky makes, and it is one reason for the disappointing showing of several magazine apps. It is also one reason why magazine publishers have felt that they should market and sell magazines on the iPad one issue at a time, failing to see that selling subscriptions through, or without, iTunes is clearly the way to go. Magazines as apps work very well as branded apps in iTunes partly because magazine titles often confer superb branding and findability on the product (Marie Claire, Elle, Vogue and also niche titles Literary Review, Opera, Index on Censorship). But the branding should cover magazines in their entirety: past issue, current issue and future issues are ideal to function as branded apps in the customer's iPad. This is a glass that needs to be very full -- including the archive.
Magazines are outside the digital conversation. This is indeed a valid objection, but in mitigation the magazine publishers (and app developers such as Exact Editions) can point out that this is a complex and rapidly developing field; better engagement and social interaction with digital magazines is certainly coming. The Exact Editions apps are already stuffed full of links to web pages and email addresses (and on the iPhone, phone numbers that the customer can call). Magazine apps can be highly interactive and they are increasingly becoming more so. Losowsky appears not to have noticed that the iPad itself makes it incredibly easy for a single 'page' or a JPEG to be emailed from any magazine app, it is not a matter of some publishers enabling this. There is nothing that the magazine publishers or the copyright owners can do to stop such informal sharing (which does not mean that magazine apps can be easily copied wholesale; that is a different matter). This is a glass to be shared.
The medium is nine months old. By which I am sure that Andrew Losowsky means that its really too early to be sure: "The truth is that we just don't know yet what varieties of format, design and interactivity will best serve each kind of content, and though some of the experiments in the field are fascinating, most of them are just irritating applications of over-design by people giddy at the possibilities of new formats." This is indeed a matter of the glass being half-full, and a point on which we can agree

Losowsky's excessively gloomy, more than half-empty, headline 'The Truth Behind the Failure of iPad Magazines' is perhaps belied by this concluding (half-full) optimism:

That said, this is still a genuinely exciting time to be working in media. Nothing at all can be taken for granted - except for the simple fact that there will always be a hunger for unique stories, told in a manner in which the text, design, images. and when necessary audio and video, combine to enhance our enjoyment and understanding of the story itself. This ability to make design part of content is the reason why magazines lasted in the first place.

I first noticed Losowsky's piece via an approving tweet , from Erik Spiekermann, perhaps the Lionel Messi of typographic design. This design discontent with magazine apps is not an odd-ball view, most/many good magazine designers are disappointed by the way that magazine iPad apps have been designed so far. My hunch is that the user experience and pleasure in magazine apps will improve as designers and publishers realise that magazine design and book design has to move to a more holistic and a more abstract level, perhaps when designers are less 'giddy' with the possibilities and more relaxed about the opportunities and the 'flow' that comes with touch interfaces. Technology is moving very fast and good digital magazines have to be conceived and conceptualised for systems and services that don't yet exist. From now on all pages are virtual, all stories have addresses, and all interfaces have to be intuitive. This is not a trivial set of challenges for a designer who aims at quality and effect.

On Making Digital Subscriptions Work

2011-02-11T09:58:00.004Z

All Things Digital has an interesting essay by John Squires: Apple, Google and the Publishers: Here's How to Make Subscriptions Work . Squires used to be a senior executive at Time Inc and is founder of Next Issue Media a company that is stealthily developing a new approach to marketing and selling digital magazines on tablet platforms.

Squires echoes cries of anguish that have been coming from his peers in the consumer magazine industry:

In recent weeks, we’ve heard growing concern from magazine and newspaper publishers regarding the challenge of providing content for mobile media while preserving their print franchises. The concern is nothing new, but it’s apparent that content providers are at risk of losing track of their customers like toddlers in a shopping mall. Squires All Things D

Its news to me that magazine publishers care for their subscribers the way parents look after toddlers in a shopping mall. Squires goes on to say:

Devices like the iPad offer consumers a rich reading experience and offer publishers even more targeted advertising, but the revenue tradeoff as publishers navigate the path from print to this new world is lopsided–and not in a good way.

The problem for Squires is that he can't see the old business model working for publishers with the new digital magazines. Publishers are not going to be 'allowed' to track their toddlers in the ways in which they have been accustomed to do. Furthermore Squires doesn't think that subscriptions are going to work for digital publishers:

Isn’t selling your magazine through an app store and receiving 70 percent of the revenues a great deal? After all, magazine subscription agents and newsstands don’t return anywhere near that amount to publishers. But this is argument misses an important point. In iTunes and the Android Marketplace, there’s virtually no merchandising of magazine products. A magazine app must swim to the top of several hundred thousand other applications. And even in the context of a dedicated magazine store, the publisher won’t control featuring.The value of the brand must pull the consumer through to the purchase. And brands are expensive to build and nurture....Squires All Things D

So the litany of complaints continues. Despite the potential for a 'rich reading experience' life is going to be very hard for digital magazine publishers, they will have to (1) create the rich reading experience (2) support devices on various platforms (3) market their wares (4) do some 'feature control' of their own so that their magazines come to the top of the heap (5) build their brands and (6) figure out how this fiercely competitive and rapidly evolving world is going to work. Perhaps Mr Squires should look to the example of Rupert Murdoch and go and build a publication which will meet those challenges head on.

Squires's proposed solution for this difficult quandary in which the magazine finds itself is to propose some industry wide standard solutions (perhaps it will appeal to the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft because) "there’s a significant long-term advantage for the software industry to make friends with 150 million magazine consumers." As though these technology titans are going to reach agreement on standard procedures so that the magazine publishers existing business model can be replicated in the digital framework?

Make what you can of John Squires' specific proposals. The second one astonished me: (the software industry should) "Create simple APIs that connect the handful of major print fulfillment houses to application storefronts so existing print accounts can be harmonized with digital access." Exact Editions has been doing almost exactly this for many of the publishers with whom we work. But note, such a solution has to work potentially for hundreds of print fulfillment houses (surely it is a sign of some Time-induced complacency to suppose that only the 'handful' of 'major' fulfillment houses count). It has to be general and generalisable. Furthermore the trick is to work with the APIs of the print fulfillment houses (not of the e-commerce store fronts), so the discussions have to take place between the publishers and the fulfillment houses and their IT houses and app developers. This sort of business has to be under the control and to the account of publishers for it to work the way they want it to. You do not attach conventional print subscriptions to digital subs -- which is what Squires on a strict interpretation is suggesting as the desired solution. You attach digital or app solutions to print subscriptions. That way the publishers (via their fulfillment houses) stay in control of the crucial customer relationship. There is no point asking Google or Apple to build your digital back-end. They are not going to do that, and furthermore the magazine industry really does not want them to do so. Which is where we started, with Mr Squires bleating that Apple controls too much data and will not provide access to the iTunes accounts of Apple's customers who subscribe to digital magazines. Why on earth should they? An iTunes customer who buys a magazine app from iTunes is an iTunes customer before she is a customer of the magazine app. The position is rather different with a subscriber who is already a customer of the magazine and the publishers can insist that their customers are treated with the respect and reciprocity that they deserve. They are already a subscriber to the (print) magazine and so should be offered free access via the app. The Economist got this right by providing free app access to all its existing print subscribers. Time Inc and the other big American consumer publishers is getting it so wrong by refusing to do this

Work around it, and start publishing digital solutions that customers want.....

The Daily is a Convincing App. But is it a Periodical?

2011-02-09T08:50:00.003Z

I like The Daily rather more than I was expecting. I also think that it has a commercial chance; it is a gamble, but it is potentially a very significant money-spinner. A lot will depend on the execution. Murdoch is prepared to take a big punt on the newspaper's success, and like a good gambler he can do this because he is playing with a limited stake ($30 million in startup costs and $500k a week in running costs). He is not playing for break-even but for a significant win, which happens when he has 1 million or 2 million subscribers. That will take 18 months or two years to pan out, so at most $100 million is at risk. For News Corporation with its huge investment in print newspapers this is peanuts. The upside is that The Daily gets 2 million subscribers from which the subscription income is $80 million ($40 annual sub x 2 million subscribers), Apple's commission and sales tax may bring this net take down to $50 million but the running costs are $25 million. Also there is some advertising revenue which should help.

Murdoch's off the cuff comments at the launch were fascinating and engaged, and I heard them the same way as Peter Kirwan, blogging at the UK Wire, who also fancies the commercial prospects of the new title:

If this makes The Daily sound like a bolt-on addition to the media ecosystem, Murdoch is also dreaming of something much bigger. Away from his script, during an interview on Fox Business News yesterday, his words suggested a bid to promote cannibalisation of print audiences.

"I really believe that everybody in America who can afford one is going to buy a tablet," said Murdoch. Ultimately, he added, he would like The Daily to overtake the 26m audience attracted by American Idol on News Corporation's Fox network.

News Corporation executives may smile at the old man's hyperbole. But the intent is clear. What's more, Murdoch claims that he isn't phased by the prospect of cannibalising print audiences. "Oh, there may be some expensive changeover," he said yesterday. "Net-net I think we will get." Peter Kirwan: What's New about The Daily?

Murdoch is aiming a newspaper proposition at a market which can probably commit to the prices he is putting on it (99c a week or $40 a year). Because he has a clean slate Murdoch has been able to take a realistic view of what an annual iPad newspaper should cost. Net-net, I think he will get.

The Daily has a mid-market feel, a bit like USA Today (2010 circulation 1.8 million, and if I were in Gannett's boots I would move very fast to cut Mr Murdoch off at the pass with a snazzier app in the same class) and it will have a mid-market appeal. It is not very serious, it is gossipy, and the sports coverage impressed me; the illustrations are good and some of the diagrams and 360° photographs are excellent. There is much that one could question or criticize (see some very insightful analysis of the typography and design by Stephen Coles), the social interactivity is ham-fisted at launch, but I will be watching the progress of The Daily with interest.

Murdoch in answer to questions, left open the possibility that The Daily will in due course migrate to other tablet platforms, but it is for this year and next aimed fair and square at the iPad. Nevertheless it is in many respects designed and conceived in a rather conservative magazine fashion: as if it were a newspaper designed for a small format with lots of colour and a fair amount of interaction, snippets of video and short, punchy stories. Which is what it is, mostly produced with traditional print tools. The maganewspaper is, we may suppose, produced with InDesign and could almost be laid out as though it were a print object -- almost, but not quite, since as with other apps generated from inDesign the imposition would not work. The framework and the metaphor is still largely a print metaphor, but one re-scaled for the iPad's dimensions and interface. Like any app it can interact with the web and it condescends to save pages and bookmarks and links in suitably undistinguished web pages, but it is most definitely an app and a tolerably enjoyable one to navigate and browse.

So The Daily is a newspaper and an app, but is it a periodical? I only raise the question, because there is no way, at present, to move back to a previous issue (except through the rather drab web pages which are used for reference, bookmarking etc). The Daily is a daily event and not a newspaper of record which would have an archive of issues that can be opened and re-opened to review and re-read earlier content, so that one could again look at the 360° photograph of Tahrir square that they carried on February 4th (one can see the video carried on that day here). It may be said that a proper archive could be 'retro-fitted' once they get going; but I wonder whether this will happen or whether we will move to the idea of a digital newspaper being a more ephemeral publication (like a news web site) with no full archive? Shall we borrow a word from the French and call such not-for-the-record newspapers 'quotidians' rather than 'periodicals'?

I think that digital magazines certainly will retain their archives, and the apps which map them will have to figure out how the archive is presented and integrated alongside the current number. There is strength in that model and anchoring readers in the quality of your back issues has some commercial advantages.

Magazines Need a Digital Format Before they Get a New Blueprint?

2011-01-31T08:11:00.004Z

Tomorrow Apple and News Corp are launching a new periodical, The Daily, specifically designed for the iPad. This could be really exciting and I wish it well (I really do, but we will have some caveats later).

Erick Schonfeld over at TechCrunch decides to peg another think piece on iPad magazines on this event: iPad Mags Need a New Blueprint. This is not a blog up to the usual TechCrunch standards but it does attract an excellent comment (from TechPops - who tells us what he wants his digital magazine to be and do) and a thoughtful blog from Mike Cane. Who correctly points out that the Daily is really about newspapers and magazines are not facing the same challenges or the same opportunities with the iPad.

There are three problems with Schonfeld's piece and they are all signs that he does not have a good understanding of the challenge the magazine industry faces:

A digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer. It needs to take advantage of technology to tell better stories. (Schonfeld)
Apple should fix the subscription problem(Schonfeld)
Making these apps social and realtime is the key (Schonfeld)

The first point is a blatant appeal to the gallery. There have been some very poor early stage magazine apps of which the best that one could say of them is that they look like badly put-together PDF-viewing packages. But the reality is that the magazine industry basically knows how to make magazines which in their print form pretty much are PDF packages (or in practice InDesign files, which are not much different). This is where the magazine industry is starting from, and the iPad is actually an excellent way of reading magazines, documents designed primarily for a print medium. Producing a really good iPad app of the print magazine is a very good starting point for where the magazine industry now is. We should recognize that the magazine format is a PDF format until it becomes something else, and any digital magazine platform is going to build out from this heritage. Connected to this point: Schonfeld is right that media apps such as Flipboard are harbingers for the future digital magazine industry, but it is swinging cart before horse to suggest that most magazines are going to become Flipboard-style aggregators. We need thriving digital magazines for horizontal aggregation services like Flipboard to work. Making digital magazines work will mean making them feel like magazines on the iPad (though of course more digital and 'better'), this doesnt mean making them all like Flipboard with its loose and generous visual style. Half the point of magazines is that they aim at individuality and unique presentation in design. That potential for design excellence and differentiation through design and layout has to be kept!

'Fixing the Subscription Problem', we will know more about Apple's moves on subscriptions for periodicals tomorrow following the launch of the Daily, it is widely expected that Apple will makes some changes to its subscription model to encourage periodical publishers to focus on the iPad. But I very much doubt that 'fixing the subscription model' will come close to the demands that magazine publishers have been making. Apple may provide a bit more customer data to publishers, but it will be surprising if it relents on its 30% commission for sales made through iTunes. Magazine and newspaper publishers have some unrealistic expectations about 'fixing the subscription problem' in iTunes. The bald and unpalatable (for some publishers) truth is that the iTunes commercial and subscription model already works rather well, and unrestricted access to private consumer data is not on offer.

'Making these apps social and realtime is the key.' This is again, at best a half truth. We can agree with Schonfeld that digital magazines are going to be interesting players in the social web. But this role may be more asymmetric than other social content players. Magazines, newspapers and books need to think carefully about the extent to which they introduce on-board, two way dialogue. All holds-barred realtime interactivity is not a guarantee of success. We may be more interested in the potential for Tweeting from magazines than in having magazines Tweet at us (see Cane). In any event the social wave for digital iPad magazines is clearly coming, but it may be that the way this should work is not yet fully in view. Its a bit tough to complain that digital magazines havent figured out their social graph via the iPad when Facebook still has not yet produced its own iPad app. If the Daily goes all social at launch (I doubt that it will) the chances are that it will have gone off at half-cock.

I look forward to buying the Daily tomorrow (it will be a shame if it is restricted to North America, surely it will be available internationally?), and I shall be rooting for it. Its best hope is that it does not disappoint and learns to adapt quickly if it has made a couple of bad early choices. The Daily needs to innovate and the chances are that it will make one or two mistakes, and having such a big budget behind it, it may be hard to recover from a mis-step Here are four tricky judgement calls that I shall be looking out for:

How does it handle RSS feeds? It is called The Daily -- which suggests that it will have an editorial focus around a 'deadline'. So in the week of the Cairo events it will be bang up against Twitter, Flickr and Reuters on the issue of periodicity and topicality. Its hard to get the RSS mix right if the editorial focus in on a daily edition.
How will The Daily be positioned in relation to subtly different tablet options that are coming from Android and HP. Has the publication been so tightly designed for the iPad that it will be an exclusive project for that platform? What about the iPhone, will there in due course be an iPhone edition? (I would love to know what advice Apple gave News Corp on this point).
Will The Daily be aiming for a significant advertising revenue base or is it going to pitch its camp solidly on the basis of subscription revenues?
How will The Daily handle the orientation possibilities of the iPad? Are we going to see a design innovation in that area?

InterDependent Content?

2011-01-27T08:28:00.006Z

John Battelle has blogged a very intriguing essay on the distinction between the dependent and the independent web. Here he makes the distinction:

The Dependent Web is dominated by companies that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites "depends" on their proprietary model of your identity, including what you've done in the past, what you're doing right now, what "cohorts" you might fall into based on third- or first-party data and algorithms, and any number of other robust signals.

The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. John Battelle: The Interdependent Web

Battelle goes on to point out:

Consider the sub-category of "content" on the web. It's a very large part of what makes the web, the web - millions of "content sites," ranging from the smallest blog to ESPN.com. Most of these sites don't change what they show us depending on who they think we are. John Battelle: The Interdependent Web

Perhaps a paradigmatic example of what Battelle is getting at here would be Wikipedia, which in spite of being a construct of millions of authorial and editorial acts is pretty much the same wherever or from wherever you are looking at it. But, hold on a moment, note that Wikipedia is changing all the time, and in ways that can be hard to predict (mostly it is getting better) and it is thus highly time-dependent. Independent of the 'self' perhaps? Certainly, Wikipedia aims at a crowd-sourced balance and neutrality. But note the variety of languages in which Wikipedia is now developed and edited. Nevertheless, Wikipedia is a standard bearer for web independence, rapidly changing, multilingual but determinate, and in a certain sense 'objective'. More and more our content services are becoming dependent services. They are not merely web sites. What you see and read depends on who you are and where you are, what you are doing; and you only read bits of what you are reading.

A very strong example of the way in which content services are becoming 'dependent' in John Battelle's sense is offered by the iPad app Flipboard. Flipboard is a pure content service but is totally 'dependent', the only element of 'editorial voice' that emerges concerns the degree to which Flipboard selects and promotes particular channels (eg this week Davos). Flipboard is not really a web service. It is an iPad app, plain and not so simple, but it aggregates a large number of web-based publications (usually via their RSS streams) and presents them to its subscribers with Facebook and Twitter resources inter-leaved in the content mix. What you see and read in Flipboard is very dependent on the choices you have made in the past, both in Flipboard and in your daily activity on Twitter and Facebook. The user is continually creating and assembling his/her own Flipboard anthology. A hallmark of dependence: no two Flipboard users will see the same content flow -- though for sure many components may be viewed in common. One of the key points about Flipboard is that it is at this point iPad-only. Flipboard is a hugely 'dependent' system, its shape is completely determined by its user's profile and activity and yet it is also completely dependent on web technologies and resources though not itself a web resource. There is no Flipboard web service, of course the company has a web site, of course Flipboard uses the web very intelligently. I can link you to stuff that I am seeing and reading on Flipboard, but Flipboard is not itself a source of content. I can't even 'Flip' you the page of Tweets that I am looking at right now.... (OK so here is a screen shot)

Flipboard works, and in my view it works very well, because it builds on mechanisms which were well established well before the iPad arrived. Publications, especially magazines and newspapers have been struggling to adapt to the web by developing their own 'dependent' web services which complement their existing and hard to monetise independent web sites. RSS feeds were an obvious example of this urge to match the daily, weekly, periodical content to the circumstances of users. But blogs and comment functions are equally significant as mechanisms through which 'content' resources have been trying to match their publications to the various ways in which their audience can engage with a publication through the web. What Flipboard brilliantly shows us is that the magazine (or the newspaper) itself can be pulled through to the iPad environment and appreciated or enjoyed as a quasi-magazine on the iPad. The RSS feed hauls the pictures and comments and some of the layout through into the iPad app environment.

Whether Flipboard will itself become a commercially important channel for magazine publishers is another matter. But it certainly shows the industry that it is possible to deliver magazine content to the iPad environment in a form which is both attractive and enjoyable. For magazine publishers the real challenge is now to find out how to deliver the whole magazine in various forms and via a plethora of reading devices and reading environments to readers in a consistent and self-contained way. This is why the publication "as an app" has strong appeal for publishers and the existing audience. The big challenge for the publisher is to see if the magazine or newspaper app, whether on third generation iPad or a second generation Android tablet, can be a satisfactory way of presenting a full publication better than it could ever have been in print. So that in 2015 you know that what your sister is reading on the Samsung Squiggle, or the Amazon Kindle Mk5, is the same thing as the you are reading on the iPad iNfinite.... The challenge is to make publications as dependent as they can be on the whims, devices, preferences and circumstances of the reader but as independant and as reliably referenceable as web pages and print publications. InterDependence is the goal.

Cost Benefits of A Magazine App

2011-01-14T12:37:00.004Z

One of my colleagues yesterday sent out an email to those of our publishing partners who are not currently offering an iPad/iPhone app of their magazine through iTunes. You can read the email here. It rightly concentrates on the user benefits -- that is the real point of producing an app version of the magazine. A successful magazine app is a good user experience and it should project and promote the magazine to a new and rapidly growing audience. But the email also produced a list of 'Publisher Benefits'. The list is of some interest:

Publisher's Account gives you 24/7 access to your app sales
Control - You set the price of app (within Apple's matrix)
Flexibility - You can change the price at any time and set the number of open access pages you want
Visibility - Your app can be found easily in the app store
Ease - Exact Editions continue to handle all customer service on your behalf
New Revenue Stream - by reaching the new app market
Marketing - the freemium app is great exposure for your title to potential subscribers

Perhaps the key item in this list is the one relating to cash -- revenue. How can one quantify or estimate the size of the new and growing market for magazines through iTunes? Here are some considerations:

The market for a magazine app bears some relation to the size of the market for the print magazine. A magazine that sells 100,000 copies a month through news stand and subscriptions will almost certainly sell more as an app through iTunes than a magazine that sells 2,000 copies a month.
The market for magazine apps on the iPad exists, and it is small if you measure your circulation in millions because the market penetration of the iPad is still in its early days. Few magazines have target audiences where iPad ownership exceeds 5% of the existing readership. So it may be unrealistic to expect your readership on the iPad to be larger than 5% of your readership in print. (This is not to say that the potential audience on the iPad is the same as the actual audience in print, far from it, but the audiences may have similar scale).
Note however that the market within iTunes is growing by leaps and bounds -- we expect to see revenues from iTunes growing by 10-20% per month through the rest of this year.
The tablet market is much more significant than the mobile phone market for magazine app subscriptions. We estimate that 80%+ of the Exact Editions iOS magazine app sales are driven by the iPad market (though a significant proportion of users will have their app on more than one device: phone/pod/pad). Customers are buying magazine apps for the iPad much more than for the iPhone. So an Android market will expand the market, but you may not need to deliver Android support until there is a reasonably successful Android tablet.
If your existing magazine subscribers are buying iPads or other tablets, will they expect to see their favourite magazines on the new device they have brought into the home? Do you want them to be reading another magazine or yours?
The Exact Editions platform requires a small upfront commitment from a publisher -- but there are no significant issue by issue costs for the publisher. For the most part we work on a small commission which covers the costs and the support of the freemium solution we deliver. So the publisher who commits to an app on the Exact Editions platform is really opening a new sales channel to an existing market.

So, my bald conclusion is that all but the most specialist consumer magazines should be making profits from apps launched this year. Who knows how the market will grow in 2012? Tomorrow can look after itself, the iPad looks like an interesting target for most magazine publishers in 2011. Forget the bespoke app that revolutionises the news business or the multi-media wonder that transforms the world of fashion publishing with alternative reality cat-walks; such apps may be built, but straightforward readable well executed magazine apps can make money for publishers now. These magazines as apps will look and behave 'pretty much' like the magazines that consumer publishers have produced in print for years, because that is what consumer magazine publishers do produce. But they will be different because magazine apps are a bit different. And in 2012 and 2013 they will start to behave in ways that were not possible or imaginable when magazines were merely print objects.

One thing at a time. And the first thing is to find out whether users like reading your magazine on an iPad or tablet. You may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

The iPad App Market for Magazines

2011-01-10T17:03:00.005Z

Around the turn of the year we saw a barrage of blogs and articles questioning whether magazine apps were working. The implication being that they are not working at all as planned or hoped for TechCrunch, Matthew Ingram, WWDMedia.

The gloomy news was best captured by a chart from Silicon Alley Insider: Chart of the Day -- iPad Magazines Tank

The story does indeed look pretty gloomy. But when you study the chart more closely the real problem was the extraordinary success of the first iPad edition from Wired. It throws everything that follows into a gloomy shadow. The GQ and Vanity Fair apps had their limitations, but the results and even the trends were not too bad, given that they were very much 'first efforts'.

Our experience has been much less dramatic but much more encouraging, so there may be a case for giving a few sketchy strokes from another picture. But we first need to note and magazine publishers need to recognize a few key points about the app economy and iTunes in particular.

The first point to emphasize is that free apps will get much more traction and much more currency than paid for apps. A free app may get 100 times or even 1,000 times as much attention as an app that the user has to pay for.
Freemium can work well for magazines. Give some content away for free, and make it attractive and easy to trade up to a paid for subscription. Freemium can work either as sheer promotion, where you do not expect to sell much to the iTunes audience, but you wish to whet an appetite. Or it can work well as a first step on the way to paying for something....
If you are going to charge for your magazine app (and if it is really good and it costs you money to make it you should charge for it), recognize that it is a lot easier to sell an app for 99c or $2.99, or even £4.99 than it is to sell one for €9.99. And selling an app for $19.99 is really tough. I am not sure that consumer purchases can be sold effectively for $19.99 or $29.99 on iTunes. This is a fact about iTunes, where users have got used to spending 99c for a track. Purchasing habits on iTunes are different from purchasing habits using PayPal or Amazon. Recognize that fact before you get too far in. Recognize also that purchasing on iTunes can be very frictionless, easier and smoother than PayPal or a Credit Card. iTunes is different from Visa or MasterCard. At low prices, iTunes is better, slicker, easier than any other e-commerce environment, but not at the prices that many magazine publishers wish to charge for annual subscriptions.
iTunes has an amazingly large audience. You cannot ignore it. You should use it to extend and embrace your existing audience. Make sure that your pricing works for your existing readers and your new readers. Make sure that your pricing makes sense to your existing print subscribers. Think about that.

One of the key things about the iPad is that it has given publishers a good reason to re-engage their existing audience in the concept of digital access. We think that this is the really, really good news about the iPad. Digital subscriptions for your existing audience are a key part of the reason for embracing the iPad. The point is that a magazine publisher can quickly and efficiently convert his print audience to a digital audience at low cost using free access to the digital feed as a reward for print subscribers. That way the circulation of the print audience is confirmed and strengthened and at the same time a new digital only audience can be won. Because the publisher sells digital access (via iTunes or directly) to those customers who do not want to buy the print service.

The data about the uptake of apps using the Exact Editions platform is confidential to the publishers of the magazine concerned. But we can publicize a few data points about the uptake of two nameless magazines. These are both high quality consumer magazines with an international but mostly ex-US audience. Both magazines have had freemium apps in the marketplace for several months at affordable prices (£4.99/$6.99 or less for 30 day subscriptions). Both have had respectable uptakes. In the case of magazine A, there have been nearly 50K freemium downloads and nearly 2K purchases. In the case of magazine B, there have been nearly 20K downloads and approaching 3K purchases. Incidentally, when publishers see this data, they are sometimes surprised by what appear to be 'low' conversion rates. Publisher B was inclined to put in some 'pre-qualifying' friction when he saw the rates (eg a form collecting email addresses); publishers with this reaction are severely underestimating the 'friction-free' style of iTunes and are also underestimating their need for exposure and promotion. The appropriate reaction would have been "Why haven't I had 60K downloads?" A 2% purchase-response rate is good for iTunes freemium apps. For both magazines the monthly purchases have been reasonably steady, steadily growing, and have shown a good ratio of renewals (ie renewals through iTunes). The renewals figure is perhaps the most telling point about the data. Apple has not yet implemented a really easy form of renewal, and it will be very much in Apple's interest for them to offer a form of 'automated' or 'unless I say otherwise' renewal, but even so magazine subs are being renewed at an encouraging rate. Neither we nor the publisher know who these renewing customers are, but Apple does give one sufficient data to tell that specific user ID's have repurchased.

Another point that gives us some confidence in the iPad and its future is that these are still early days. Neither of these 'respectable' consumer magazines have had anything like the promotion and attention of the Wired or the GQ apps. The publishers have given them some 'mind share', and some linkage and advertising via web pages and email campaigns, but I am pretty confident that the promotional budget in both cases has been " low to minimal". Sensibly enough, the publishers concerned have opted for low risk promotion and advertising because they have been experimenting, assessing reactions and feedback. These are still early days, because the iPad is not yet 10 months old, there are still barely 10 million iPads in the market place (many of them in the US). The potential for consumer magazines when there are 50+ million iPads in the market (ie early 2012) is obviously much greater. Another factor that gives me confidence in the potential for publishers making significant profits from their digital editions is that these two publishers have for different reasons not yet begun to exploit the full range of access options for their public. Publisher A has been promoting digital subscriptions through the web, but has not yet offered 'universal subs' to his existing print subscribers. When this is done he will experience a big uptake in app usage and app sales. Publisher B has not yet begun to promote or advertise the option for web subscriptions to the digital edition, when he does so there will be a substantial increase in digital revenues. The Exact Editions platform allows the publisher to promote digital subscriptions across the range: (1) directly as web subscriptions to a purely digital service (2) through iTunes as a way of selling 30 day subs to an iTunes audience; and (3) as an added value service to the existing, renewing and new print subscription audience. It is the potential publishers now have for a cross-platform and integrated, convergent solution for the magazine audience that is most exciting innovation about the iPad. Apple deserves a lot of the credit for that.

Syncing Multiple Issues and Bonus Media in Apps

2010-12-21T17:37:00.006Z

Last week Exact Editions introduced an upgrade to the iOS app platform. The new release (4.1.0) sees two important improvements.

First, publishers can now incorporate 'Bonus Media' in an app on the iPad -- and for the moment, this deeper level of interactivity will only be available through the iPad. The solution we have built enables a magazine to offer its iPad readers, short video clips, sound and additional photo images (eg from a sporting event or a fashion shoot) in a consistent and easily navigated way. The additional content is included in the app, cued with icons in page flow, accessed via the menu at the top of the screen (next to the '?'/Information icon) and once accessed in a wifi zone may be synced to the user's device so that the media can be enjoyed even when not on-line. The first magazine to benefit from these enhancements was SXSWorld, and there are now open examples of this multi-media content available for any user of this free app; simply download the free app and turn to Issue 4 in Volume 4. Here are a few screenshots:

Bonus Media are signposted in the menu bar

The user can flip through a sequence of additional photographs, not included in the printed magazine.

The second significant upgrade in the Exact Editions platform is that syncing of multiple issues is now supported. As many as you like -- or as many as the memory on your iPad permits. Previously, the rule was that the most recent issue in a subscription would be synced to the iPad/iPhone, readers who wanted to access back issues were completely dependent on access via an internet connection. Now a user can sync back issues (or unsync them) by checking/unchecking the the list of back numbers for each title

Syncing multiple issues through the check boxes on the issue list

If we were asked to summarise the Exact Editions view of magazine apps, I guess one could say that our view is that the whole magazine in its digital form should be an app. The whole magazine should be an app and the relevant archive for the magazine should be accessible and readable (of course 'searchable') from within the app. The whole magazine should be there in the application, but when it is there, it is of course fine to add extra interactivity and linkage. And 'extra', or 'bonus' media. Why not? Some magazine publishers on the other hand seem to have taken the view that a magazine app should be constructed and distributed on an issue by issue basis. Although this may sound like a simpler approach and an easier target, we think that starting with the whole magazine in its entirety as a digital resource is easier for both readers and publishers.

Google goes into Culture Commerce

2010-11-30T09:47:00.002Z

The rumour mill has it that Google will launch a Chrome netbook, cloud-based, computer before Christmas or early in the New Year. When you put this rumour alongside the others coming from the Googleplex you get an interesting picture

Is Google going to buy a big package of movie rights? Is that why it has hired the former Netflix executive George Kynci?
Google is possibly quite close to signing a deal with the major music labels for its cloud-based music-streaming service.
For a couple of years, Google has been apparently on the brink of releasing a digital books service in collaboration with book publishers. Most recently Dan Clancy told us that Google Editions will be launching very soon ("très bientôt")

The rumours about the Chrome netbook suggest that its really all about the web, cloud-based productivity and web browsing, but if its launch is accompanied by, or closely followed by, a Google distribution and e-commerce solution for books, films and music, the market place for publishers and entertainment companies may change very fast. Google will be a formidable competitor if it becomes an information publisher and an e-commerce platform for film, music and books. Competitor primarily for Apple and Amazon, Google may well be seen as more of a 'friend', because more collaborative and more open than either Amazon or Apple, by the big incumbent publishers and media groups. Knowing, as we do, the way Google works (quiet launches, 'beta' services, and something of a scatter gun approach) I think its unlikely that Google will launch a fully fledged, cloud-based, Chrome-machine, with a multi-channel, multi-media dashboard in place in the first quarter of next year. It is surely more likely that this hardware platform and this constellation of media services will each emerge in their own good time. But if the plans come off and Google has these publishing partnerships in good order, it is highly likely that Google will be selling a lot of consumer products next Christmas. And I do not meant via Groupon; a commercial solution that can stream all kinds of media stuff from your locker in the cloud to Android and Chrome platforms, will be a dazzling consumer attraction

The Economist's Economical and Effective iPad App

2010-11-24T06:35:00.002Z

And having played with it a bit, I would say that it is a very nice production. Take a look at it here.

There are four aspects to the Economist app that I particularly like:

It has been delivered as a complementary (ie free) offering to all existing subscribers. Exact Editions has been helping magazine publishers to make this bridge to current print subscribers for a while, but a lot of industry experts seem to think that this is something very difficult to do, or somehow not allowed by Apple's e-commerce system, or just generally impossible. Since the Economist is now doing this with no trouble at all (the sign up was very easy, and you only need to do it once -- as is the case with Exact Editions' universal subscriptions) perhaps we will now no longer read claims that it is not feasible to do this. There will be followers......
The Economist delivers all its six editions through the same app, and the user can select which 'regional edition' she wishes to receive. That is a very good plan, simple and in a sense generous. But a generosity which costs the publisher nothing (once it is decided, as it ought to be decided, that all the editions are deserving of a digital service).
The Economist app delivers the individual stories clearly and well, with re-sizable type, and pictures and diagrams in place. Achieving this smoothly and with consistently good results is not easy and must have involved planning a fair degree of integration between editorial work-flow and the app delivery framework. Well done. I also recommend the Economist for choosing a deployment for the iPad which, I am fairly sure, can be easily adapted to other digital form factors that are surely coming. I doubt that the design and editorial process involved in producing the app in its variant forms is onerous, on an ongoing basis. So the planning and integration will be a good investment.
I especially like that The Economist does not try to do too much, or to introduce multi-media and fancy additional features at this stage. This is an app for the weekly publication, not for the web site. The RSS feeds do not clutter up the app, though they can still be found on the web service, of course. The app will be ignored by some so-called experts for not being more ambitious and daring as a publishing innovation. But they have chosen the correct path: get the basic magazine up and running and then take it from there. It will not be difficult for them to introduce more interactivity into the framework they have built.

What is there not to like? Since I am very much in favour of the Economist's app these hesitations or questions, are not intended to be dismissive of what they have achieved:

The Economist app is what I would call a good 'ebook' style of digital edition. The format and design quality of the original publication is mostly lost. Page numbers, and paginated format has gone. The print ads have gone (if I want to apply to be Director General of the World Water Council I will need to go to the print edition). The internal cross references are also gone, and that matters. Furthermore, the user no longer has a simple equivalence between the print edition and the digital edition. This dissonance imposes a bigger cognitive overhead than is generally accepted.
There is as yet no search and no archive, one guesses that these features will be added. Perhaps they should really be there already.
The navigation possibilities with the app are not as rich as in many other magazine apps. The hierarchical order of the magazine has been preserved and can be rapidly flipped, but I was looking for a 'scrubber bar', to be found in most magazine apps, or a 'page flow' widget such as is found in Exact Editions apps.
The Economist's ebook style solution works well for the Economist (which is a more text heavy 'magazine' than most). But I doubt that the same process will work for a very heavily illustrated and page-beautiful magazine. The Economist calls itself a 'newspaper' and I feel that its app solution is better suited to a serious newspaper than to the majority of magazines, where considered layout and clever illustration is a key element in the pleasure of the reading experience.
Furthermore the Economist does not have the benefit of being a platform solution. The Economist is a big enough and a good enough magazine to contemplate building its own solution, but many advantages will come from working with a raft of similarly designed offerings. For most magazines that is an important consideration.
Although, I applaud the decision not to launch with many multimedia bells and interactive whistles, the digital magazine is very short of linkage. Linkage to the web and linkage to other information resources that matter to readers. The Economist app will be better, much better, when there is more.

The Economist have produced a good solution for their loyal, influential, and large readership. They have also shown the magazine industry that developing a solution for your existing subscribers is an important first step. They have not yet shown how great an iPad magazine could be, but those steps are in the future and they have made a good start. Rival publishers should take note and take stock.

Apple's Next Announcement: Android Compatibility?

2010-11-16T17:20:00.005Z

It seems as though the Apple announcement about the availability of Beatles music via iTunes was not such an earth-shaker. Fred Wilson's tweet was the best riposte that I have seen so far ("I've had the Beatles on iTunes since I bought all of their CDs and ripped them back in 2001 #muchadoaboutnothing" tweets Fred).

But here is an announcement that really would surprise the digerati: Just suppose, Apple decides to offer the iTunes app store via Android?

I guess most experts would dismiss this out of hand. Is it not the point of iTunes and the app store that it gives users and potential purchasers a compelling reason to purchase Apple hardware not the devices that come from other manufacturers? Surely Steve Jobs would never want to do this? Wouldn't putting iTunes on Android be a way of endorsing the competing Android standard? Surely Google would never allow that?

But before we dismiss the idea, give it some consideration:

The prospect that Google might ban an iOS4 emulation environment for Android would surely, in and of itself, be enough to encourage Apple to produce one. Google would lose its moral high-ground if it pulled such a trick.
Apple would surely sue anyone who built a 'clean room' iOS4 environment for Android, but that doesn't mean that Apple could not choose to do that directly. Apple has a choice as to how to play this issue of 'standards' and 'fragmentation. It would be sweetly ironic if Apple brought the Apple standards of e-commerce and app regulation to the small Apple-blessed part of the Android spectrum, letting the rest of the Android world hang on to the devils and dangers of unregulated experimentation.
Apple may not want to appear to endorse Android at this stage, but as Android approaches a degree of maturity Apple will be more interested in 'managing', 'stabilising' and 'participating' in the evolution of standards and expectations that are being set by the non-Apple universe. Apple could exert considerable influence in this way if there is a large library of iOS-compatible apps running through Android.
Apple is capable of using the 'embrace to extend' strategy beloved of Bill Gates. Remember how many observers (including many music publishers) were surprised when iTunes for Windows appeared in 2003 and the way in which this step re-inforced Apple's position as the primary avenue for digital music sales.
When Apple's music and media goes to the cloud, then there will be little reason for Apple not to offer its music service through the Android eco-system. If the music and the media properties are positioned as cross-platform, why not make the same choice for the apps environment.
Android manufacturers and designers would love to inherit the wealth of apps available for iOS4. There would be a bargain to be struck if Apple were willing to license its environment to particular manufacturers or network operators. Bargains being struck means that Apple gains leverage and position.
Apple will gain additional software revenues through its 30% tariff on any app sales through the Android environment. Concurrently providing a direct Android solution for its committed developers would be a way of keeping the lead that Apple already has in the developer community. It might postpone the time when Apple's developers give equal or greater weight to the Android platform. As the market for apps matures, the percentage of Apple's profits that is coming from e-commerce will increase and the attractiveness of revenues from an Android-compatible market will increase.
It is unlikely that any Android device manufacturer could produce a device that completely matches the specification of the iPhone, still less the iPad, in every particular. Some apps will not travel outside iOS4. The Ocarina app for example might not seamlessly translate to the best Android phone solutions, what with the differences in microphone positioning and function. But Apple will like that, complete inter-operation across the board, might be too much of a threat.
Apple could decide to run an iOS emulation environment across the Android phone environment, so iPhone apps cross over and iPad apps do not. Keeping iPad apps restricted to the iPad hardware whilst the iPhone apps are allowed out. Again, Apple has choices and can play this game of extension and standardisation in ways that suit Apple and its customers and developers. Google's 'hands off' position on Android begins to look a bit more like a 'hands tied' stance.
That Apple have not done this so far, is absolutely no guarantee that they might not be inclined to do it in the future.

There may be some element of the Android and iOS4 licensing that means that such a direct app cross compatibility cannot happen, (if so I am not sure what this road block could be). But if it is a possible development, then I am sure that Apple and Google will have done a bit of 'what-iffing' to consider the potential outcomes from such a move.

How will we be Reading Magazines in 2020?

2010-11-16T15:17:00.002Z

We have been informally polling readers of this blog to find out how we think magazines will be read in ten years time (you may still enter the poll here). We offered eleven different options for magazine reading a decade from now. According to those who have completed the magazine poll these are the likeliest options:

On a tablet (something like the iPad)
In print on paper delivered via physical distribution
On an e-ink device (something like the Kindle but with colour)
On a device or medium unlike any of the others in this list

At the bottom of the list

From an image projected to a surface by a mobile phone (or something like that)
On heads-up interactive goggles
On silicon brain inplants

I guess we only put 'silicon brain inplants' in the hope of attracting the science fiction audience, but I am a bit surprised that 'On a device or medium unlike any others in this list' did not climb higher than the number 4 slot it now occupies. At the beginning of this year, Apple's iPad was still an unknown quantity, quite possibly a huge flop in the making; and yet now 9 months later, for many people it looks like the most likely way in which magazines will be read in the next decade. Surely there is a chance that something still better, and quite unheralded, may come along?

Well our sample of respondents does not think so, and this very same sample also thinks that it is very possible that the printed paper magazine will still be up there contesting the number one spot with the iPad or its successor of 2020.

We constructed this poll because we thought it might throw up some data that we should consider at our private (invitation only -- and I am afraid they have now all gone) Roundtable to discuss the current state of digital magazines at the British Library on December 1st. The theme of the Roundtable is: Bringing it all together: iPads, online and print; So we probably guessed right in putting iPads and other Tablets as the first of our themed discussions for the roundtable. These seem to be some of the tablet-related issues that may be addressed by our panelists on the day:

Are tablets now defining the format for digital magazines in the future?
Is it a problem that Apple makes by far the coolest device.
Will there be lots of tablet platforms? Apple, Android et al (this begins to look complicated!)
And what about mobile phones? Distinct or v different opportunities?
Can magazines sell/distribute digitally direct? Or do they need to go via an iTunes or a platform?

Magazine Publishers and Horse Dentistry

2010-11-12T13:41:00.003Z

It seems that every other day brings a new bout of moaning about the limitations of the Apple iPad system as a digital magazine platform.

But are these complaints justified, or is it really an indication that magazine publishers are both missing the bus and looking a gift horse in the mouth? The latest piece of mis-guided bleating comes in an otherwise sensible article from Damon Kiesow in Poynter Online. He says:

What publishers and consumers need from Apple is a real digital newsstand, which would allow:
One-stop shopping for multiple publications
The ability to buy a single issue or subscribe
Capability to connect print and tablet subscriptions, including any package discounts
A central location to access purchased or downloaded publications
Sales via iTunes or a publisher's own circulation system, with royalties adjusted appropriately
Damon Kiesow 3 strategies emerge for charging for iPad publications

These sound like reasonable requirements. But the plain fact is that iTunes and the app store pretty much does all that right now. Let us take them one at a time: (1) iTunes is a one stop shop for lots of publications, it is hardly Apple's fault if plenty of magazines have not ventured in there yet. Even so, the iTunes news stand is better stocked with newspapers and magazines than any other digital news stand. And getting stronger. (2) (the ability to buy single issues or subscriptions) as Kiesow acknowledges earlier in the article Apple through the iTunes app store allows publishers to sell single issues or subscriptions (at Exact Editions we enable publishers to sell 30 day subscriptions to their magazines which is not the same as selling single issues; but there are plenty of publishers and platforms selling single issues through iTunes) (3) (connecting print subscribers to apps) but as Kiesow recognises there is no obstacle to a magazine publisher connecting its existing paid subscribers for free to the app which is being sold by Apple in iTunes (he cites the experience of People magazine, but at Exact Editions we are encouraging all magazine publishers to do this: connect your existing subscribers for free through the branded app which you are offering in iTunes. This is completely within the letter and spirit of Apple's rules and guidance). (4) is completely baffling, because iTunes so obviously just is that; iTunes is a central location for e-commerce, for storing magazine issues and for providing users with access to archives. How would or could an Apple kiosk do that better? (5) (a system for 'sharing royalties') is already in place and Apple has the rather marvellous adjustment that a publisher can choose how to play the game, the publisher can either sell via iTunes in which case he will find that Apple have taken a 30% commission from the sale, or he can choose to give the magazine away, or indeed provide free access to subscribers from whom the publisher has charged an annual or monthly subscription (outside the Apple system). Not only can publishers connect customers who they have acquired via the iTunes system to their existing deals and print-based offers and incentives, but they can do that without paying Apple a cent for the business which is happening outside iTunes. Apple is being a lot more 'open' about this than will be some of the competing digital news-stands that are coming along.

All this should be known to the complainers in the magazine industry and I think that the real source of the griping, grumbling and equine mouth inspections is elsewhere. Perhaps these are the real problems:

iTunes is not a complete digital back-end system for magazines. Publishers are used to having a specialist distribution house handle all complications to do with physical distribution and maybe they are hoping that Apple would be able to do this in the digital sphere and look after the magazine publishers special interests in the way that fulfillment houses have done. Once this is formally stated the idea is ludicrous, but some magazine experts talk as though its Apple's job to deliver, in full working order, the digital back-end of their industry. This is perhaps the burden of Kiesow's request that the putative Apple kiosk should 'connect' the print and tablet subscription ('including any packet discounts' -- I like that requirement: consider the extreme complications that could arise from blending infinite varieties of print/digital discount packages the magazine publishers will dream up; that modest requirement will keep Apple's engineers busy for years). But Apple is not in the magazine or newspaper business and it is not their job to build a system which solves the transitional dislocations of those industries.
iTunes does not have an exclusive magazines-only zone. Like the iBooks store. This is true, but it may be a good thing for the magazine industry that Apple does not have a required format and delivery solution for magazines. The jury is still out on the iBooks solution, and perhaps Apple is being very wise in waiting to see how digital magazine delivery evolves. Why should they plump for a possibly half-baked digital standard when we still don't know what the right digital format for magazines is? Certainly Apple has not solved all the problems of digital magazine production, the result is that there is a rather interesting ferment of development and innovation. If Apple had developed a pre-packaged solution (cf Amazon and their so far half-hearted and not very good magazine delivery) we would not be witnessing these exciting experiments within iTunes.
Apple is not being friendly enough to the existing magazine business. There have been a chorus of complaints about Apple not providing sufficient information on app usage to developers, or to magazine publishers who produce apps. The magazine industry is used to having its own tame auditing service (ABC and BPA being two of the biggest industry consortia providing such information), specifically geared to the magazine industry and its advertising customers. Apple has shown no signs of opening up its books to ABC or the BPA and is frankly unlikely to do so. Why should Apple be unmovable in this respect? Primarily because the business of auditing advertisements has moved on, and there is now no conceivable rationale for having an advertising metric which is exclusively tailored to the magazine industry. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook etc will be the advertising networks that count in the future and they will all be trans-media (web, TV, film, digital publishing, social networking all in a big mix). Since 2005, the boom in digital advertising has shown that measurement and auditing is so closely tied to implementation and operations that it is naive to seek to recreate a magazine-specific analysis or distribution solution. Digital magazines will need advertising but they will need to work with digital solutions and digital metrics which are not narrowly specific to one industry or one media type. It certainly is not in Apple's game-plan or in their interest to gerrymander a magazine specific solution for reporting and measuring usage on magazine apps.
It is hard to sell magazine subscriptions through iTunes. Kiesow correctly points out that Apple enables publishers to sell subscriptions, and there has never been a problem about doing this (we have been doing so at Exact Editions since the iPad launched). In contrast to Android, Apple in iOS 4 and iTunes actually has a rather effective way of providing in-app purchases of subscriptions. The problem for the magazine industry is rather different: iTunes customers are hugely biased towards buying stuff that is at the low end of the iTunes price matrix. It is very hard to sell annual subscriptions to magazines through iTunes at the prices that magazine publishers would like to charge (and perhaps need to charge). This is a real problem but it really is not Apple's fault, and they can hardly blamed for this supposed shortcoming. iTunes works very well for low-priced transactions. But it is hard to see annual magazine subscriptions through iTunes flowing off the digital shelves at prices of £20/$30 and upwards. So it will be interesting to see how Newsweek fares with its experiment of selling 6 months subscriptions through iTunes at $14.99. iTunes apps are pretty 'frictionless' when priced at $0.99 or $1.99. But it is much harder to sell subscriptions at $9.99 or $19.99. Perhaps Newsweek will start a trend, or maybe magazine publishers should stick with the scheme of using iTunes for customer acquisition and then upselling them to an annual subscription purchased via a credit card direct from the publisher (where consumers are happier to spend $9.99 or $29.99, for a publication they really value).

The conclusion that one should draw from all these niggling gripes about Apple is this: publishers do not realise how lucky they are, magazine gurus should stop complaining and use the Apple service for the tasks it performs so well, and get on and sell or freely provide (in the case of existing subscribers) access to the magazines that they can now deliver digitally or in print. When you think about it, it clearly would not be a good idea for the magazine industry if Apple did provide a complete and end-to-end solution for digital magazine distribution. Magazine publishers need Android, and Windows 7 and pure web distribution to preserve their independence and choice. They need alternative channels for magazine distribution not just an iTunes route to market. Magazines, not Apple need to control and manage their own digital distribution, and if Apple were suddenly to produce a comprehensive digital magazine service, this would be dangerously sedative if it stopped innovative publishers from looking to alternative digital distribution routes and technologies.

Adobe's Magazine Solution for the iPad

2010-11-05T08:01:00.006Z

Here is an informative video podcast from the Adobe evangelist Terry White: "Adobe Digital Publishing to the iPad: A First Look"

It is a 15 minute overview of the solution for building iPad apps that Adobe is building for magazine publishers. As you might expect there are some neat software solutions in the package, especially notable are tools for placing video in a document page, for interactive/panoramic 3D photos and model rotation, and for full integration of a web page in the document. Cool stuff.

But the thing that really struck me with this overview is that Adobe is taking a big, and surely quite a risky bet on the way that we are going to read and interact with digital magazines. Adobe have decided that the information architecture for the digital magazine will be very different from the conventional paginated, linear, sequence of the printed magazine. The Adobe solution is entirely built on the proposition that digital magazines should have a matrix style of layout, with pages arrayed left/right in the horizontal plane, and also up/down in vertical 'stacks'. This concept seems quite natural for a 'story', or a set of photos, or a collection of cartoons, which can be read in the vertical 'drop' whilst the ordered contents of the magazine move along in the horizontal mode. This sounds like a logical way of planning a magazine issue and there is apparently no reason why a digital magazine should not be so arranged. We have seen quite a few early magazine apps already employing this, washing-line, information layout, by no means all of them from Adobe's developers. I am not convinced that users really want to read magazines in this way; but if they do, Adobe will be in a very strong position because they now have a direct set of tools for bridging magazine publishers from the InDesign package with which most high-end magazines are now produced, directly to a file format and an information architecture for the iPad to which Adobe are building an extensive and complementary set of tools.

On the other hand, there are several reasons for thinking that this big bet on the next stage for magazine architecture could be the wrong way for magazines to go digital. Here are some:

Each magazine issue has to be precisely designed for the iPad, perhaps page by page, with adjustments and tweaks. The automatic layout tools in the package cannot guarantee a 100% result. This means more work in the publishing/design stage.
Twice over. The magazine on the iPad should really have two sets of pages adjusted for the different aspect ratios of the landscape and the portrait mode of viewing the device. Terry White suggests in the video that the digital magazine could be designed for presentation in only one orientation, but that really is not a good option for the iPad. Magazine apps, or even ordinary documents, that can only be read in landscape or portrait mode on the iPad feel very lame.
And then the magazine has to be re-engineered again for the iPhone (if that is supported) which has different proportions to the iPad.
Redesigned, or re-tweaked, many times more (it is probably much worse than you think) since magazine publishers will need to review and tweak the magazine layouts again (twice) for as many alternative devices as will require magazine apps with different aspect ratios.
Multi-page, multi-column, layouts work better in the horizontal plane than when read in vertical scroll mode. What do we do about that if the whole of the magazine is being matricised?
This bi-valent, matrix, layout is arguably not a good solution for magazine users, because the arrangement of a digital magazine not only changes in potentially confusing ways as one switches a device between landscape and portrait mode, but it also confuses the reader as one transitions between different devices, or from print to digital. The overhead imposed on a publisher in needing to refine designs for different versions on different screens, is bad enough, but it is outweighed by the cognitive 'overhead' for users who need to relearn how to navigate and understand a magazine which is being presented in different ways on different devices.
Are readers going to be happy with a reading style for magazines which is completely different from that used in reading newspapers or books? Are digital books meant to work as well in matrix mode as magazines? What about newspapers?
Will this matrix layout work efficiently when you have magazine apps, book apps and newspaper apps on the same screen; for there will soon be bigger touch screens? Or when we wish to consult two issues of the one magazine? Matrices hog space in both dimensions.

Adobe need to have an app-building solution for the magazine industry where their software is an essential and highly regarded creative tool, but there are reasons for doubting the generality and flexibility of their current approach. If there are a score or more Android hardware devices in the next year -- three, four, or five of which achieve some level of consumer acceptance -- Adobe's decision to couple the design of a digital magazine so closely to the screen size and the hardware spec. will be sorely tested.

Khoi Vinh's Indigestion and the iPad

2010-11-02T07:12:00.006Z

Khoi Vinh published, last week, a damning and severe critique of the current state of magazine iPad apps. Here are a couple of extracts:

My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.....

Take the recent release of the iPad app version of The New Yorker. Please. I downloaded an issue a few weeks ago and greatly enjoyed every single word of every article that I read (whatever the product experience, the journalism remains a notch above). But I hated everything else about it: it took way too long to download, cost me US$4.99 over and above the annual subscription fee that I already pay for the print edition and, as a content experience, was an impediment to my normal content consumption habits. I couldn’t email, blog, tweet or quote from the app, to say nothing of linking away to other sources — for magazine apps like these, the world outside is just a rumor to be denied. (My iPad Magazine Stand Khoi Vinh)

In fact Khoi is pretty gloomy about the prospects for the magazine industry:

The fact of the matter is that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in, that is making less and less sense as we forge further into this century, and that makes almost no sense on a tablet. As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all — a problem that’s abetted and exacerbated by the full-screen, single-window posture of all iPad software. (My iPad Magazine Stand Khoi Vinh)

There are some excellent responses to Khoi's depressing account of the magazine industry prospects in the comments which his blog has attracted. The best full-out response that I have seen comes from Mike Turro.

Without a doubt the future of magazines–both as an industry and a publishing framework–is uncertain. However, to write off the reading experience provided by a good magazine as a relic of the print world is extremely shortsighted. When Khoi offhandedly and anecdotally declares “that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in” he is assuming (though he does give a slight nod to the contrary) that the current use patterns of the web’s most emphatic users (also iPad’s early adopters) are an indication of the eventual use patterns of the population of tablet users as a whole. Khoi is certainly a smart guy, but it may be a bit early to make that call. (@Khoi Vinh's Beautiful Mistake Mike Turro)

Mike Turro calls Khoi Vinh's mistake, "beautiful". I am not so sure about that -- it could be a blunder, attributable to his indigestion through consuming too many unripe apps. It seems to me that 'magazine designers' are particularly excited and in many cases particularly disappointed by the possibilities of the iPad, because they have been thinking of the iPad as a new medium and a new design challenge for their typographic and layout skills, as though magazine publishers could own or control the device the way they control paper stocks and printed colour choices. But the iPad is not the medium but a digital device. Magazines will grow and change as they work out the potential of digital media, but they start this adventure the way they are. That is nothing to be ashamed or worried about. The excellence and remarkable quality of the iPad is that it is really a very 'neutral' digital enabler and any virtual, digital, media object should be able to thrive in its embrace. We should not be designing magazines (newspapers, books, films) for the iPad but for their audience, an audience that is increasingly digital and which will now have Galaxies and Droids as well as iPhones and iPads, and this means we should now be designing digital resources which can gracefully leap into different devices and across various media platforms. So if there is a reason for sticking to proven formats (pages, paragraphs, layouts, inserts, wrap-arounds, even belly bands and overlays, indices, cartoons, charts and tables) this is not because these formats are inherently digital, they are not, the reason for sticking with them is that the users/readers understand and enjoy this traditional 'grammar' of type. Too many of the magazine apps that we have seen for the iPad have been designed and engineered precisely for the iPad in a way that will make them impossible to deliver for the iPhone or the successful Android tablet which will surely appear in the next 6/9 months. A publisher or designer who crafts their magazine app specifically for the iPad is building in obsolescence and writing in tablets of stone a message that should be digital, transferable and evolving. The challenge which the iPad and other digital manifestations of the magazine will present to the publisher is this: how can we make a magazine that works well in print and in a range virtual manifestation on tablets, games consols and many other digital gadgets that we have not even considered yet? As Khoi Vinh and Mike Turro both recognise, this is very early days for the iPad and for tablet apps.

The requirement that a magazine should be consistent across a variety of print and digital manifestations certainly does not mean that it should be the same in those 'editions'; if, to take a specific and local example, you look at Exact Editions apps you will find that there is stuff that you can do with them on the web that you cannot do with them on the iPad, there is stuff that you can do with them on the iPhone that you cannot do on the iPad and there is plenty that you can do with them on the iPad that you cannot do on the web versions. The various digital forms of a magazine will be different from each other but they should have a common core; and a clever designer will make sure that a 21st Century magazine not only looks good in print, but also in its many digital variants where additional layers of interactivity and sociability will certainly accrue. I have been struck by the insistence with which the readers who subscribe to the magazine we support with apps and digital editions want the app to reflect and to represent the magazine that they know. They expect it to be on the iPad and they do not expect it to be something completely different from the magazine they may have been loyally reading for a decade and more.

Gramophone

2010-11-01T06:28:00.004Z

Gram ophone (The world's authority on classical music since 1923) joined the Exact Editions platform last week. The free trial issue has lots of intriguing articles:

an interview with Claudio Abbado
an article on Emily Dickinson and music
lots of live links to help you plan your listening/travelling (this is the August issue!)

If you have a subscription and are lucky enough to have an iPad, you will want to read it on that device, with the Exactly app from Exact Editions.

Will Magazine Reading Be More Social?

2010-10-28T15:14:00.005+01:00

Exact Editions is running a public poll to find out how we think that magazines will be read in ten years time. If you haven't yet voted on the issue, please do so.

The sample voting is still small, but I am not surprised that the leading candidate in this race is:

The tablet (something like the iPad)

This is beating 'print on paper delivered via physical distribution'. A bit lower down the list is the option for genuine 'don't knows': ' a device or medium unlike any of the others in this list '.

While I am not surprised that the iPad (or something like it) is the most favoured choice for our most preferred magazine reading medium for 2020, I would have been very much surprised if you had told me 18 months ago that this tablet-type solution would now seem to be the most promising future vehicle for magazines. The iPad is astonishingly successful, but it is only 7 months old. The way that a magazine app should work on the iPad is still very much up for grabs. The way that users will want to use digital magazines is not a settled issue. There is a lot to be done! There are strategic choices to be made!

Exact Editions is running this poll as travaux preparatoires for a round-table forum that we are hosting for movers and shakers in the magazine/technology space in London, on 1 December. One of the key themes for discussion on that day will be 'iPads and other tablets', but another theme, the fifth and last that we have listed for the round-table is 'the social graph'. We are pondering the relevance of the social graph to the shifting technical base of the magazine industry as it goes digital: Few magazines/newspapers have really tapped the social graph (yet). Are Facebook and Twitter the real new frontier for digital publications? Although the social graph and the social context of digital magazines is not yet the top item on most digital magazine executives 'worry list' I cannot help but wonder whether the issue of magazine format and delivery is intimately bound up with the question of how magazines can be most easily integrated into the social graph. If the tablet, an iPad or its equivalent, becomes the primary way in which we interact with our closest, but absent, friends and our wider web acquaintance, then the magazine publishers who are now gearing their publications for tabletisation or iPad delivery will have made a prescient move.

The iPad is a surprisingly social device, more so than a notebook computer or a mobile phone. I do not think that it is just the novelty element in the iPad that makes me much more willing to pass mine around -- much more willing to pass it around than to pass around my mobile phone. The momentary, or episodic, lendability of the iPad may have something to do with its 'touchability' which is itself of social value in a small group, and magazine publishers will be reassured to know that this 'physical lendability' is very limited. Sharing a magazine subscription via the same iPad is feasible for mother and daughter, or husband and wife, but not really practical amongst a wider group of friends.

How Will We Read Magazines?

2010-10-22T14:53:00.005+01:00

We are running an on-line poll on the way that magazines are to be read 10 years from now.

If this is an issue on which you have views, go and cast your vote. Remember we are not asking how magazines will be read next year, or in 2012, but in 2020! These are the choices:

In print on paper delivered via physical distribution
In print on paper delivered by home printer device
On a tablet (something like the iPad)
On an e-ink device (something like the Kindle but with colour)
On a mobile phone (something like the iPhone/Blackberry)
From an image projected to a surface by a mobile phone (or something like that)
On a personal computer (the equivalent of today's PC or Notebook)
On a TV-type of home entertainment system
On silicon brain inplants
On heads-up interactive goggles
On a device or medium unlike any of the others in this list

Oh yes, there is an incentive for completing the poll: you will be able to see how the votes of others have been cast (totals only -- this is an anonymous poll), and you will be able to come back in and check the results again later. But we will also blog about the result here next week.

One reason we decided to construct this poll: at Exact Editions we are running a round-table discussion for 50/60 leaders and key decision-takers in the magazine business, the round-table to be held at The British Library, on December 1st. The focus of the discussion is very much on the promise and potential from current digital technologies (our theme is "Bringing it all together: iPads, Online and Magazines in print"), and in preparing our themes and thoughts for this event we thought it would be useful to consult the wisdom of crowds on the imponderables and the various sea changes which confront the industry.

Although it is very hard to be right about this kind of issue, it is of fundamental importance to the industry and its decision takers. Which is one reason why the magazine business has shown so much interest in the potential and performance of the iPad as a magazine reading device.

Universal Subscriptions

2010-10-19T17:35:00.002+01:00

Exact Editions has always worked to help publishers offer digital editions to existing print subscribers. Our first contract made provision for what we called 'Combined Subscriptions' a route whereby a publisher could add the digital sub for any of his print subscribers. In practice, this never worked too well (uptake was slight in most cases). For quite a few reasons:

Our web service is designed to handle annual subs (ie 12 months) and it was very difficult to build in more flexible alternatives without confusing the customer experience in the e-store. Many consumer magazines rely on quarterly subscriptions that are renewed 'automatically' via direct debits from the customer's bank.
Most consumer magazine publishers (back in the day) felt that they ought to charge a premium for providing print+digital subscriptions. And this has NEVER worked -- basically because consumers do not see why they should be paying a premium for buying the magazine twice .... To the consumer it seems obvious that the subscription is for 'one thing', the magazine in two different forms, no way would a rational agent pay twice for the same thing. To the publisher it seems obvious that the 'consumer' ought to be paying more for getting a better service. I do not know who is right, morally, in this dispute. In practice, however, the consumer is right. The consumer is always right, and purchasers will not pay for what we used to call 'combined subscriptions'.
We used to call them that, but we now call them 'universal subscriptions'. This is a term that we picked up yesterday from Colin Crawford. And 'universal' is clearly a better term, because 'combined subscriptions' sounds ugly and complicated. 'Universal subscription' connotes a simpler, a more open-ended and a more comprehensive solution to which existing print subscribers, the lifeblood of most magazines, deserve full access. But the Exact Editions service is more universal than 'combined' because it allows a publisher to offer the print subscribers, access through the web, through the iPhone, and the iPad. One might expect also to add Android access to that range of universal access.
The 'universal subscription' proposition is clearly better for the consumer than the prospect of paying extra for access to a digital or an iPad edition, but it is really much better also for the publisher, because the publisher or his distribution arm maintains control of the subscriber list. We can only guarantee to provide publishers with a reliable universal service if the Exact Editions platform can verify subscription status in real time. The big consumer publishers who have been nagging Apple with the demand that they have access to customer data have been pushing at the wrong door. Much better to retain control of the customer data on their own side, and then enable suitably qualified users of Apple iOS devices (ie existing subscribers) to access the accounts which are maintained at the publisher end. Some shrewd newspaper publishers are already using this approach (WSJ, Financial Times).

There is one odd thing about the evolution of the Exact Editions service towards supporting publishers with the provision of 'universal subscriptions': it was the arrival of the iPad which made this all seem like the right way to go. The advent of iPad apps and the need to provide existing subscribers with access to iPad apps for their own magazine subscriptions has been the catalyst which is encouraging many publishers also to provide access to web-based digital magazines. The iPad is in some ways a disruptive and innovative move towards a new idea of the digital magazine, but its introduction has helped publishers and consumers to realise that there is value in the simple proposition of a digital edition of the existing print publication.

Nicholas Negroponte: Books will be Gone by 2015

2010-10-19T14:19:00.005+01:00

Nicholas Negroponte, interviewed on CNN, makes the bold claim that (physical) books will be gone by 2015. I am supposing that he means more precisely that at some point in the near future, books will be more read and browsed as digital resources than as print on paper objects. To sharpen up the prediction, in which year will we see the switch over point, when more books are read on a digital medium than in Gutenberg-style print on paper? Will the big switch-over from physical books to digital books take place in:

2014 Negroponte is being cautious
2015 Negroponte is spot on
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022 Hard to see this far out
Later Negroponte is talking through his hat!

To take part in this poll go here (Condorcet Internet Voting Service). Results and some comments will be posted on this blog at a later date.

SXSWorld Magazine as a Free App

2010-10-14T05:22:00.014+01:00

SXSW World is the second magazine to use the Exact Editions iPhone/iPad app platform for free distribution. Dazed & Confused was the first.

SXSW World, as you have probably guessed, is the magazine from the organizers of the wildly successful music/film/technology/culture fest held each spring in San Antonio, Texas. With an iPad or an iPhone you can now read this quarterly magazine for free. In this blog we are going to use it to pin-point the basic controls that are to be found on all the Exact Editions apps, but if you have an iPad we strongly recommend that you go and pick the app up and play with it yourself. Try all the orientations, all five free issues, and all the functions on the app's toolbars. Any written or verbal explanation is a poor substitute for the experience of driving the app yourself. But, as second best, we provide some screenshots with explanation:

The Front Cover. Note each of the page numbers on the cover have a green spot, and a click on the highlighted number takes the reader straight to the referenced page. Note also the tool bars at the top and bottom of the window. These tool bars (which disappear after a few moments, but can be recalled by touching the screen) carry the main navigation controls. The Exact Editions apps are designed to give all available space to page images of the magazines and books carried, but the user will soon find out that all the software controls for the app are readily available in the unobtrusive tool bars. Starting at the bottom left:

This triple-decker sandwich icon, is in fact a table of contents icon, it takes the reader to the main table of contents in the magazine (or book), as here:

Again, we draw attention to the interactive links highlighted in green on the digital table of contents page (zip codes, email addresses, urls, as well as page numbers are highlighted). The iPhone, since it is a phone, will also present the phone numbers as highlighted for click-to-call. The grouping of three icons at the middle of the tool bar at the bottom of the window are for moving through pages.

Naturally the arrows are for moving right or left, and the left arrow is 'greyed out' in this snap because we are at the front cover of the magazine. Sorry there is no way that you can go left here! The open book, or concertina, icon in the middle is perhaps the most powerful of the navigational tools in the set we offer. It opens up a quick browse view of the magazine, which we call 'PageFlow', which is in some ways similar to the iTunes 'Coverflow', but rather more 'page-y', since it shows pages in recto and verso views as you move through the publication (naturally, by sliding your finger over the stream of pages).

PageFlow is so blisteringly fast on the iPad that this soon becomes a very valuable way of controlling and navigating the magazine as a virtual object. The slider bar with its bead (to be picked up and slid along the bar) is streaming through the same underlying PageFlow, but even more quickly, and this is especially useful for really large volumes.

The thumbnails used for PageFlow are small, but with an illustrated magazine they contain sufficient information to be highly useful, especially for finding again pages that you may already have browsed.When you have slid to the right part of the magazine, two pages will be open in the 'valley' of the page images. You tap the left hand page, to go to the left hand of the opening, tapping on the right hand page takes you to the other one. If your sliding navigation has 'overshot' the mark you can touch any of the other visible pages in the sequence to go direct to that page. Seven pages on each side of the opening are immediately available. As it happens we want this page:

This image can be expanded (spreading fingers) to a higher resolution:

I am not sure that we need to see Matthew Vaughn in higher resolution than that!

The last icon on the bottom tool bar is to alternate between double page and single page views.

Which takes you to the double page spread:

We have only covered the controls that are available from the bottom tool-bar. Next time we shall cover the set of controls that come at the top of the page.

The iPad is Magical but it is not a Mystery

2010-10-12T08:40:00.006+01:00

Dan Bricklin has an excellent blog post about the extraordinary but hard-to-define magic of the iPad. It is one of those rare blog postings that one would like to offer to every one who thinks about the way apps are working on the iPad and what the iPad can do for publishers and readers. Here is a chunk of Bricklin-wisdom:

The way I see it, what makes the iPad magical is that with it we are the magician. The iPad is our own specially marked desk of cards. We now have power to easily and confidently control things that we previously did not. It is a very empowering tool.

With the iPad, we are the masterful magician, not the audience watching in awe.

Why is this so? Isn't the iPad just a big iPod touch?

As I pointed out in my first iPad essay, the iPad gives us more screen space than a pocket device like an iPhone to expose control points and to make the operation of those controls clear and easily accessible with fingers. The iPhone-size screens have room for mainly one major UI-control cluster plus a small toolbar or two -- when the keyboard is up there isn't room for almost anything other than a small view into what you are entering with little context. The iPad does not have such severe limitations, having room for many controls and explanatory information. You can sit back in your seat (like Steve Jobs at the announcement) and comfortably control the device, unlike an iPhone where you pull it to your face and squint to see the controls (especially if you are over 40 like I am).

The use of touch and the application of the capabilities of the graphics processor to give the illusion of smooth flowing, directly manipulated operations enhances the feeling of control. The larger screen in a still-portable flat form factor makes it comfortable for multiple individuals to watch as any one of them controls changes -- public magic, not private exploration. The wireless connectivity quickly brings requested data in on demand. The large screen has enough room to give you context and depth of information from that data. Is the Apple iPad really "magical"?

This is helpful and enlightening because much of the magic in the iPad is a result of its simplicity and the way in which its form factor (mid-size, touchability and screen resolution) encourage a direct and human relationship between the object as instrument or display, and the reading or viewing subject as mover and navigator. The success and the magic of the iPad is both subtle and simple, but it is not a mystery, because the way it works is very simple but with a high degree of user control and involvement. Bricklin goes on to note that the iBooks app is only 'so so' in the magic stakes.

Likewise, I've found some other reading applications, like magazines, that look really nice, and seem to give you control, but that fail to deliver enough when you try reading and perusing the publication -- you feel hampered and long for bound paper that you can skim through and with which you can easily flip back and forth with the right feel. As they say, "God is in the details" -- details of implementation are important and can distinguish the winners from the losers.

To me, a computer is a tool. You use tools to get things done. In the case of the iPad, you can use it to read, to write, to watch, to search, to communicate, to play, and more. The challenge in app design is to give the user a feeling of appropriate and comfortable control.

Bricklin does not say this, but I think that many of the newly re-designed magazine apps have been making a grave mistake by supposing that users (or shall we call them 'readers') want something very different from the print magazine that they already know. Most subscribers and readers like the magazine that they subscribe to or read because it is the way it is. For a loyal reader of The Spectator, or The Wire, the digital edition of the magazine, whether on the iPad or on Android, or the web, has to be recognizably the magazine to which the customer is a loyal subscriber. Of course things will change, and they should change, when the magazine becomes digital. But breaking the mould, and starting again, is a mistake because offering readers a new 'matrix' organisation for the magazine framework that they already know is really taking control away from the reader. We know the way a magazine works and we understand that it can be quickly flipped through with sideways skimming. Asking or expecting the reader to navigate with new radically new conventions is likely to puzzle and distract. Similar thoughts apply to multi-media. It is great, indeed magical, that magazines can now incorporate sound and video in their digital manifestations. But magazines are not TV programmes or chat shows. After a bout of early enthusiasm and exuberance, I suspect that magazine publishers and editors are learning that video and hypermedia devices should be used sparingly and subtly in iPad editions. As Dan Bricklin puts it "The challenge in app design is to give the user a feeling of appropriate and comfortable control." You don't do that by ignoring all the subtleties and 'affordances' in the wonderful print objects which are the starting point for creating magical, digital, magazine apps.

Do you Design for the Device or for a Virtual Page?

2010-10-11T03:59:00.003+01:00

We are hearing reports of what may be the first significant competitor for Apple's iPad: the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Here are some comparative notes from Tim Bray (who is likely to be pre-disposed for an Android tablet and against Apple's iPad), and here is a brief overview of a Tab being put through its paces at a Trade Show by Noah from PhoneDog.

I do not know whether the Galaxy Tab is good enough to provide significant competition to the iPad, but the signs are that there will soon be a 'good enough' Android competitor for the iPad. One interesting point: it looks as though the seven inch form factor may be a significant point in favour of the Tab. Plenty of people find the iPad a bit too hefty, a bit too big. This is an area where Apple will face competition, choosing a different form factor (size and aspect ratios) is a good way of differentiating a rival product. There will be plenty of different form factors: 5", 7", 9", 11" etc.... From what we know of hardware markets and mobile opportunities such differentiation is inevitable.

What message should this be carrying to magazine and book publishers? The obvious message is simple, physical and ergonomic: your consumers will next year be carrying and unpacking devices with very different form factors and screen sizes. If you want your product/service to be readable and useful you absolutely have to factor this in to the information architecture of your magazine, or book. To redesign your magazine for each and every new form factor..... that way lies madness.

As luck would have it, I have this weekend been playing with another creditable 'home-produced' magazine app for the iPad: Esquire's new app. The result is a pretty decent magazine-like experience on the iPad with a degree of interactivity and playfulness. But it is very much of a one-off solution. It will be interesting to see whether Esquire persists in offering such an issue by issue app; an implementation which has a substantial overhead in terms of design and creative input, over and above the production and design of the print magazine. Furthermore the designers have so clearly tied their app to the iPad platform that they would need to engage in comparable investments to deliver interactive versions for the 5", 7", 11", and 12.5" platforms that will be hitting the market next year. The Esquire app, although it is designed for the iPad paradoxically shies away from even this target by being implemented purely for the portrait mode of presentation. The app doesnt swing when you swivel! To most iPad users that is going to feel very wrong.

So here is a number one rule for magazine designers: when you are planning digital implementations think about virtual pages, not about actual pages or specific aspect ratios. That way you have a chance that your precious investment in an iPad app will be adaptable to the next screen size that emerges in the Apple range, never mind Samsung, HP-Palm, or Dell. And if Samsung have hit on a good form factor, there will probably be a new format from Apple soon!

The New Yorker App: Fabulous but Flawed

2010-10-01T16:50:00.003+01:00

One of the best magazines of all time and the acme of American style, The New Yorker, this week they launched an iPad app, and it is in some respects a brilliant effort. There are some very strong aspects:

A sensational front cover by David Hockney, painted on the iPad with Brushes and with a second interactive page where you can see the way he painted it (brush strokes re-played). One might say that this is a very simple idea and a very straightforward implementation. But it is nevertheless brilliant. This will be copied many times by iPad magazine covers and digital magazine art; but perhaps never bettered.
There is a funny commercial for their new app by Jason Schwartzman (directed by Roman Coppola) and you can see Jason taking a shower with his iPad here.
The visuals in the app are mostly fabulous (we have a bevy of design quibbles, but this is very much a first effort and the designers have taken some risks) and the quality of much of the design of the magazine comes through brilliantly.
Some of the ads are astonishingly strong, especially the small ads with links -- for example try the Swan Galleries ad with its links through to catalogues for current auctions which can all be viewed with great detail from within the app. This placement gives the right kind of information-dense ad incredible 'focus' and visibility.
The cartoons are, as is to be expected, brilliant and can be viewed in place, scattered through the magazine, or together in a cartoon gallery.

We should aplaud a great first effort, and I continue to enjoy the magazine days after downloading it. The creative talent associated with The New Yorker is second to none. However, there are a few 'buts' which we notice in a spirit of friendly and constructive criticism.

First, the information design of the Condé Nast apps inherits a matrix-framework built for them by Adobe. The Wired apps were the first to show it, and it seems as though this duplicated portrait/landscape rendering of a magazine layout could become a standard Adobe packaging technique. The app produced in this way is rather 'portly' (though much smaller than the Wired apps) and it seems that The New Yorker has some reservations about the approach. We saw the Deputy Editor, Pam McCarthy, noting for All Things Digital, that the Adobe method of scrolling a long story doesn't work, “It’s pretty clear that when you have a 10,000-word story, smooth scrolling [in the vertical] is not a good option,” she says. For me, the Adobe technique of hanging each story as though they were page proofs draped on a 'washing line' through which users can navigate the magazine as a matrix, is not a good option either. Furthermore I am sure that Adobe will have to change their model of what a digital magazine is, because representing and designing a magazine in two different orientations creates more work for designers and, much worse, it creates unnecessary work for digital readers who have to learn about two slightly different digital representations of the magazine both variant in important respects from the magazine as it has been loved and learned in print. Finally, in precisely targeting the screen size and functionality of the iPad (the app is not at all available for the iPhone) Adobe seem to have created an endless design treadmill for their magazine customers who may have to produce subtly different solutions for each tablet platform. The only practical way to solve this looming problem (there will soon be many tablet formats and Android will not help by having variant app standards) is to treat the print magazine as a virtual book (if you insist a 'page turning' object) and then build interactivity on top of the virtual book. In that way a scaleable and generative solution can be delivered for a large range of reader devices. You will find more precise questions about the design solutions chosen for the app at MagCulture, but this fundamental issue of order, predictability and information architecture is the basic flaw in the Adobe method.

The second reservation, is that Condé Nast seem to be stuck in a publisher stand-off with Apple their necessary distribution partner for the iPad (no one can get an app on to the iPad without Apple approval!). Condé Nast President Bob Sauerberg as quoted by the Wall Street Journal:

"It is important to the New Yorker that we have offerings that allow long-term relationships with the consumers. Obviously, we don't have that in place for the moment with Apple. We are very keen to do that." WSJ, September 26

The astonishing thing about this comment is that Condé Nast already has a broad and a deep connection with its long-term consumers (the last time I looked it had just over 1 million of them), and it could easily enable them to access the iPad app if it adopted the strategy which the Wall Street Journal itself adopts of giving free iPad access to print and existing digital subscribers. There is no need to ask Apple's permission to do this. If Conde Nast does not switch on its loyal print subscribers -- which is perfectly within the constraints of the iTunes/Apple proposition -- it is very rich to complain about Apple not allowing the company to connect with its readers. When Sauerberg was promoted he noted

"We want our readers to engage with our brands in a variety of ways, and we feel our success will be based on being able to provide our content seamlessly across every appropriate platform that exists now and in the future. We want to take that engagement and continue to try to increase it and revalue the consumer proposition. We want to do that with our magazines and our websites and our digital applications." (Folio Magazine -- Transcending Print Q&A with Bob Sauerberg)

Fine words and correct. But where is the follow through? The iPad could be a seamless bridge to the consumer's existing subscription (well a small hump of a bridge, almost, almost, seamless). The iPad actually gives Condé Nast a very straightforward way of serving existing print subscribers and were Condé Nast to do this, they would immediately have a much stronger digital connection with many of their readers and one which in the long and the short-term will serve them much better than a relationship mediated and controlled by Apple. To argue that Apple is not letting you connect to your subscribers when you do not connect the subscribers that you already have, and for which Apple will make no charge, is simply absurd.

Apple's Segmentation and Service Integration

2010-10-01T12:12:00.007+01:00

There is a brilliant and highly perceptive article on Apple's strategy by Mark Sigal over at O'Reilly Radar. Read it all, but here is an excerpt:

In the real world of building products and attacking market opportunities, market segmentation is the process of defining and sub-dividing the aggregate, homogeneous market into addressable, targeted needs and aspirations buckets. Buckets that are in turn, thresholded by demographic, psychographic and/or budgetary constraints.

Market segmentation strategy enables a company to drive complete, unified product solutions that are harmonious with messaging, customer outreach, and channel strategies for selling and supporting customers.

In this regard, Apple's product strategy is a study in market segmentation. Versus merely trying to stuff a product, burrito-style, with as many different features as possible, they target specific user experiences, and build the product around that accordingly. Apple's segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom

Mark points out that Apple has defined and addressed these market segments (or buckets) by delivering a range of devices which have differing but powerfully complementary and mutually attractive portability, wearability, pocketability modalities. Apple has brilliantly seen that in the age of mobile computing it is highly desirable to offer your users different styles and weights in which devices may be donned, doffed, cuddled, clutched or tethered; best not to have them 'lugged' or 'humped'. The way the devices look and the way they feel matters more if you are carrying them around. Their touchability, weight, balance, their reflectivity and colour -- all these are important with tools which are becoming almost a part of our wardrobe (or at least will often be taken out of our handbag). Style becomes an aspect of function when the objects are to be worn and carried. He also provides us with a helpful diagram of the range:

Mark Sigal goes on to point out that this segmentation is complemented by highly effective integration at the level of the OS (to a degree -- making us parenthetically wonder when will iOS 4 move out towards the desktop and down towards the Nano?) and most importantly, and more universally, through the e-commerce platform iTunes and the media layer. The media layer is universal; we should reflect on the defensive strength that gives the Apple product skeleton. We should reflect on the accretive potential that this breadth of cultural objects gives to the device constellation. Because there are many, many more, choices at the media level it is essential for the Apple eco-system that the individual choices of consumers are shared within their individual device grouping. The media layer is where the consumers individual choice reigns supreme and it is in this sense the most 'open', the most consumer-committing, and potentially one of the most profitable aspects of the differentiation strategy.

Further, when you see how Apple has used its vertical integration of the iPod media player and the iTunes marketplace across all of its devices to create a billing relationship with 160 million consumers vis-à-vis simplified discovery, purchase and distribution, it provides a window into how they've facilitated a market segmentation approach that is simultaneously harmonious and discrete. Apple's segmentation strategy, and the folly of conventional wisdom

Harmony is key, the range and mutually supporting quality of the Apple product segmentation is making it very difficult for competitors to mount an effective challenge to the iPad, and to an extent to the iPhone. And we notice that hardly anybody is trying to mount a competitive challenge to the iPod Touch which may be the most effective, defensive/aggressive, unit in the Apple line-up.

Life is difficult for the consumer electronics and device manufactures who compete with Apple, but following Mark Sigal's analysis what are the implications for media owners?

The first point to understand is that Apple's strategy is broadly media friendly. Especially to media that wish to establish subscription services to Apple's large iTunes audience. The device manufacturer and the mobile network operator may be in direct competition with Apple, but the media producer should aim at a symbiotic relationship with the leading mobile media platform.
Furthermore the Apple strategy is working and it needs to be followed. But notice that this does not mean that a media owner should aim at segmentation at the service level. Quite the opposite. Books, films, magazines, newspapers, TV shows should be sold as all-in inclusive services wherever possible. The media should flow between all the device options that confront the consumer and wherever a publisher can establish a direct relationship with a consumer, that relationship (a subscription) should be transferable to any other device or access solution that the consumer is wearing/lugging. Segmentation at the device level should be married to integration at the service layer.
Apple is building its services on top of web solutions. Apple's universal media layer is driven by web services, as (See John Gruber on Apple and the Open Web where he points out that Apple is heavily invested in HTTP but not much in HTML). Follow that model. The web is fundamental to all media distribution, and it is at the level of web distribution that the media owner can hope to provide a fluid service for users who may be part in and part out of the iOS device network.
There will be scores of new device options in the next two years. Apple's present lead in media delivery will be steadily encroached. Avoid the mistake of building solutions for devices (there will be 5", 7", 9", 11" and more screen sizes on tablets next year). Respect the integrity of your product and your service and deliver the same solution everywhere, as far as possible. The best solution may not be fully deliverable on some platforms, but make sure that the core offering is available there (even if some of the bells and whistles are missing).
Consider, at every step in your relationship with Apple, that the consumer is king. Apple will not lightly grant access to consumer information and private data that the Apple devices may obtain, or that ill-mannered apps might obtain without the consent of users. Apple will not and should not pass on this private data and do not expect them to do so.

An iKiosk for iTunes?

2010-09-21T09:12:00.003+01:00

There has been a spate of news stories in the last few days about Apple preparing (or discussing) a central kiosk for newspapers and magazines. See Bloomberg and the WSJ. This is mostly speculation, but it may be well-informed. It is surprising that Apple have not already launched a common framework for delivering newspapers and magazines via subscription. Many observers assumed that it would be there when the iPad was launched, in much the same way that the iBooks app is there. In much the same way that iTunes is there so that users can buy music.

One reason that we havent already seen an iKiosk is that it is a challenging proposition to build such a service, and perhaps even more challenging to win the agreement of the major publishers who need to be signed up for it. In an excellent post M C Siegler at TechCrunch summarizes the obstacles. He points to four areas of difficulty:

Publishers do not want to surrender control of their subscriber lists and the associated or derivable data on individual use. Apple does not want to allow publishers to 'grab' intrusive information from users of Apple devices.
A thirty percent Apple-tax on subscriptions sold through iTunes is too big a chunk for the publishers to surrender.
Timely publication (especially of newspapers) is a challenge.
Handling full publications (and their archives) is a problem -- remember the first Wired App was over half a GigaByte.

These issues are in subtle ways inter-related, and I suspect that lurking behind them are two bigger challenges that Apple really cannot solve for the newspaper/magazine industry. The first, and the major challenge, is that the old prevailing model of newspapers and magazines being largely paid for by advertising is fundamentally broken. It is not coming back. That model can not be resuscitated (at least in the transition or medium term) by a digital solution. But the publishers' budgets and business models are so wedded to advertising revenues that they will not be able to embrace solutions which appear to abandon or de-emphasize it. Publishers will insist on securing more data on their subscription customers, but they will not be able to do very much with it. The digital advertising networks are not going to be publisher mediated or publisher controlled. The second major challenge, is that it still is not obvious or certain what the 'file format' for these digital publications is or should be. There is a radical unclarity about what it is that is going to be digitised.

Take the issue of 'timely delivery'. Magazines and newspapers that are fed to an iKiosk have to appear in their digital format a few hours after they have been released in print. Or, better, they have to appear in their digital format before they appear in print. The book publishers and Apple have weeks to play with in transforming files from a printed book into iBooks. But an iKiosk must be much faster. If digital newspapers and magazines are to appear reliably and pretty much instantly on the iPad/iPhone they need to be processed automatically from a content management system to an app service. How can this be done, without congestion and additional work in over-stretched design and editorial offices? How can this be done automatically by Apple? Apple can not afford to reach back into the editorial and content management systems of the publishers. This requirement raises in an acute form the question of what a digital magazine/newspaper really is. Is a digital periodical something like a web site or an RSS feed, something elastic and flowing which can be updated in real-time and adjusted from moment to moment through the period of live publication? Or is the starting point for a digital periodical the fact that it is a series of determinate issues, each of which need to be automatically transformed from something like a PDF file into something like a set of virtual pages? Are we talking feeds or pages? Or both?

One last point. These apparently well-informed (because repeated) rumours about an Apple News Stand do not tell us whether the service will be for iPad and iPhone or for iPad only. If Apple's new news service is aimed solely at the iPad, I think we can expect a very adventurous and cool solution, but in being tied to the iPad it will raise even more challenges for publishers who do not want to be platform-specific. If, on the other hand, Apple backs a much looser format comparable to the ePub solution used for iBooks, then we should be able to use and read newspaper on the iPhone with comfort.

Readerly and Writerly Apps by Emma Bradfield

2010-09-16T14:13:00.002+01:00

Dan Franklin of Canongate recently noted the potential Barthesian “writerly” nature of apps. Having written to death (pun intended) on Barthes's seminal essay as an undergrad, I geek out a bit when literary allusions are still pertinent outside the academic world (take that Avenue Q and your hurtful song).

Franklin suggested that books have the opportunity to be more “writerly” as an app than in hardcopy, because they “can be much more thoroughly explored on multimedia devices”. With some interactive apps, it's most definitely the reader at the reigns, creating his or her experience, taking the lead and being liberated from preconceived notion of the Right Way to read a book. Indeed, I think Barthes would be jumping for joy if he could read the description in the App store of the recently released MyFry app, with its “non-linear structure [which] allows you to create your own personal narrative”.

In light of the topic, perhaps I should have started with the conclusion, gone onto the end and finished with the middle. However, in keeping with my essay-writing days, I'll stay old skool as it's easier to follow. No one is sure yet how the digital audience want to consume their literature, but the replica model remains tried, tested and successful, delivering a product with is faithful to the original, without disrupting the traditional reading experience too much.

I mostly agree with Joe Pine about people not wanting millions of options, they just want the exact product they want. At Exact Editions, the content remains the same, it's the way of accessing it that changes. Reading your favourite title in print, digital and app, depending on your needs at a particular time, we feel is important. More and more of the magazine publishers we work with are opting for combined subscriptions, so that their readers can read content in three different ways without paying thrice. I'm not sure how book publishers could offer 'combined subscriptions' to print purchasers, but if they could, I trust it would be a significant breakthrough for the book publishing industry. Perhaps the book industry can take a leaf out of the vinyl market's book, and offer download vouchers when the book is bought, just as print magazines come with reference numbers to be entered online to receive the digital and app.

“Writerly” apps, might be intimidating for some and a bit tiring for others, but I'm sure it depends on personal preference. Perhaps a lot of readers are happy with a more “readerly”, passive experience of reading on the iPad, online and in print, after a long, hard day at work, or on a lazy Sunday afternoon, without having to add to it? I, for one, prefer to curl up and just read, but then I've always been a self-confessed book-worm, and not a gamer.

The Future of Magazines

2010-09-14T13:59:00.002+01:00

We have been thinking about organizing/hosting a round-table discussion with some of the digitally aware magazine publishers that we know in the London-based magazine industry.

If we are to host such an event it is clear that this should not be a sales pitch for Exact Editions. A round-table discussion needs to focus on the broader context that confronts the industry as it gradually (perhaps too gradually) moves into a digital framework. If a 'round-table' discussion is not to be a sales pitch, it is important that we identify the broad issues and the strategic matters that should be at the focus of board-level discussions in the magazine industry. These seem to be some of the key issues:

* are digital magazines very different from the magazines that we know? Should they be very different?
* are consumer magazine publishers being too slow to adopt business models which work with the iPad and with a new generation of readers who are primarily digital?
* should print subscribers be offered digital versions as a part of their print subscription?
* is the print audience morphing into a digital audience? Or will we be running with 2 quite different audiences (as seems to have been the case with the web visitors and print readers for many magazines in the last few years)?
* has the iPad radically changed the user's expectation of a digital magazine?
* is the iPad really important, a game-changer, or a flash in the pan?
* beyond the iPad, where will we see the next new digital device which will present a big distribution opportunity for the magazine industry?
* are apps replacing the role of the web site for magazines? Or are web sites and apps complementary?
* how do you make money from apps?
* what is the role of multi-media or interactive elements in a digital magazine?
* can consumer magazines re-establish themselves with strong subscription revenues from digital editions and apps?
* what part of the revenue from digital magazines will come from advertisers?
* how are digital magazines going to adapt to the requirements and opportunities of the social web (Facebook, Twitter etc)?

Mulling over these, as it seems to me, key issues, I am struck by the thought that the challenges that face the industry now are very different from those that we were discussing two or three years ago. The iPad is part of the explanation (which means that it really is a game-changer). But I think there is another important difference. Magazine publishing is now entering a more confident, and a more hopeful phase. Publishers, designers and editors are becoming much more optimistic and positive about the prospects for digital magazines. There is less gloom and doom, and a renewed belief in experimentation and innovation. These are good signs for the industry.

Twitter ROI

2010-08-26T17:05:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I watched Cision's webinar on Social Media ROI. I guess webinars act as an all-singing all-dancing white paper, promoting thought leadership whilst simultaneously advertising your wares in a more interactive way (there was a Q & A session at the end). Happily, Cision didn't go for the hard-sell, and it was actually pretty informative.

The comments about Twitter were particularly useful. It seems the number of Twitter followers you have has fast become synonymous with the number of Facebook friends you had at uni; breaking through that all important 1000 threshold might make you look popular online, but confirmed 200 “Attendees” on your 21^st birthday Facebook event doesn't remotely translate to 200 of your nearest and dearest incarnate on the day (luckily, as my card was behind the bar).

The same goes in the Twittersphere and corporate accounts. It doesn't actually matter how many Twitter followers your company's account has, as a high number of Twitter followers does not necessarily equal a higher number of X sold (subscriptions in our case).

I guess it depends how a company chooses to use Twitter, and who it is they are targeting.Twitter can definitely be used as an effective B2C tool for customer services. It's somehow comforting to think there's a human responding from the vast faceless corporation that is @Starbucks. I think this is great, and if our subscribers chose to tweet us a problem rather than email, we'd be sure to respond (although providing detailed technical support in 140 characters would be a challenge).

Since taking over the Twitter account, however, I quickly realised that, for Exact Editions at least, it's much more effective as a B2B marketing channel than B2C. We provide a platform for 100s of magazines, and we can see that, say, Jazzwise fans aren't going to talk jazz in a forum of thousands of subscribers to different titles; it'd fall on deaf ears, and social media is supposed to be, well, social, not a monologue.

Therefore, our subscribers choose to ask about the subjects relevant to their magazines on the magazine's individual Twitter accounts, and this leaves @exacteditions free to tweet about the things we understand best - digital publishing news, Exact Editions technological updates, blog post alerts etc. Putting out a search for our company name from Tweetdeck has already yielded a few leads from publishers interested in digital editions and iPad apps and we hope to continue in this vein. As the Cision chap pointed out:

Retweet frequency > Twitter followers (154, since you're asking)

And this is a much more accurate KPI – we know we're on the right tracks when others in the profession are engaging with our views and perpetuating them, adding to them, refuting them, and generally causing that all important “Buzz” or “Chatter”, that leads people back to www.exacteditions.com to work with us.

Apple iTV -- A Big Change?

2010-08-23T17:22:00.004+01:00

Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) has a well-informed, short blog on the prospects of Apple's iTV, which he suggests will be announced in September. According to Rose:

The rumor: Apple will be releasing a revamped/renamed version of their 'Apple TV' set-top box, called 'iTV'. The box will run the Apple iOS (same as the iPhone/iPad), and be priced around $99.
(Kevin Rose Why Apple's iTV Will Change Everything).

The only quarrel that I have with Rose's piece is his headline. So far from changing everything, my bet is that this is just one more 'chock stone' in the more or less impregnable media arch that Apple is building. It changes very little and will probably be as successful as Apple's other recent innovations, because they are all moving in the same direction. Its an obvious gap in their media line-up: having a market for film, audio, books, magazines, newspapers and now TV will make the Apple constellation (iPhone, iPad, iTouch and iTV) an incredibly tough proposition for any head-on competitor, Sony, Google, Microsoft, HP etc.

Apple will be even harder to overtake when they have planted the idea that your iPad, or your iPhone is the default remote control for the family TV. One can also guarantee that they will evade the charge of monopoly by making sure that the iTV platform is 'semi-open'. TV companies will be able to sell programs, through iTunes, but channels will also run on the hardware and nobody will be obliged to put stuff in iTunes..... its just that if you don't do that you will be missing a major market opportunity. Apple will also control the consumer data and jealously protect the 'privacy' of viewers information requirements/habits. The TV consumer electronics companies will suddenly realise that a lot of the value they capture has migrated to the lowly, and hitherto neglected, remote control. No need for touch screen TVs if the control is touch screen. Nielsen will lose its pre-eminence in measuring audience and ratings. And the TV network and cable companies will suddenly realise that a great deal of leverage over their output has magically gone over to the touch sensitive iPad/iTV device, which is the switch to their conduits. Apple disintermediates most of the big players by inserting their iDevice in the space between the layers of hardware and program. Who else gains from this disruptive innovation? Consumers of course, and the program producers and independent production companies. That is the way disintermediation works.

TV companies may be appalled by this prospect, but all other media organizations will understand that this innovation gives them just another very strong reason to get their apps on to the iPad/iPhone platform.

Nick Bilton's Grammatical Clanger

2010-08-06T16:58:00.004+01:00

Nick Bilton who blogs for the New York Times has dropped and smashed the front of his Apple-loaned iPhone 4. Here it is a complete, fragmentary, mess.

I thought it would work beautifully until I dropped my iPhone on the concrete on Tuesday evening. The phone’s glass became a Humpty Dumpty look-a-like.

I’m still trying to figure out whose fault it was? Of course, I’m mostly to blame for being clumsy and dropping the phone. But is it also Apple’s fault for creating a gadget that breaks so easily? Electronics Designers Struggle With Form, Function and Obsolescence

Musing on this mini-disaster leads Nick to consider that perhaps the requirement that electronic devices should look and feel uber-slick has led Apple's designers to sacrifice function for form and to build objects which are insufficiently robust.

Jason Brush, executive vice president of user experience design for Schematic, a branding and design agency, noted in an interview that the fragility of electronics today might not lay in the form and function debate, but rather that gadgets are not meant to be long lasting.

“If you purchased a Leica Camera a hundred years ago it would still work today. It was bullet proof,” he said, “But electronics today are not built with permanence in mind.”

Mr. Brush said that electronics are now built as fashionable objects that serve a functional purpose. “When things are made to look beautiful versus being designed to last for 100 years, the products form can look vastly different,” he said. (NYT)

Clearly Mr. Brush is on to something here. iPhones are not built to last the way that Leica phones are, or were. But surely Jason Brush and Nick Bilton are missing the key point with this criticism? Apple's devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch etc) are obviously not built to last, they will be improved upon very soon; more germanely they are not built to be objects in the sense in which the Leica was an object. The Leica camera is a specific functional tool with which quite specific and well-framed tasks would be performed in a professional manner. Nick Bilton has committed what philosophers like to call a 'category mistake'. He has mistaken the iPhone for a Leica-like object when it is clearly an adverbial-appendage. The iPhone and the iPad are not truly objects, they are adverbs. They are only parenthetically about taking pictures, they are mainly about doing all kinds of stuff, much of which you hadn't even considered to be do-able in that way, or at that remove. They are multi-purpose mediators through which the web and the internet interacts with the user. It is moot whether they are appendages to us, or appendages to the web through which stuff now happens. The creative process is now all about the web (subject) doing (verb) to us (object) in a certain way -- perhaps most stylishly in the Apple way. The iPad is, by some distance, the most adverbial of the range of devices that Apple has produced. That it is a range of devices, each of them invoking their own adverbs, and hard to copy or emulate is the key Apple's 'defensive' stance in relation to Android and other competitors. Any company that wants to compete with Apple now has to do some deep syntactic analysis. The adverbial genius of the iPad is that it has redefined and clarified the adverb 'gorgeously', 'stunningly', 'veridically' or 'lazily' in the way that we interact with the web. The genius of the new iPhone is that it has appropriated the adverbs 'instantly', 'face time' (which in spite of sounding like a process, is on its way to becoming an adverb characterizing conversation), 'unintentionally' and 'magically' to the previously more or less routine but increasingly mobile business of using a telephone.

So, Nick Bilton really should not worry about breaking an object (especially since it is one that had been loaned to him by Apple, 'generously'). He has lost an object but gained access to a range of adverbial devices each with unique performance envelopes through which he can interact with the web in the way that Apple envisages smart journalists now need to do that. Guiltlessly and perhaps carelessly. Hold on for the iPad nano, Nick.

Apps and Print Subscriptions

2010-08-02T10:37:00.006+01:00

Digital editions aren't necessarily an alternative to print editions - in many ways they're complementary. Lots of print subscribers like to be able to search a publication's archive or read the latest issue in the most convenient format at that moment, whether that's an iPad app in a coffee shop or a waterproof (perhaps slightly damp) paper edition in the bath.

We've long encouraged this kind of "combined" subscription by allowing publishers to offer their print subscribers access to the online edition. All the publisher needed to do was collect the subscriber's email address, enter it into our system and we'd set them up with a year's online subscription.

The difficulty with this arrangement has always been keeping the digital access in sync with the print sub, so that renewing one extends the other (and cancellations are honoured). Keeping track of the two subscriptions manually can become a pain.

This is why we were excited last week to introduce our new Agency Subscription arrangement. This automates the online subscription handling, so publishers can offer all their print subscribers automatic access to the digital edition on the web and via a branded iPad app.

The key to this has been to integrate with the magazine's print subscription agency. They were able to offer us a very convenient gateway for checking subscription details, so our servers can talk to theirs to check whether a print subscription is still running.

Instead of the publisher re-entering subscription data on our systems, the subscribers themselves can claim their free online subscription via a web form. In the background we check the subscriber number against the agency's gateway and set up a new digital subscription. Our servers periodically re-check the credentials to keep the digital access in sync with the print subscription.

The system's now been running for a few days and we've seen encouraging take-up from print subscribers. We hope to repeat this with other titles over the next few months.

The Enviable Attractiveness of the Magazine Format

2010-07-31T14:15:00.003+01:00

Flipboard had a great introduction a few weeks ago"A Prettier Way to Browse the Social Web" (NYT). Robert Scoble went overboard "Overall this is an extraordinary iPad app and one that will shake the media world for quite some time". Scoble may be partly to blame for the amazing user response which promptly swamped and downed the servers which drive this clever and rather beautiful app. For a while new subscribers have been filtered and phased in through rationed waves of invites. My invitation arrived a couple of days ago, and after a few sessions and hours of enjoyment I share Scoble's enthusiasm. It is a lovely app, and really a new thing that can only work in the iPad ecology (crisp colourful images, touch, speed, cacheing and that lovely screen).

Flipboard so far only runs on the iPad (but there must be ways to bring it to the iPhone 4 with its fabulous screen) and if you have an iPad I advise you to get it. It is to this point entirely free. Here is a short video that gives you an impression of its smooth and seductive operation. The company describe Flipboard as your 'personalized social magazine'. It certainly feels 'magaziney' in a very good and attractive way. It should also be very interesting to magazine publishers in showing how it might be feasible to integrate magazine content with social networks. How magazines can integrate with social networks is really the next big challenge for the digital magazine industry and Flipboard have taken a crack at the problem. At this point Flipboard only directly supports feeds from Facebook and Twitter. But that is enough to be getting along with; in my opinion, Flipboard is very Twitter-friendly, even though it may not become my favourite iPad client for tweeting (I dont have a favourite on the the iPad at all). Flipboard is actually rather more disruptive of the RSS-feed market and professional blogs than it is of the magazine industry. Interesting, because in my view RSS feed apps look rather thin and uninspiring on the iPad, and Flipboard has jumped in and gone beyond the RSS feed/reader approach to create a rich smorgasbord (images, YouTube, Tweets, as well as extracts from web articles) rather than the text-heavy RSS drip feed. If you thought that RSS feeds might be disintermediating old-newspapers and magazines, you maybe thought wrong if newly Flipped magazines and newspapers start re-intermediating familiar layouts and formats. Some commentators have suggested that the 'aggressive scraping' that Flipboard does is a substantial breach of copyright (it will for example, take cues from your Twitter feed and cache lots of images and stories overnight that you might want to click-through to when you wake up to read your Twitter stream, this cacheing is in most/all cases done without permission from hosts).

We don't know what the legal issues with such pervasive, background, ferreting and cacheing may be. But if I were a magazine publisher, I would start figuring out some partnership deals with Flipboard and tell the company lawyer to calm his aggressive and injunctive instincts and keep quiet whilst we watch what could be going on here that interests magazines. The deals should involve advertising revenues and/or subscription services: there is already an Economist collection, a 'section' in Flip-speak (more magazine lingo), taken from the Economist's free web services, why not have a full content-stream available through a Flipboard subscription? Flipboard is going to be a great host for iAds. Free and curated collections should have great promotional value for the magazine brands behind them. Flipboard is definitely a vessel which magazine publishers should aim to climb on board -- rather than sink the ship through charges of copyright infringement. The way Flipboard manages to co-ordinate and mix pre-packaged content selections from established media with the randomness of Twitter or Facebook feeds is truly impressive. And the Flip metaphor in both borrowing from and breaking the magazine paradigm, is much more attractive and compelling than the simplistic grid of Google's Fastflip (itself perhaps a source of inspiration/exasperation for the Flipboard founders).

So, I really like Flipboard. But the thought that really stays with me is that its conception and execution is an enormous compliment to the magazine industry and the quality of the illustrated magazine format. Users and technical gurus love Flipboard because it combines social agility with the extraordinary attractiveness of magazine layout on the iPad. The remarkable and delicious touchability of magazine stories and picture callouts all this with page sliding, or flipping. Heck, Flipboard even has a table of contents which you make for yourself as you work with it. But it really is a table of contents and the sections within it are also organized hierarchically in good old magazine style. Hear this magazine publishers and editors! Magazines look fantastic on the iPad. iPad developers who want to make their apps look truly elegant and readable ape the style and layout of a magazine. The iPad is made for digital magazine go to it!

I find it strange that many magazine editors and publishers want their magazine to look less like a magazine on the iPad. As one of our more go-ahead magazine publishers said this to me the other day: " I want to do something different with the products other than just serve them up in a different format - what are your thoughts?"

Exact Editions have quite a few thoughts on this topic. Starting with the observation that putting magazines to work as apps is NOT just serving them up in another format. But the big news from Exact Editions this week is that we have started serving digital magazines to the print subscribers of one of our most long-established magazines. The subscribers have been learning from the address label which accompanies their weekly magazine that a complementary digital edition is theirs, as soon as they choose to log in. They can in fact use this Shared Access Code with their personal subscription account on either the web, or in their branded magazine iPhone/iPad app.

More about this in our next blog. But in the meantime I leave you with this poser: if the coolest app in the Apple universe is trying to look as much like a magazine as possible on the iPad, why are not more publishers trying to make their digital magazines or their magazine apps look even more like a magazine on the iPad? Rash prediction: I think that the best digital magazines in the next few years are going to be more interactive than the ones we commonly see now. But they are going to be even more magaziney than you imagine. Getting digital magazines right is a matter of making their format entirely magazine-like but totally appropriate for digital delivery. Flipboard may be borrowing ideas and architecture from the magazine industry, but it is also pointing the way in which digital magazines can steal back some of that innovative glitter.

Why the iPad is Still Really Good for Magazines

2010-07-28T17:25:00.006+01:00

It seems that quite a few of the big magazine companies are unhappy about the way that Apple is managing, 'controlling' if you like, the app store. First there was an article in Folio magazine, then this was picked up by All Things Digital and then the blogosphere erupted. According to Folio magazine:

.... getting an app approved can be a frustrating ordeal, especially when publishers find out at the 11th hour that their proposal has been rejected (in what increasingly seems to be arbitrary fashion). Condé Nast famously had to rework its iPad apps when Apple announced that it wouldn't accept Flash. The iPad is Great But Remember—It’s Apple’s Way or the Highway

This is loose reporting. First, developers obviously hear 'at the 11th hour' (which just means 'at the end of the process') that their app has or has not been approved by Apple. Do you think that they would be happier to be told before they submitted it that their app was going to be rejected? There is no timetable involved, there is no guaranteed outcome to the process. It is an 'approval' process. Second, the Apple approval process is certainly getting to be more predictable and less arbitrary. There are some reassuring signs that it is loosening up somewhat. Third, it is ludicrous to suggest that Condé Nast were caught by surprise that Apple would not support Flash. This was clear well before the iPad was launched and should have been obvious to anybody who was following Apple's strategy for the iPhone in 2009. Apple would have had to change tack significantly to support Flash and if Condé Nast were listening to Adobe whispers, rather than Apple directions, they were clueless. Adobe .... words fail me. It is not doing a good job for the magazine industry.

And Peter Kafka at All Things Digital says:

Time Inc. executives “have been going nuts,” trying to figure out how to get Apple (AAPL) to approve a subscription plan. One of the more desperate suggestions, which apparently didn’t get traction: Pulling the publisher’s apps out of the iTunes store altogether.
Subscriptions, whether they’re for ink-and-paper magazines or their digital editions, are a big deal for Time Inc. and every other magazine publisher. They value them in part because they provide recurring revenue, but primarily because they provide a treasure trove of data. Time Inc's iPad Problem is Trouble for Every Magazine Publisher

Some bloggers have turned this into a generalised fact. The e-consultancy blog reports it as a universal truth that magazine subscriptions are not allowed: "So far, no other publisher has been able to sell subscriptions through the iTunes store either." This is completely false. Exact Editions has been selling subscriptions to magazines through iTunes for nearly a year. Plenty of other developers are now doing so. Exact Editions may have been the first developer to help magazine publishers sell subscriptions through iTunes, but there are now dozens more. Peter Kafka has got it wrong in suggesting that Time Inc does not know how to sell magazine subscriptions through the iTunes system. The problem is, as he hints in his next sentence, that Time may want to develop its own in-app subscription service and its own analytical reporting on customer usage. Both of these are no-no's with the Apple iTunes terms and conditions.

Apple is being more explicit and more open with its policies and its directions to the market than it was a year ago. The terms and conditions for app development are now published. If Time is not reading the developer agreement that it has signed up to, that is not something to "go nuts" about. Apple should not be blamed for objecting to magazine publishers trying to re-invent the wheel on in-App subscriptions. iTunes already supports in-app purchasing on magazine subscriptions and the market will get very messy if there are lots of different terms and conditions for buying stuff through iTunes. Nor should Apple be blamed for not allowing publishers to invent and deploy any form of spy-ware or tracking software that they attach to 'their' magazines when deployed in iTunes. One of the snags with the still nascent Android app developer market is that there is not yet a recommendable and standard method for deploying in-app subscriptions. I hope that there will be soon. But, when it comes it will have arrived because Google or a major Android player deploys it. The Android market-place will not work if each participant re-invents all the commercial rules. Apple is doing us all a service in trying to establish solid and consumer-trustable e-commerce standards. Apple is also, in my view very rightly, jealously guarding and defending the privacy of its users. If the magazine publishers (or the games publishers) were allowed to deploy all the intrusive and malevolent data-collection services that can be devised for mobile e-commerce we would all be the losers. I am not suggesting that Time Warner will put intrusive tools in its apps, but I am saying that we need a gatekeeper to make sure that rogue publishers and developers do not abuse the system. On this, I trust Apple more than I trust Time Warner or WPP. Apple has to do some of this for the apps market if it is to be trustable, and Google will have to do something similar for its Android market it its going to work.

There are ways of selling subscriptions to magazines in iTunes; there are ways of selling subscriptions to digital magazines on the web that can then be read with a free or paid for iTunes app; there are ways of doing most of what magazine publishers want to do. Some of it can be done within the Apple e-commerce system. Some of it has to be done in another way. But the fact is that the iPad is a wonderful device on which to read a good magazine and the big magazine publishers need to get on board quickly and with subscription services that users will buy. Apple is not stopping them. They are reluctant to sell through Apple to consumers whose identity they cannot track. But the plain fact is that this is always the way they have sold single copies through the news stand, nobody knows who buys a news stand copy. iTunes is the digital equivalent of the kiosk. It is the way publishers can sell magazines to the general market, without getting much feedback on who is buying. That is a good start, but iTunes is not a good way of selling annual subscriptions at the prices that publishers would like to charge for annual subs to magazines or newspapers. iTunes is not a good way of selling to a highly targeted market. B2B publishers will sell some magazines through iTunes but it is not the way they are going to nurture their core audience (precisely because the publisher will find it hard to determine exactly who the readers are). If the big publishers want to sell annual subscriptions to consumer magazines they will need to figure out how to sell them direct. They will need to build their own digital circulation and not expect Apple to do it all for them. It can be done and is being done. The best place to start will be by converting the existing print subscribers to digital subscriptions (not 'instead of' print subscriptions but 'as well as'). Furthermore, magazine publishers should be careful for what they wish. To hope or expect that Apple is going to solve all their distribution and platform problems is to bank on a solution that would be uncomfortably monopolistic and threatening to their long-term interests.

Get cracking on the iPad, but look also to what you can do with the web to sell subscriptions to your services. This is the direction that magazines should be taking.

In Praise of Not-Reading

2010-07-24T16:35:00.003+01:00

Reading is, in these days, an over-rated activity.

Most of what is most important about books is now about not-reading them. I was reminded of this deep but counter-intuitive truth by a blogger (An American Editor) recently complaining that his To Be Read pile (TBR Pile) was getting unmanageable because it was full of ebooks that often cost nothing and were without physical presence.

Which brings us to the special problem of ebooks. Yes, ebooks are a special problem because they take up virtually no space — just a bunch of bits and bytes, digits if you will, on a disk that can store gigabytes of digits. And so that TBR pool steadily grows. I looked this morning and I have more than 300 TBR ebooks, and that pile keeps growing. Acquiring Books for the TBR Pile: The Special Case of eBooks

American Editor is here admitting to a very old-fashioned mistake. He has not caught up with the twenty-first century. Books are now not really for reading -- or to be more accurate -- they are only occasionally, under the most special circumstances, for reading. Publishers are partly to blame for this (culpable, since all publishers, especially of newspapers and magazines, know that their profits are entirely dependent on selling stuff that the customers do not read) and digital book experts would be much more on the button if they spent less time fretting about 'reading'. And part of the problem is that the digital experts operate with a vastly over-simple model of what reading is. The conventional wisdom is that proper reading (sometimes called 'long form reading' -- a ghastly phrase for a dubious concept) is the measurable phase in which you open all the pages of the book and look at them, the hours and minutes through which a book, conveyor-like, passes, between the moment that you bought it and the moment that you shelve it in your personal library, never to be looked at again. Incidentally, 're-reading' is a much more interesting concept than mere 'reading', but we note that in passing and may return to the topic on another occasion (you will have observed that you can do that with writing as with reading). This Taylorean model of, conveyor-like, reading predicates that in serious reading our eyes scan more or less consecutively the whole book from page 1 to page umpteen. Efficiently and quickly. The time and motion expert holding a stop-watch, just as Google analytics calibrates our use of the Google library. As though reading a book might not actually comprise understanding it, or failing to enjoy it, or realising pretty instantly that it was not worth reading at all. Under any circumstances.

Of course, reading has always been, but is becoming steadily more, episodic; very little of our reading is like this conventional model of continuous reading, and most of us who now work in intellectual or bureaucratic activities which involve web-based reading, spend a lot of time, yes reading, in ways which are not at all like the way you first read and enjoyed Babar, P.G. Wodehouse or Jane Austen. You see, we spend a lot of our time and energy deciding what not to read. And these decisions matter. Possibly even as much as enjoying Babar, or re-reading Jane Austen.

Our understanding of digital books would be much better if we spent less time wondering about how we might read them, and a lot more time thinking about the ways in which we may use them without necessarily, or even at all, reading them. For certainly, and beyond all doubt, when there are 20 million books in Google Books Search we will not seriously, continuously, read more than the tiniest fraction of them. There are a lot of things that we need to do with books and it is not at all clear to me that we have a framework in which these activities can take place with digital books, half as effectively as with print books. For example, we need to be able to:

search them (that activity appears to be brilliantly covered by the already mentioned Google Books Search)
provide access to them (possibly well covered, in the USA, by the afore-mentioned)
buy them
listen to them
lend them to a friend or a colleague
translate them (well)
quote from them
(ideally) cite them when we quote them
non-consumptively compute them (we none of us know quite what that might involve)

These are all important points, but I will admit to playing a rhetorical trick with this list, my bullet points, and the bold face. The key point about the list is the recurrent 'them'. There are so many things that we need to do with books aside from, and apart from reading them. The key thing about digital books is that we need them. We need digital books to be the 'object' of all these newly digital verbs and activities. Digital books need to be as versatile and as 'real' as physical books in all these ways, even though they are now becoming entirely virtual and insubstantial. The big challenge that Google, Apple and Amazon have yet to project is that books themselves are becoming networked. And the Google, Apple and Amazon models of network usage will inevitably fail if they are not truly book-centric.

May I recommend (unreservedly, though I have forgotten most of it, and disagreed with much of it) Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read. Which, in case you mistakenly decide not to read it, has many reviews here.