Open Archives (4): Citeability and Moving Walls

There is a strong case for Open Access to scientific research and scholarship published in article form. This was crystalised in the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001. Scientific and scholarly research publications benefit from being openly accessible, because the value of the underlying research is enhanced when it is made freely, easily, accessible to other researchers. If scientific research is to be effective it needs to be cited and referenced; it is clear that open web-based publication makes it easier for researchers to cite the work of others in the field. Open web-based access is the way that research in an internet age can be most efficient.

The Budapest programme specifically limited its recommendations to:

The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. [my emphasis].

This is an important limitation. For sure, commercial consumer publications are not obliged to follow the STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) and other scholarly periodicals in providing free and Open Access to their magazines. After all most consumer magazines pay their contributors, often very handsomely. Yet it may well be in the interests of a successful consumer magazine to make a substantial portion of its archive freely accessible as a web resource. Why should this be?

One reason -- is that Open Access to an archive enhances the authority and renown of a magazine. Consumer magazines are often quite specialist, quite limited, in their appeal. But this tight focus is part of their strength and gives them potentially authoritative status. The reputation of a magazine or a periodical is immediately enhanced if its articles can be effectively cited, referenced, commented upon, by others. The prevalence and searchability of the web has enormously increased the extent to which magazines can build a reputation through links and citations. Citeability/referenceability/linkability is the strongest reason for making some portions of a consumer magazine archive available as a digital resource.

This way bloggers, enthusiasts, journalists, emailers, advertisers, and reviewers will pile in to amplify the reputation of the publication. An obvious way of gaining the advantages of a citeable archive, whilst not giving away the baby with the bath water, is for the publisher to make the archive freely available through the web, outside of a 'moving wall, so that issue become available after a period of some months (6 months, 12 months -- whatever is judged necessary to maintain the perceived value of the personal subscription). The concept of a Moving Wall in this sense comes from JSTOR -- an archival system for scholarly periodicals. Interestingly, JSTOR was originally set up simply as a way of archiving and aggregating inaccessible periodical archives, but they are now trying to reach through to an Open Access model (or a more Open model).

So making portions of a consumer magazine archive Openly Accessible makes sense if this significantly enhances the reputation and the authoritative quality of the publication, and if it does so without damaging the commercial prospects of the magazine. We think that in most cases it will clearly do so, but it is a matter for publishers to decide and our system enables publishers to control the extent to which the archive is open.

Because Exact Editions is a middle-man we have an interesting perspective on the dilemma of Open-ness. We do not publish magazines and our subscribers are always subscribing to a magazine where the publisher has control of the product, the subscription price, frequency, extent, design, copyright etc. Exact Editions is a distribution partner whose reward is a small commission on the digital subscriptions sold. So we are keenly interested in having more subscribers.

Furthermore, the way our deal works with the publishers we absorb the distribution and maintenance costs of the digital edition. So it costs Exact Editions, not the publisher, a bit more to maintain an Open Archive. We think these costs are easily containable within the parameters of the small commission we obtain from selling additional digital subscriptions, so we encourage our publishing partners to offer Open Archives with a moving wall. The marginal costs of maintaining Open Access are marginal. So you dont need to feel sorry for us!

On the other hand, if you enjoy the open archives and never buy a subscription you can thank us as well as the publisher for making this service available. We like subscriptions best, but we also like appreciative feedback or fan mail ;-)

Open Archives (3): Browsing Sells

We have compelling evidence from usage statistics: usage of a magazine's trial issues drives subscriptions. It certainly does. Interestingly, the different magazines have different conversion rates: for some magazines the conversion rate may be as low as 1 new subscriber gained for every 50 sample pages viewed in the shop, and for others the average can be 100s of pages freely viewed for each new sub. The highly pictorial magazines are highly sampled. I think this is a very positive take-home from our experience of digital magazines. A lot of users enjoy looking at the well-designed and glossy magazines in our system!

Some of the more specialist titles seem to pull viewers through to a subscription more rapidly than the general interest titles. Another interesting fact, the magazines are used from from front cover to back. All the sample magazines seem to be sampled/tasted throughout (there is a usage weighting towards the front of the magazine, the front cover -- this is one of our busiest last month, the contents pages -- this is our busiest last year -- and the opening articles -- lots of tasters have read this article on 9/11). This usage weighting towards the Front and the Table of Contents is a consistent pattern for magazine samples on Open Access and also for the usage of the titles by subscribers.

So what does this tell us? One lesson that we have taken from our monthly stats is that a significant increase in trial usage will boost subscriptions. It is actually a very obvious point, if a publisher promotes the archive of the magazine, and the quality of its back issues is more widely appreciated, more subscriptions will be sold.

Magazines are much like books in this respect. Just as Amazon's Search Inside works -- "Browsing pages sells more books", so also with magazines. Browsing sells more subscriptions. If only dentists waiting rooms were points of sale, we would be leaving his surgery with a couple of subscriptions as well as our dental floss. Of course, on the web they can become that.

This is one good reason for making a substantial section of a magazine's archive available as a free resource which prospective subscribers can search and browse. Usage of the archive will tend to drive subscriptions. But it is the publisher's choice to decide how much to offer for free access and our system now enables publishers who use our system to make this choice.

The Catholic Herald

The Catholic Herald, the leading Catholic weekly newspaper, joins Exact Editions today as the 45th title in our shop. It is a full broadsheet and has an archive approaching 250 issues. For the first six weeks the publisher is offering free access to the whole archive, for all-comers. So there are plenty of things on which you can do research. We usually pick out a few nuggets, so here are some items that caught my attention in a brief browse.

• A scrumptious recipe for slow-baked lamb. I once ate a meal cooked by Timothy Gardner and it was very good.
• With its extensive archive, this paper required a way in which searches could be ordered by first or last.
• Also a way in which the user can jump to the issues of a specific year eg 2003 or 2005.
• For a moment of reflection read about Oscar Romero.
  

Open Archives (2): The First Two

The Catholic Herald joins Exact Editions today with a substantial archive running back to 2003. For six weeks the whole archive will be freely accessible (including the current issue). It is a substantial archive of over 200 issues. Try some searches: here are 43 occurrences of the phrase: "Oscar Romero".


The Ecologist is also throwing open its Exact Editions archive of back issues, behind a six months moving wall -- this means that the archive is steadily enlarged as more issues are published. You should subscribe to the magazine to have access to the current issue, forthcoming issues as they appear, and the 6 issues contained by the moving wall. The open archive offers 23 pages with a mention of "Kyoto". Versus 33 occurrences for those with a subscription. I expect that the search term will continue to be used for many years.

More of our magazines are putting their archives open, to varying degrees, in the next few weeks.

Open Archives (1): How Open?

Exact Editions has recently improved its content management system, so that a publisher can determine HOW MUCH of the magazine archive should be exposed for open access to the general public, the general web user.

Our system is set up so that a publisher can offer five levels of access to an archival resource:

1. An archive can be completely closed except to subscribers. This might be an appropriate solution for certain types of B2B publication (eg membership only magazines). None of the consumer magazines in our shop is completely closed.
2. All the magazines currently in our shop have at least one, open, free trial issue. We will maintain this option for the publishers who want it.
3. A publisher may opt to make all except the last year of the publication 'Open Access'. We call this option a 12 month moving wall.
4. A publisher may opt to make all except the last six months of the publication 'Open Access'. We call this option a 6 month moving wall. We will also support more current, more proximate, moving walls: three months, two months, one month, should this be needed.....
   
5. Finally, a publisher might opt to offer the magazine as a completely free 'Open Access' resource. Currently we are delivering The Publican for CMPi on this basis.

There are good reasons why some magazines should be completely Open Access -- many scientific periodicals have moved to this model of distribution. They now have to pay their costs by levying a charge from the contributors or sponsors of the research reported. Also, Open Access makes complete sense for magazines which are essentially free in print; but we think it is unlikely that a consumer magazine which is completely Open Access will sell many personal subscriptions.

So complete and immediate Open Access is not recommended for a consumer magazine which aims to sell personal subscriptions. But it, of course, does not follow that a consumer magazine which aims to sell digital and print subscriptions should be completely Closed. Far from it. But there is an interesting question as to "How Open should a consumer magazine be?" when it wishes to sell the most possible subscriptions? We will look at this issue in the next few days.

The iPhone, with bated breath

Like most nerdy types we have been waiting for the launch of the iPhone for months. From its earliest demo , Steve Jobs was showing it with a newspaper web site and stressing the advantages of being able to read the paper on your phone......


Today we hear that the iPhone will come with Safari. Unlike most digital magazine platforms, Exact Editions only requires a standard browser on the client-side. Our pages are simple web pages, no proprietary file format, no Flash is needed.

So, it is looking secure that Exact Editions will run very sweetly on an iPhone. Furthermore we have live -phone numbers in many magazine web pages (International format phone numbers are callable with a click-through). The first user who confirms that you can click-call a number from a digital magazine on an iPhone, gets a free subscription to any of our magazines that they choose (send in a photo of yourself holding the iPhone with sample page, to claim your prize).

Here is a page with some live phone numbers. Please do not ring the New Internationalist's international offices, unless you need to do so!

Postal Woes

What is worse, a postal strike which appears to be looming in the UK? Or lousy postal rates which threatens to cripple magazines with a smaller circulation in the USA? On this read an excellent essay from editors of the Nation and the National Review, on the Bosacks blog.

Answers on a post card please (sorry, pathetic joke).

A digital edition does not solve either problem, but it can lessen the pain.

The Guardian's 50,000th issue

Published today. To celebrate they have put up 50 of their front pages, 50,000 issues since 1821.

Stepping through their front pages one notices how the pace of change and innovation has accelerated. The first colour on page one happens as recently as 1996. The Berliner format only covers the last few examples. More colour, reduction in format size, blockier layout......

The funny thing is, it is almost as though newspaper editors and designers KNOW that they have to make their product more like a web page. As though they secretly know that the future of print is to become a digital edition (oh yes, hand-in-hand with the print edition, whilst there is still a need for it).

They know this and are making their newspapers (and the magazines, which all newspapers increasingly resemble), more web-like, more suited to being presented as a digital replica in a web page (which in a month or two will be flipped horizontal to landscape on an iPhone). There is a hidden hand pushing print into a digital and web-friendly format, whilst at the same time the Official Doctrine of most newspaper and magazine publishers is that the web is different and their web version, needs to be repurposed, needs to be something other than the daily/weekly issue that they lovingly prepare in Adobe Files and which they messily Print.

Digital editions are still officially a backwater, in the book of most newspaper publishers and editors. The Guardian is a case in point it has a very respectable Digital Edition, but it is well hidden and comes as a surprise to many people who know their excellent but rather outmoded Guardian Unlimited as the popular face of the newspaper on the web.

Floating Jellyfish with Interactive Advertising

The Digital Magazines blog has a notice on the newly launched Jellyfish from the UK's National Magazines. This is a free e-magazine aimed at the teenage girl market. It uses a similar technology platform, Ceros with Flash, to Dennis's Monkey. John Weir's blog notes:

Like Monkey, it is based on the Ceros system, with lots of video, audio content and web links. Among the things I liked were the "click to rotate" feature on the shopping pages, and the fact that it links directly to a number of social media sites like Bebo and MySpace. Additionally, the magazine has marketed itself by producing behind the scenes videos for YouTube.

Only problem is the advertising - on which this publication will stand or fall. Only Garnier have supported the launch issue, and for the magazine to gain any traction, they will need more support from big name brands.

Advertising is certainly the problem, if it does not come through to support the proposition.

But it is also doubtful whether such new vehicles, even when backed by sufficient advertising, can possibly be the solution that the magazine industry is looking for. These interactive packages, using Flash, are not the magazine. The magazine is not getting a web presence, at best the audience is being projected an associated brand presence and a new media venture. If the new media venture works, there is still a question about what happens to the magazines -- should they gracefully retire from the web and abdicate any interest in developing a digital audience? Or should they still aim to develop a web edition and associated advertising, in which case they have created a competitor targeted at their own audience? Much more interesting and potentially fruitful for the magazine industry is the technology Seadragon, brilliantly showcased by Microsoft with a digital edition of the Guardian here. Print ads, which in their web presence could contain amazing, microscopic detail and interactivity will rejuvenate the value of branded advertising on the web. Print advertisements in their myriad digital instances would become referral agents for the major consumer brands. The punch would be packed in the zoomable fine print of the digital ad. Such ads would be using magazines (legitimately) as a Trojan horse to attract readers to the deep and interactive ad which cannot of course be printed in any magazine. But the magazine is a valid gateway and the demographics of each different magazine audience work to the benefit of the consumer brand, and the advertising agency, which can assemble its interactive audience as it sees fit. See yesterday's blog for more on the Microsoft technology.

Scaleable Print and Collective Seeing

Microsoft are developing some incredibly cool image technologies. They are highly relevant to the way magazines, newspapers and books will be viewed and read on the screen in years to come. From O'Reilly I found a link to an amazing presentation of Seadragon and Photosynth from this year's TED conference, by one of the developers, Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

One of his examples shows a digital edition of the Guardian (one of the very, very few newspapers which publishes a perfectly respectable digital edition). The digital newspaper in the Seadragon environmnent can be seamlessly zoomed and scaled. As Blaise says, newspapers and magazines "are an inherently multi-scale medium" but, ideally, the only thing which should constrain our digital view of the print is the number of pixels in the screen, and Seadragon enables indefinite and smooth zooming. The Microsoft team have inserted a doctored car ad in the corner of the Guardian page, so that one clicks on a thumbnail in the ad to see alternative model choices, and then within the thumbnail there is another thumbnail for prices and one for technical specifications. So print which would be 1 point, if it were real, and at normal resolution completely illegible, can be zoomed up to a comfortable reading scale. This additional tunneling into the detail, by zooming, has enormous potential for newspapers/magazines on the web. Zooming out is also important. Exact Editions' own 16-page view, has become for our users an important way of scanning the digital magazine.

Newspapers and magazines will certainly go this way, Seadragon or similar. All the publishers and the associated technologists who are busily developing repurposed web-sites and pale web imitations of their print offerings should mothball their solutions at this point (including the Guardian's own Unlimited service). Oh yes keep the HTML going, whilst there are eyeballs, but strategic planning must focus on the Print Edition and the Digital version of that........The printed look and feel is going to be with us for a long while yet.

Cool as Seadragon is, Photosynth may be even more important. You must see the video presentation to get the full richness of the software. Blaise shows us an incredible montage of Notre Dame cathedral, where a three-dimensional model of the building has been constructed from thousands of Flickr images of the cathedral (I guess every photo on Flickr tagged for Notre Dame, Paris). Its an amazing scaleable, zoomable, pan-able, rich, community-generated collage. A community-generated and optimised view of the building. Collective seeing. The software application is figuring out from the internal visual properties of the photos and snapshots how they should be joined up, registered, smoothed, or hyperlinked together. Scene recognition and optimised editing in one framework. A system which is hyperlinking thousands of photos on the basis of what they are representations of.

I would provide you more links to the Photosynth solution (here is one to a project, How We Built Britain, that has just been launched by the BBC and Microsoft) but the environment requires the latest versions of Windows, and I have a Mac so have not poked around these examples and cannot vouch for them.

There are some obvious ways in which Photosynth-type applications could be extended (eg in piracy, or in collective archives of self-scanned print images). Photosynth-ed images of scanned print would be a doddle. Can you see Microsoft doing an 'end run' round Google Book Search by encouraging readers to assemble and share collective digital copies of books?

These image-manipulating techniques, in the hands of users, will be incredibly viral and publishers need to figure out how magazines, newspapers and books are distributed through the web in an authorised way by the publishers themselves. Before the users do it for them.

Google Interiors

Google has antagonised many publishers by scanning and databasing books held in libraries, which are not out of copyright, and for which Google has not sought permission from the publisher or copyright holder. Some publishers have launched court cases, others are on the verge of direct action.

The court cases will proabably decide these matters in the end, but I wonder whether Google really needs to upset its potential partners by appearing to ignore the claims of copyright?

In this context, it is a relief to see that Google are at least seeking contractual authorisation before launching their new Google Interiors service.

Sandra Niehaus has a rare comic talent. Thurberesque.

Consumer Magazines and the Web Opportunity

We don't often see CEO's of major magazine companies talking intelligently and aggressively about their plans for the web. So its refreshing to read the interview with Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc, on the Paid Content blog. She voices the fear which chills publishers when they look at the economics of web advertising, and lays out her approach here:

Here is the strategy. First, build the best of product. Differentiate it. Second, build the big audience and by that I mean you need partnerships with everyone. Then third, worry about monetizing it, but you got to have a big audience to make money on the web because the CPMs are low. I have said this publicly: The magazine model is a beautiful model because you got high margins; two revenue streams, the consumer pays and the advertiser pays; beautiful cash flow, you get the money up front. The average reader of Sports Illustrated delivers about $118 to the bottom line in Time Inc. The average very engaged user of SI.com can generate about $5 in advertising contribution. I need many more online viewers to equal one magazine reader. That is why you have to go for big volume and that is why you got to have partnerships. You do not do exclusives with anybody.

The abyss which terrifies mainstream newspaper and magazine publishers is that contrast between $5 from ads-only web users ("very engaged" users), and $118 from the ads+subs in print audience. Even if the audience is expanded 20-fold by the web, the revenues are treading water. Ann Moore seems to be driving her major magazine properties towards an ads-only, no-subscriptions web strategy. That may be right for Sports Illustrated and People magazine, but for many magazines that appeal to more specialist audiences a digital subscriptions strategy does work, its already working for magazines in our shop, and will be a key part of the right digital strategy for a consumer title. Most magazines appeal to niche markets -- which is the reason for their success in advertising. It is hard to make hard and fast rules here, but one would guess that a completely open web strategy funded solely by ads may well be a fruitful strategy for a magazine with over 1 million circulation. It is unlikely to be a productive strategy for many magazines with a circulation of less than 100,000 print copies. Over 95% of the magazine titles published, in this global industry, have circulations of less than 100,000 in their print editions.

Message to circulation directors: think digital and look for a subscription strategy which can support users who subscribe to different magazines.

Ordering Search Results

We have just introduced the option to sort your search results, by the date of publication of the issue in which the search term appears. If you search the 50-odd "open access" trial issues, for occurrences of 'David Cameron" there are currently 23 results, and they will be sorted by relevance (the default setting -- which will weight more highly a page on which "David Cameron" is a high proportion of the text on the page),
or by newest,
or by oldest.

There are some large archives lined up to come into the system. This additional function will be useful for sorting through search results on accounts where there are hundreds of issues because a customer has multiple subscriptions.

Publishers Blogging

There are lots of magazine blogs. But there is a real paucity of blogs about the magazine business: its commercial prospects, the strategic issue of adapting to the web, competitive intelligence and innovation. Book publishers, by contrast, are getting to be very bloggy-minded. We regularly tune in to book publishing blogs such as Charkinblog, O'Reilly's Radar (which is a gold star technology blog with good publishing angles). Brantley's blog and the hugely informative Open Access News. Michael Cairns has posted some very helpful guidance for publishers who are considering blogging about their business. He is thinking of 'book publishers', but I reckon that the magazine publishing industry is in greater need of more coverage in the blogosphere. I know of no blogger who provides detailed and insightful coverage of the results, corporate activity and strategic issues facing magazines in the way that Cairns's PersonaNonData does for the book publishing sector. The best coverage may be from Paidcontent which is too Press-Release-driven and includes the magazine industry in its overall media purview -- so much less analytical or opinionated than Cairns's commentary.

Some of the best magazine industry blogs? I would recommend Samir Husni's MrMagazine.com (particularly interested in launches), Jeremy Leslie's magCulture (insight and focus on design) and Magforum, an informative UK-focussed web site which is evolving into a blog. If you have necrophiliac inclinations there is the funereal magazinedeathpool. Chris Anderson is one of the most influential magazine industry bloggers and pundits, but his blogging is too rarely about magazines. Its all about his big idea thelongtail. And Nicholas Carr and Jeff Jarvis occasionally touch on the magazine industry, which they both know well from the inside, but Carr needs to get a better grip on the future of digital print, less on the future of IT, and Jeff Jarvis risks losing himself in interactive TV (which is another business, not the magazine industry).

Bill Gates and the future of print

Juan Antonio Giner in his Innovations in Newspapers has a great list of "Wrong Predictions" and he puts Bill Gates's reported remarks on the invevitable move of reading to the web in the same camp: another wrong prediction.

Bill Gates was clearly saying a lot of different things in this presentation. Some surely right, some pretty questionable. I am sure that he is wrong to say that newspaper subscriptions are in inexorable decline. You never know, overall newspaper subscriptions might rise whenever the publishers figure out a good web-subscription model. Web subscriptions services are surely going to work in music and in film, so why should they not work for digital newspaper services? Print only subscriptions will surely decline as more of our reading moves to the web. But growth in digital subs could more than compensate for decline in newsprint use.

You need to read the 25 wrong predictions for yourself. Hilarious. And some of them were probably made as recounted. Some we already know (eg Lord Kelvin's “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”) but this one was new to me:

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

The interesting thing about this is that Warner clearly knew what he was talking about. Warner Brothers became hugely successful after 1930. So was he dead set against the Talkies? Or was he saying something a bit more nuanced? Sure enough the fuller context to this quote is that Warner completed his thought with "..... The music — that's the big plus about this." OK he was still wrong, but he was all for moving on from the silent movie. I think Bill Gates is also like Harry Warner, very much an enthusiast for the new broader audio or digital technology. But like Harry Warner he only sees half the picture. But that is true for us all -- surely? I read Bill G. (indeed I read him digitally) as being more of an enthusiast for digital newspapers than a doomsayer for journalism.

Google broadens scope: Search is now Universal

Google has made a subtle but important change to the way it offers users 'Search'. Here is the BBC's brief summary:

Google is overhauling its search system so it returns "universal" results not just those from webpages. The change means users will also get results from news sites, blogs, video services and other relevant places........ The expanded results will be available via a series of tabs that will appear on the results page.

There is a lot more detail from Danny Sullivan. We will see how this works out; my first impression is that it is a shift of emphasis rather than a fully implemented parallel search. The tabs seem to be prioritised. News, Video, News, Maps, and Gmail, come in the top level and the other 'specialised' options are only available to me through a pull down list. It may well be that the 'top level' has been customised for my usage pattern (if you dont use Gmail, I doubt that Gmail would figure in the top level for you!). Google is increasingly delivering a personalised service which means that search results are not universal but personalised. As web services become more integrated they become more universal but also less reliably repeateable.

Curious fact: Microsoft's Windows Live searches Exact Editions content more reliably than Google. Microsoft is not dead yet.

Carbon Neutral News Corporation

Rupert Murdoch has announced that News Corporation will be carbon neutral by 2010. You may be tempted to think of this as a corporate gesture, a gimmick without much substance, but take a look at their Energy Initiative Webcast.

Rupert Murdoch and his senior executives are interviewed in the webcast (Peter Chernin, James Murdoch, Rebekkah Wade, and a dozen others) and they are committed to transforming the way the company does business. Murdoch himself is clearly on message. As he says "We must transform the way we use energy... acting on this issue is simply good business". He outlines many specific targets and recognises that they have a lot to do. Introducing digital editions of the News Corporation magazines and newspapers has to be a part of that change, which as Murdoch sees will effect consumer behaviour and open new markets.

Getting the web to work for media businesses is important and high profile. Kate Fehrenbacher at GigaOM puts her finger on some of the key issues.

Digital Editions work. Magazines need to get digital

Yesterday was a free day for me. But with a Blackberry you are never totally on holiday. Two work items piqued my interest.

Sad news for Tom Moloney, CEO of EMAP. He has left the company and the speculation is that it may be snapped up by a private equity company.

Another tiny item from feedback also snagged my interest (yes feedback gets forwarded to our Blackberries and, sad as it may be, I often look at it even on my days off). Geoff who subscribes to The Baptist Times writes in:

After only two weeks of the new subscription I am pleased with the flexibility of being able to read articles as time permits, and also reading past issues. It means that I am saving paper even if it is recycled!

Thanks Geoff! This is the kind of unsolicited reaction (almost as important the steadily accelerating growth in new susbcribers) that tells us that digital magazines are working in the market place. The new CEO of EMAP will have engineered a quick turnaround if he/she sees how much their wonderful magazine assets can benefit from digital editions. From being fully engaged on the web.

A new angle on Web 2.0

Tim O'Reilly presents a fertile thought experiment. But it is not just our commercial and financial activities which can be enhanced by web-scaled interaction. How would it help our reading on the web, if the process of reading, to think and to write, was enhanced with intelligent feedback: to the reader, the publisher, the author or journalist?

When, soon, most of our reading (magazines, newspapers, books, blogs, by definition, etc...) is web-based, how will the different reading applications co-ooperate to enhance the way we read to think? One answer is that Google will do it all..... but that probably is not the optimal solution and has a scary, pit of the stomach, feeling about it.

It is at least possible that there may be quite a number of different more or less *intelligent* reading applications/environments/services. That scenario is compelling if reading services are collaborative.....

DIVE magazine

• As close as I want to be to a grey reef shark.
• Or a hump-backed whale.
• Clinton 'Clint' Currie has spent three years of his life underwater.
  

Magazine Week Web Site

The Magazine Week web site is up, but it is clearly still in stealth mode, so it would not be fair to make any definite judgement. As yet no sign of a break-the-mould proposition..... such as World Book Day's free book token for every schoolchild.

PPA Conference and the Digital Future

We were not able to get across to the PPA conference so we relied on reports blogged for the Guardian's Organ Grinder by Stephen Brook and Jemima Kiss. I was struck by the quoted comment of Stevie Spring (CEO of Future Publishing):

Spring also pours scorn about predicts of the digital future. "Anyone who has a forecast beyond six months is fooling themselves because none of us have a clue."

That seems broadly right! Though, at Exact Editions, we are sure that the future will be heavily digital much sooner that the CEO's realise. But for sure, the only safe prediction for the future is that we will all be surprised by it, in that sense we none of us have a clue.

But there was an amusing placement, since the Guardian's Organ Grinder had the PPA reports next to reports from Microsoft where Bill Gates was saying that all newspapers (he was referring to the advertising revenues) will be online within five years. If that happens with newspapers, it is a racing certainty the same will happen with magazines. I wonder how many of the CEO's have really taken that one on board? Yes, the advertising revenues will also be online. Gates is right, and Stevie Spring is right: we none of us have a clue but there will be an innexorable shift and as Gates put it 'a massive amount of innovation' will be there with it.

Magazine Week (4)

Joel Rickett, who writes for The Bookseller, gave me a helpful run-down on why World Book Day has been such a success for UK book publishing and bookselling. Right at the heart of its success has been the 'incredibly potent voucher scheme' which puts a £1 book token in the hands of millions of children each year. This focus was a masterstroke because, from the off, it secured the goodwill of parents and teachers. Joel points out that there is now a very effective team, with a degree of operational independence, running the event, and the PR has been very strong, led by the prominent publishers and orchestrated by Liz Sich at Colman Getty. The PR has been very effective, but it does not always work (the attempts to focus on adult readers have been less successful than the school-targetted projects) and it is key to success to keep ringing the changes. Each year there is a fresh angle. Joel points out that the local PR has also been very effective, with author appearances at hundreds of bookshops up and down the country.

So far this informal inquiry has four take home messages for the first Magazine Week: (1) focus on a core, other-directed (generous or altruistic), activity which is at the heart of the week:- whatever it is, it must not be too obviously a 'retail gimmick'; (2) make sure that a good PR firm is in the planning -- with a modest but adequate budget; (3) if at first you do not succeed, then try, and try, and try again..... and (4) encourage the good and the great who lead the industry (the likes of Nicholas Coleridge, Duncan Edwards, Peter Phippen and Sylvia Auton) to become involved and committed. Such a quartet could be the consumer magazine industry's riposte to Gail Rebuck, Tim Hely-Hutchinson and Nigel Newton, mentioned in the last post.

Magazine Week (3)

More on the lessons that can be learned from World Book Day.

Its a striking tribute to the success of WBD that it has gathered support from all sectors of the book trade: publishers, authors, shops and retail, libraries and schools and of course the consumers. Everybody has been pushing and the Booksellers Association has been in the lead. I asked Tim Godfray, ceo of the BA, about their involvement and in his words the promotion has been 'without question an amazingly successful' exercise. The BA estimates that the advertising value of the publicity achieved is in the range of £3.2-3.4 million this year (with extensive promotions in the Sun and the Daily Mirror and lots of TV and radio advertising). 14 million WBD tokens were produced, and most of these tokens were exchanged for '£1 off a book' or for one of the specially produced titles, selected from publishers' offerings and priced for the promotion, at £1 a time. Godfray emphasises that this success comes from everybody committing resources. The publishers club together to fund the organization and provide the core budget, while the booksellers take the hit on the margin (they absorb the £1 off on the free Book Tokens) and the schools also like to get involved -- 40,000 school packs distributed.

It will be hard for Magazine Week to find such an obviously 'good' goal as helping kids to read, and to buy their first book. For books have a particularly central and foundational role in the reading pantheon -- I dont see 'helping kids to buy their first magazine' having a comparable pulling power with teachers and parents. But finding a goal which is not too obviously self-interested. Not in Joel Rickett's phrase too obvious a 'retail gimmick', but a noble challenge or opportunity around which the whole consumer magazine market can coalesce -- that is the challenge. Because the WBD cause is so obviously worthwhile, as well as being 'publisher self-interested' the big wheels of the publishing business Gail Rebuck (Random House), Tim Hely-Hutchinson (Hachette) and Nigel Newton (Bloomsbury) are prepared to invest personal initiatives in making it work. They have been very active, especially in PR. More about PR tomorrow.

Blueprint

• Here are three international designers that we will hear more about: Alexander Brodsky, who is Russian, Akira Minegawa, Japanese, and the American Steven Holl.
• Even the ads in this magazine make me wish that I had trained as a designer.
• So this summer I could go and take a course? The Ghost Lab school sounds like fun and hard work.

Design and highly visual magazines seem to work in a particularly interesting way through the 16-page spread available on the Exact Editions platform. Contrast Blueprint with Dazed & Confused, HALI and Contemporary.

The Economist and The Independent

Juan Antonio Giner's Innovations in Newspapers blog has lots of good pictures of the Sarcozy result. Some of the best come from my daily read, La Repubblica.

Juan also has a gripe about the lack of coverage on their web sites from The Independent and The Economist. He is of course right (though by today, in both cases, the web sites have caught up - he was blogging on Sunday when many newspapers leave their web sites quiet). Newspaper web sites would be much better and more topical if they spent no time at all 're-purposing' the content of the last issue. Repurposing, costs a lot and is something which newspapers do faut de mieux from pre-broadband necessity. The much better thing they can do with their last edition is publish a digital edition immediately. Doing this preserves all the design values and the brand identity of the publication and calls for no real time decisions and no new editorial resource. Repurposing necessitates decisions and editorial resources and risks misallocating them -- inevitably it will. The web site should have all the things that a web site can do, and the newspaper daily/weekly edition cannot.

Like blogging on the Sarcozy result as it happens. Giner blogs on a Sunday and blogs enough to be three people, but I presume he is only single, in which case these world-class publications could easily manage to field one blogger on their web site whose role should be to get about as much as Juan Antonio. Good blogging is much cheaper than a repurposed web site -- and for the record a perfect digital edition service is a lower investment even than a single world class blogger. The digital must lead to increased revenues and profits, of course.

I blogged about the tardy delivery of The Economist in Italy. Our issue is still arriving over a week late (maybe today we will get our still missing issue from 28 April). The Economist distribution department has been outstanding in following up this complaint -- apparently the issue is printed in Switzerland and then trucked to Milan where it is polyloped and dispatched. But the subscriber issues still get to Florence six, or more, days later than the issues of The Tablet which are polyloped and posted in London; and about a week later than the Economists on the news stands outside the Duomo (usually on Sunday). But following my grumble, I have had two phone calls and two emails from a distribution expert, and the Economist will now try posting the Italian subscriptions in Switzerland! By the middle of May we are promised a prompter delivery. Amazingly thorough (their expert even took the trouble to find out how The Tablet copies were shipped), but remedial, customer service. A proper digital edition would be even better!

Newspapers and Magazines still looking for a digital strategy

Greenslade is on holiday, so one relies more on the excellent Innovations in Newspapers, beautifully illustrated, for the blogged news of newspapers. Juan Antonio Giner spots a characteristically shrewd, but unusually inconclusive, analysis of the Murdoch bid for the Wall Street Journal from the Independent's Hamish McRae. McRae's analysis and lack of follow-through may soon disapear behind a pay wall, so here is his intro:

Journalists inevitably find it difficult to comment dispassionately on events in their own industry, and the bid by Rupert Murdoch for Dow Jones is no exception. But the fact that Mr Murdoch should feel Dow Jones is worth so much more than the market had previously valued it at says something interesting about the way in which the newspaper industry is adapting to the new technologies. There is life in the old dog yet.
........(and conclusion)..........
The one thing I am very sure about is that physical print media will continue to be very important for at least another generation.....

Well that is in one way quite reassuring but he does not justify his optimism (I am not myself so confident about the inkiness of newsprint for the next 30 years). McRae does not see, does not consider, that one way in which print newspapers may 'survive' is by becoming digital editions which are themselves the newspaper. Exactly the newspaper, though not of course newsprint. Journalists seem to discount the possibility that digital editions may replace, and satisfactorily replace, print editions in a way in which web sites by definition cannot. Digital editions have now replaced printed issues for scientific and technical journals. Yes replaced. Web sites do something else, something different that they can do better than a paper or a digital edition. Rupert Murdoch sees all this, or feels it in his bones. That is why Rupert thinks that the WSJ is worth $5 Billion, or $2,500 per subscriber/copy sold. Rupert is right, the best newspapers have a great future and it will certainly be digital.

Juan Antonio Giner is also gloomy about the prospects for the Conde Nast Portfolio magazine, but he likes Monocle. If he is correct in his defoliation of the first issue from NY ('caviar and peanut butter' how cruel, what a dissonance on the palette) the planners of the Portfolio launch will be much to blame for not producing a digital edition of their launch issue. If you must have a five month gap between your launch issue and your first regular issue, it would be much better as a primarily digital issue. That would make the print issue a collectors item, that would would also maximise the chances of distribution everywhere (not a copy of Portfolio or indeed Monocle to be seen in Florence this last month); importantly also it would not hang around getting battered or neglected in kiosks.

But is there a Market in the Gap?

Last week's Press Gazette had a thought-provoking article on two recent, spectacularly failed magazine launches, Popworld Pulp and So London (the web sites are, at this moment, still up). Neither of these magazines launched with digital editions. The PG article is only available to subscribers, but there is a summary on the PG's open web site.

Development Hell's music magazine, The Word, is cited as a good example of the way a new magazine can grow from a conservative launch to become an established title in a highly competitive area. They have a brilliant quote from Jerry Perkins publisher of The Word:

We knew there were several gaps in the market, but obviously you need to make sure that there is a market in the gap.

This is a motto that should be written, in 36 point, at the top of every new magazine launch plan. Such a launch plan must, in 2007, also start with the web strategy. How does the web site complement the print product? And of key importance: the magazine's founders should explain how the digital edition will be used (whether to maximise consumer awareness, subscriptions or advertiser responses). If the business plan does not convince on those grounds, the financial backers should immediately pull away.

Magazine Week (2)

Magazine Week is scheduled for 17-23 September, see previous post. I have asked a few key people who have been behind the success of World Book Day since its inception, for their advice and the fruits of their experience. Magazines and Books are different but there are surely some parallels.

Jo Henry runs BML which has been very influential in tracking the consumer appeal of WBD. Jo kindly answered some questions that I threw in her direction:

Q1 Is there a key lesson that you have learned from the success of World Book Day?
WBD works because there is a core of very committed, highly professional people within the industry who really believe in WBD as a concept and put a lot of (mostly unpaid) time into making it work year after year. It is a very good example of the way in which the book industry can collaborate to grow the market and create readers. There is also, of course, the essential sponsorship from Book Tokens which underwrites much of the cost and a lot of organizations who provide eg free distribution and printing for the specially chosen £1 books.

Q2 Do you have any advice for the magazine publishing and magazine selling industry?
WBD still has much greater impact in the children’s market, being promoted heavily through schools and libraries to that sector. However, in the last few years efforts have been made (with some success – now over 50% awareness) to reach adults as well. I would suspect that having a core audience in mind would be helpful as you launch.

Q3 A day or a week? Plusses or minusses?
In fact the voucher redemption scheme (£1 book tokens send to every school child in the country which can be redeemed against the £1 books or used as a discount voucher against another purchase) runs for almost a month, and whilst there is a concentration on the day itself, schools and shops do run the campaign over long periods. Shops find it difficult to sustain for longer periods, however, as their promotional calendars get very full, but on the other hand you risk missing lots of people if you only go for a day.

Q4 Has the international side to World Book day been important to its success in UK and Eire?
No one seems to take much notice of this. We don’t use the same day as other markets and we don’t use the same theme (give a book on World Book Day for example, used I believe in Spain).

It sounds as though WBD success, like many other marketing triumphs, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Jo's advice on having a 'core audience' in mind is very helpful. The Spanish tip is interesting and possibly more relevant to magazines than to books. Book Tokens won't work for magazines since we do not have Magazine Tokens, but perhaps the theme of developing magazine week as the week in which one buys a magazine for a friend ...... that could work. It could have that concrete 'call for action' focus of the 'Book Token' scheme.

I am sounding out one or two other luminaries of the book trade, so there may be more advice from this quarter.

Surfer's Path

• Beautiful but scary
• Google Earthspots
• I am getting the hang of this

Here is an overview of the latest magazine in our 'shop'.

Magazine Week and World Book Day

The PPA (the Periodical Publisher's Association) is planning a Magazine Week for September 17-23, 2007.

This seems like a good idea. It is surely inspired by the success of World Book Day, which, although it is only 10 years old, attracts a lot of press interest and consumer involvement. The consumer involvment is probably the key to success here .... I wonder what the people involved in the success of World Book Day have to say about the project? Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.

Are Cartoons Endangered?

Daryl Cagle, a cartoonist, posts insightfully on the challenges that traditional newsprint faces from the move towards web-generated advertising. We sympathise with Daryl Cagle in his instinctive reaction that 'learning how to blog', or 'moving to animated cartoons' in order to meet the challenge of the web, does not seem like the right strategy. Perhaps Murdoch's pow wow in California this week will come up with the answers -- to the challenge that newsprint faces.

Notice that some things from the web can help the cartoonist to survive. First, cartoons in digital editions can be very findable. All you need to do is to link to the url. If I were a cartoonist I would do all that I could to make my cartoons findable, if necessary and, in the absence of citeable digital editions from the publisher, by republishing them myself. Second cartoons which appear in print and in a digital edition format become potentially a 'sponsorship' opportunity. Cartoon slots used to carry sponsorship in some British newspapers. Content-sponsorship certainly has new possibilities with digital editions.

Shipping times

We live in Italy and we currently have subscriptions by mail to three British magazines: The Economist, The Tablet and the Times Literary Supplement. They all charge a premium for posting to Italy, and they arrive in a very strange order. The Tablet gets here usually on the Saturday one day after its Friday publication in the UK. Presumably it is printed on the Thursday. The TLS usually gets to Florence five or six days late. Thursday this week. The Economist seems to be the slowest of all, usually arriving a week late, as today. This is too slow for a topical magazine.

I have a sneaking suspicion that The Tablet may be making a special effort over Italian distribution because of its strong Roman audience. Its a pity, in more ways than one, that the World Bank and the Nobel Prize for literature are not also based in Rome or Milan.

It is high time that these excellent magazines had proper digital editions. Then there could be no complaints about slow delivery. They all offer their print subscribers certain priveleges from their web sites, but these repurposed web sites are confusingly different from the print publication and limited. They are none of them a patch on the print products. Sigh.......

Journals and Consumer Magazines - different timescales

There are important differences between the market for scientific, technical and medical journals (STM), and the market for consumer magazines. For one thing, the STM market is almost entirely in the English language, which is not true for consumer magazines. For another advertising is much more important in consumer magazine publishing. But there are also similarities between the two industries and one of the similarities is that the consumer magazine market will inexorably drift towards electronic delivery, as the STM market has already done.

There was recently a fascinating discussion on a librarians list (Liblicense) about a question posed by a specialist publisher: Is it time to stop printing journals? Mark Leader points out that the printing and print distribution part of the operation is really expensive and perhaps little needed. The many responses to his question are archived here (you may need to scroll down the page to reach the 're - Is it time to stop printing....' thread). The overwhelming consensus among the librarians is that the patrons really only now care about the electronic version. One librarian blogged this comment:

We certainly don't need to keep the print to satisfy our user base. Two years ago we stopped getting any print for our ScienceDirect titles [ScienceDirect are the biggest aggregator/publisher of STM periodicals] I did not get a single question, comment, or expression of concern from faculty or students. We've reached the point where librarians tend to worry a lot more about the print than the people who use our libraries do. [see Scott Plutchak blog]

Scott is a librarian at a big American research university, but what has already happened in Birmingham, Alabama, is now happening in every major university. its clear from the other librarian responses that the electronic journal is now what really matters to researchers, whereas only 7 years ago the print version was sacrosanct.

Academics by and large now depend on the electronic journals, not on the printed issues -- and yes many of them, if they are over 50, will still prefer to read a printed version, but this they will probably print out for themselves. All the searching, the finding, the browsing, the access and the distribution are happening through the network. This consumer practice has changed remarkably quickly, and the journals have remained pretty much unchanged as print objects (titles the same, articles very similar, pages the same, design the same, editorial and refereeing process the same, citation and abstracting the same). Its just that the print objects are now electronic resources. The whole business has gone electronic and the publications are arranged, and thought about, as though they were exact digital replicas of the original paper products. Remarkable consumer change is allied to remarkable conservatism about the publication form.

This wholesale change in research publishing practice has taken about 10 years to evolve (Elsevier's ScienceDirect went into Beta-testing in March 1997). STM journals are now primarily electronic. If the use of paper was banned the system will still work perfectly. I conjecture that the consumer magazine publishing will take about 10 years from now to make the same transition. Paper will not be banned, but it will be more expensive and less used. We will still have print magazines in 2017, and they will have significant uses and loyalties attached to them, but the overwhelming weight of publishing effort and of consumer attention will be fixed on the digital magazine.

Two more conjectures: consumer magazines will remain multi-lingual (there are at least 30 languages where signficant consumer magazine publishing occurs) and consumer magazines will remain attractive advertising networks. You can count on it, and the publishers who succeed in the adaptation will be the ones who figure out how web-based advertising can help the consumer magazine to thrive.

Rolling Stone soon to be Archived

The magazine not the band, what a difference an 's' makes. Bondidigital, who have given us The New Yorker on DVD, and on memory stick, are now going to produce 40 years of Rolling Stone magazine in their proprietary digital magazine format.

The complete archive of The New Yorker is stunning value for $29.95 -- that is for 4,000 issues, 80 odd years, but think of all the cartoons. Mind you the hard drive or memory stick at $199 is not such a snip. We wonder why the publishers do not use the web to deliver this archival service. Each week another issue is added to the back issue pile. Juggling 8 DVD's to search the intermittently updated archive of a single magazine is redolent of the clunky, pre-web, technology of microfilm and microform. The price is very good, but the magazine would surely get more value and users would get much more usage if the archival service was bundled in with a current subscription, this is the model chosen by Harpers. Gaining access to a complete archive of The New Yorker would be a totally compelling reason for having a current subscription.

Bondidigital have done all the hard work of scanning, annotating and organizing the back issues, Exact Editions can provide them with a very slick and affordable ramp to web delivery. Invitation herewith extended.

I like this reviewer's comment on the DVD collection:

"...the most visceral pleasure in these discs comes from the advertising. It is so interesting that you can be forgiven for confusing the real relation between advertising and edtiorial content, for supposing that ocean of warm, gray ink existed just to support those astonishing ads. Who remembered that Exxon made an 'intelligent typewriter?'" The New York Times OPINION, Sunday, November 6, 2005. Cited here.

How true. Advertisements have a lot more entertainment and reader value in them than editors or business managers sometimes realise.

Thanks to Personanondata, where I found the Rolling Stone announcement.

Scottish Memories

The fortyfirst title in the Exact Editions shop.

• We could be here now?
• You would need your ice axe for the Knoydart peninsula.
• When sideburns were mutton chops.
  

Magazine Launches

Samir Husni takes FT reporter James Chaffin to task for an article headlined 'Time and Hearst focus on new media rather than new titles'. Husni counters with some statistics on new launches:

Even if you exclude the specials and one shots, here are some of the numbers of new magazine launches going back to 1984. Keep in mind these are all new magazine launches with at least four time launch frequency. Starting in 1984 the numbers are 134, 203, 299, 300, 284, starting in 1990 the numbers are 325, 363, 443, 417, 458, 510, 535,459, 518,360 and starting in 2000 the numbers are 333, 301, 290, 454, 473, 350, and 332 in 2006. There is no need to explain any of these numbers. I think they speak for themselves. I hope reporters, especially those in the print media, stop promoting the myth of print is dead and no one is doing anything in print any more

One can agree with Husni that its absurd to say that print is dead; its very much alive and kicking, even trade magazines. But Husni's statistics do suggest that the rate of new US consumer magazine launches is slowing significantly: down from 535 in 2006 to 332 in 2006. That is quite a drop in decade (38%). But surely Chaffin is none the less right in the thrust of his article that a consumer magazine launch now has to have a strong web strategy. That was not true even five years ago. Conde Nast's Portfolio the biggest launch of 2007 has attracted a lot of attention to its web strategy, "The website is huge. It's key to the enterprise," [Joanne Lipman, Portfolio's editor-in-chief quoted by Chaffin].

Neither Husni, nor Chaffin, make what seem to us the most obvious point: a new magazine launch should not really happen in 2007 or 2008 unless the publisher has in place a strategy to launch a compelling digital edition. Most new launches do not, which is nuts. Distribution and promotion are the two biggest challenges for a new magazine and digital editions are by far the most cost effective means of delivery and of promotional sampling. Portfolio needs to flesh out this side of its business strategy fast or it will lose its advertisers.

Kerning and Knuth

Although I started in publishing at OUP (Oxford University Press) more than 30 ago when hot-metal printing was still alive, I missed out on the proper training in print and typography that might have been appropriate at that time and in that place. I am embarassed to admit that I first heard about the concept of kerning, a few years later, when an enthusiastic philosopher pointed me in the direction of Donald Knuth and the mathematical typesetting language and system TeX which Knuth developed.

Knuth is an extraordinarily brilliant and unusual thinker. His home page gives you a flavour of his genius.

The maths behind kerning fascinated Knuth and is touched upon in the current issue of Wired. See the wiredblog for some discussion of kerning and the switch between page design in print and web. Carl, who linked me to the blog, must have been thinking, that Exact Editions would have solved the problem which troubles the blogger here:

The same goes for Wired’s new logo. It alternates between letters without and with serifs, yet the area between each pair of letters is about the same, thanks to the serifs on the I and E and lack thereof on the W, R and D. This equivalence makes the logo easier to see and read across a crowded supermarket aisle. The alternating fonts also make the letters seem to blink on and off as you read them from left to right, in emulation of digital ones and zeroes.

The blogger then went on to make some remarks which get trashed by comments and which he has now withdrawn. Some of the comments are very neat. Designers really care about their art.

The problems would not even begin to arise were it not for the fact that Wired on the web is a repurposed/redesigned/repackaged version of the print magazine. If Wired were on the Exact Editions platform you would just look at the digital edition exactly as it is in print. Here is an example of kerning in the typography of a title.


And here is another effect, shadow type, which can not easily be emulated in a web page design:

Of course it is trivially straightforward to include kerning, or any other subtle visual typographic effect such as shadow type, in a web page which is an exact edition or simple replica of the original print page.

Earnings Calls from the NYT and GOOG

This is the time of year when big US media companies make their Quarterly reports to investors. Here is Juan Antonio Giner being very direct and quite rude about The New York Times's results. He surely has a point? The New York Times is a fantastic brand, and a wonderful newspaper -- the results don't need to be so dismal. The Economist is a print media brand of comparable reputation that regularly gets more than adequate financial results.

Here is another shrewd commentator being very brief about Google's eye-popping results announced yesterday. "Another very good quarter". That is all John Battelle has to say. Its almost all that needs to be said.

Google press release here. Transcript of NYT conference call here.

The NYT complains about the advertising market. One does not see Google showing any anxieties about the flow of advertising spend. Magazines and newspapers badly need to find a way of catching their share of web-based ads. Digital editions are a part of the answer.

Google, Microsoft Live, and Porfolio

Interesting blog from Michael Cairns of Personanondata. Like the rest of you I have been paying a lot more attention to Google Book Search than to Microsoft Live Search Books. But if Microsoft are developing systems which work for publishers interests and also for end users, then they have taken an important step forward. [Yes I know there were two 'ifs' in that sentence!]. Google Book Search is making such rapid progress that it is certainly going to work. But Cairns is right, having more than one digital avenue is really important for publishers and authors.

Portfolio, mentioned the other day, has been getting some ecstatic reviews from Samir Husni, several of them, and a more cautious one from the Printisdead blog. I am not so sure about the printisdead idea. When you think about it, Google and Microsoft would not be investing so much in Print Search and digital editions if they thought it was dead or dieing. So you might expect Conde Nast to do a digital edition? So far nothing there but a repurposed magazine (most of it) and a repurposed, but not permalinked, table of contents.

the philosophers' magazine

the philosophers' magazine has a trial issue with a special feature on Poverty and Duty

• Tony Blair's guru
• Why we/you should be doing more about people with less
• Philosophy rocks with Mylo
  

Portfolio

Portfolio is a big new business magazine from Conde Nast. Jeff Jarvis today has an intriguing preview on his BuzzMachine. The magazine itself is not out until next week, and there is then a big gap (advertising dictated) until the second issue in August, when the magazine will become monthly. It looks like its playing in the same general space as Monocle (blogged yesterday), but my sense is that it will be more businessy, perhaps a little less avant garde. The one will have a New York focus/locus, the other a London/European one. Jarvis emphasises the cloud of bloggers -- but we wonder whether bloggers can be integral to the success of a monthly business magazine. The Portfolio web site is broadcasting interviews which form a part of the first issue. Same plan as with Monocle and a good way of giving tasty context to browsers who may decide to buy or subscribe. This comment of Jarvis's gave me a shudder:

Having said that, Portfolio is doing some things quite right. Start with the fact that all the content of the magazine, with the exception of a few difficult-to-translate graphics — will come online the same time that the magazine goes on sale.

Why allow the exception? This sounds like a re-purposed version of the magazine. The publisher loses a lot more than a 'few difficult-to-translate graphics' when a beautiful magazine is repurposed. Loyal readers need the web version of their magazine to look and be the same as their print version. Oh dear. Lets hope that is not what they have done.

Low impact only for a Week?

The Week magazine is going to produce an online-only magazine issue, about environmental issues. The issue will be sponsored by Lexus as a showcase for its hybrid products. According to the New York Times Lexus will be spending over $500,000 on the sponsorship of this special issue.

The extra issue is scheduled for April 20 and will be available online for a week. Its theme will be the environment. That, the publishers say, is another reason the issue will not be the usual paper and ink. It will save, a spokesman said, a lot of trees. (see report in The Press Gazette web site).

If there is any environmental benefit in this exercise, there is a compelling case for producing a digital edition of the weekly magazine on a regular basis. Being environmentally sensitive just for a week is a nonsense. The Dennis spokesman who says it will save a lot of trees is talking through his hat. The Week should be publishing a regular digital edition for ecologically concerned subscribers. That will save some trees.

Monocle

Monocle is one of the most interesting magazine launches of recent years. It is inspired by Tyler Brûlé, whose previous magazine launch was Wallpaper*

Monocle has a very strong visual design (as one would expect from a Brûlé concept). Black as a cover, which gives it a strong contrast on the news stand. It is also a very ambitious editorial project (as one would expect). It is particularly interesting in the way the web service includes broadcast and is conceived of as complementary and distinct from the magazine. This is a magazine publisher taking a new look at the potential for web services which differentiate and develop the magazine print offering.

Leaves plenty of scope for a digital edition, and arguably necessitates a digital edition. Since Monocle publishes 10 times a year, at over 200 pages an issue, the subscribers will soon need the benefits of a searchable archive, of the echt magazine. This monocle needs a powerful lense for its back issues.

Here are some comments from Juan Antonio Giner. His first reaction was more enthusiastic some of Juan Antonio's screen shots. Third issue is out next week.

Interesting notes from Jeremy Leslie on the tricky art of naming a new magazine.

Harper's and Magazine Archives

Harper's is one of America's oldest magazines. It has a broadly progressive and liberal stance and after a sticky patch in the early 1980's, it has been notably enterprising in its publishing with the current management. Harper's has now produced an archive of its 157 years of monthly back issues. PaidContent has a note about this. The archive is available to all current print subscribers. I could not see an option for 'electronic only' access, but if you reside in the USA you can have access to all the back issues and 12 months of the current publication through the post for $16.97. This seems like a pretty good deal. PaidContent also contrasts the Harper's approach -- of bundling in access to the archive with a current subscription -- with the New Yorker's decision to make its memory stick or CD-based archive a separate subscription option.

It is clever of Harper's to allow anyone to search its archive for free (you will only see thumbnails of the PDFs unless you have a subscription), and we reckon that most magazines will gain more by offering a full archive as a subscriber benefit, rather than trying to develop a separate set of subscriptions to an archival service.

Interesting also, that the magazine had help from Cornell University Library in scanning its first 49 years. Getting good quality scans is now harder work than digitizing them or getting the whole kaboodle properly web-searchable. Old magazines were often printed on poor quality paper and are friable, fragile and hard to handle. We look forward to doing our first century archive -- but will trust the publisher and friendly librarians to organize the scanning.

Publishers Grumbling

Book Publishers seem to have given up on negotiating with Google and are relying on the various court cases to stop the "Do not be evil" Bad Guys. There was an extended example of book-world whingeing in Charkinblog yesterday (reproducing in full (?) a piece by Nick Clee from the Times Literary Supplement -- not available online). Here are some representative grumbles:

A victory for Google [in the various court actions] – or an extension of legal wranglings to a point beyond which its opponents run out of funds – would raise the threat, the book industry believes, of a severe compromise of authors’ and publishers’ rights.

Let me see if I understand this right. Is Nick Clee complaining that Google may have an unfair advantage in the litigation because they have deep pockets? Were these not cases brought by the publishers and the Authors Guild? Google can hardly be blamed if the publishers run out of patience, or money, in the court cases they have initiated. After a lengthy whinge about Amazon and the erosion of territorial rights (for one brief moment I thought that we were going to have protests about Virgin Atlantic's cheap flights facilitating the import of low-priced American editions), there is a very odd final complaint, again about Google.

Piracy will certainly be widespread on the internet. Protecting texts against it is a huge problem, not only because of the skills of the hackers, but also because digital rights management (DRM) systems are unpopular with consumers. However, it remains likely that most people will continue to buy texts from official sources. Let us hope simply that the dominant official source for books is not Google. Or else we shall all have to find another way of earning a living.

This is a completely cock-eyed conclusion, because the the Google method for delivering books on the internet (which does embody the most user-friendly form of DRM) is much more secure, much harder for any commercial or systematic piracy to cope with, than any of the other distribution systems which publishers are using. If piracy is the big problem then the publishing industry should rush to embrace Google distribution. Google Book Search is effectively unusable unless you are connected to the web and to Google: the 'copies' which Google makes are good for a mere snippet. They are en masse useless, unless you have the Google search engine (or something similar which is not at all easy to build).

The potential monopoly power of Google should be much more of a concern to publishers than the way in which it is digitising books. There is no point in publishers grumbling about Google unless they can articulate a better way of doing it and have confidence in their ability to publish digitally.

Disclosure: Richard Charkin is an old friend. He has also been generous about Exact Editions. We think that he and Nick Clee (I vouch for his recipe for lemon whip here) need to represent the way book publishing should be digital.