Twitter ROI

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Google Books Search over the Summer

Judge Chin is still considering his decision in the case of Google ..... His ruling may come this week, next week, or in a few months. Only he and his team have a good idea of that. Meanwhile Professor Pam Samuelson has produced a very thorough, balanced, somewhat critical review of the proposed Settlement and of Google's efforts in a 60 page paper for the Minnesota Law Review. If you haven't been following GBS too closely, this is an excellent place to get an insightful review and summary of what has been going on. If, like several hundred lawyers and digital library experts you have been following GBS too closely for years, you will already have read her piece and it will have reminded you of stuff that you had forgotten. Her conclusion:

The future of public access to the cultural heritage of humankind embodied in books is too important to leave in the hands of one company and one registry that will have a de facto monopoly over a huge corpus of digital books and rights in them.
Google has yet to accept that its creation of this substantial public good brings with it public trust responsibilities that go well beyond its corporate slogan about not being evil. Google Books Search and the Future of Books in Cyberspace

I have been a 'qualified' supporter of Google Books Search from the beginning. The qualifications are coming more to the fore. Whatever Judge Chin decides, we can be sure that Google Books Search is going to be mired in legal complexities for years to come. The international ramifications of the venture are hopeless and will sap energy and innovation. Google Books Search, if it is approved, will work badly and too patchily for European literature and libraries, and it will be especially rough and unsatisfactory for British literature, libraries and universities. It will be a mess of conflicting and irresolvable copyright regimes for years. Google itself seems to find it hard to innovate or roll out new services. A clean and direct implementation of Google Editions has been 'promised' for this summer, or this year, but it has been promised before. Several times. No doubt part of the reason that it is being held up is that its roll out may have unpredictable or unwelcome legal consequences (or unwelcome splash-back from the court of public opinion). Google Editions when it comes should be a very useful and popular service, but Google have to get it out of the door before it can properly grow and bed itself into the array of digital books that is now mushrooming.

Pamela Samuelson points to the lack of substance in Google's mantra 'we will not be evil'; but its arguable that Google has failed in a more fundamental and troubling way. It has failed to sacrifice the idols of its founders; it has failed in corporate governance. Page and Brin met and worked together in a project for digital libraries. The Google Books Search proposition was clearly motivated in part by Page's promise to digitize the libraries of his alma mater the University of Michigan. The two big leaps in the Google Books enterprise, were first to dream of digitizing millions of books in one universal searchable index (the original project, defended by an appeal to 'fair use' and the transformative effect of a large database of books) and then secondly to aim for a commercial settlement to the 'class action' suite, through which Google, the authors and publishers would effectively enclose, exploit and privatize millions of copyrights for which they cannot claim ownership. I suspect that the Google Books project, and especially the Library component, has always been too close to the goals and aspirations of Google's young founders. The big and aggressive steps that the company has taken to stake out its claims have been part of the founding DNA, the dreams that brought Brin and Page together. The third 'founder', Erik Schmidt joined the company in 2001. At about that time the initial steps for the Google Books enterprise may have been taken, perhaps Schmidt may have been too much the 'new boy' to question the goals of the original founders. Schmidt should have spotted that there were copyright problems, he should have noticed that there were at least issues of politesse involved in digitizing and then using for profit, stuff that did not belong to Google or to the Universities with which they worked. I bet that he has since then wished that the aims of the Google Books undertaking were more clearly understood within and without the company. And more cautiously and generously drawn. At some point Google has to take a much more humble view of its role, and at that point things might start to work in its favour.

Convergent Digital Solutions for Publishers

Do not say that we do not listen to our market. One of my colleagues was explaining how our system of Shared Access Codes (SAC) enables a publisher to offer a comprehensive service to subscribers who may soon be getting and wanting both a print subscription, web access, and an app for their iPhone and iPad. The Exact Editions service enables publishers to do this... and it can be viewed as a comprehensive distribution platform for the publisher. But the publisher interlocutor on the other end of the line, remarked to my colleague "Ah, so you have a convergent service".

And this struck us as an important insight. Whereas it is natural for us to view our solution, which offers a variety of manifestations of the same content (iPad, iPhone, web and/or plain old print) to the user as a comprehensive set of distribution options via the same account - for what our 'Shared Access Code' does is create an identity bridge between these different environments for the user -- this publisher was viewing the matter from the other end of the telescope. What the 'SAC' does is produce a convergent solution for consumers bringing them access to the same thing. The SACs provide common access to the same thing: the same magazine, and the same individual account associated with a single subscriber. So rather than seeing our range of options as providing divergent channels of distribution, we now try to think of the complex as providing convergent access to the unique account.

The point of course is that the ideal service for a digital publisher is one which converges both on the consumer (allowing her access to the same magazine distribution from a multiple range of 'platforms' and 'devices') and on the magazine - bringing consumers and subscribers from the full range of distribution options to the same magazine and the same brand.

It also seems to us very important that digital magazine distribution solutions (whether for the iPad, or for the next big thing) should preserve the identity and the brand of the magazine. One of the strongest aspects of the iPad/iPhone marketplace is the strength and recognition it gives to brands. Even the rather small badges that cover apps have sufficient visual strength to carry a brand:




Magazines on the iPad

Joe Wikert has posted a pretty strong complaint on his Publishing 2020 Blog:

Where Are All the iOS Magazine Subscription Apps

.......
I'm certainly not the first to blog about this and I doubt I'll be the last. What I can't understand though is why, after Apple made in-app subscriptions possible months ago, are none of the big guys selling their magazines that way?

Does it have to do with Apple's 30% cut? Are they all trying to find a way to get around this and sell direct? That's what Amazon does. When you buy a Kindle edition via the iPad app you're actually just going direct through the browser, not buying through iTunes. I'm assuming Amazon therefore doesn't have to pay Apple a cent on the transaction. Why wouldn't magazine publishers want to do the same, especially on longer-term subscriptions?

Joe is a magazine enthusiast. He is just the kind of customer that the magazine industry needs. There are lots more like him and these customers will not hang around indefinitely. I have to point out that magazines using the Exact Editions platform can sell magazines through the iTunes platform, using Apple's in-app purchasing system which works very well. We would also note that apart from the magazines hosted by Exact Editions, very few publishers are doing this. Is this because the publishers do not want to surrender the 30% commission to Apple, as Joe suggests? Perhaps, but there are ways round this -- and Joe Wikert mentions some of them: the Kindle from Amazon is exploiting some of these possibilities. Exact Editions has another sort of solution in shared access-codes, and in offering 'freemium apps' for magazines which offer the dual function of providing free promotion for publishers and the opportunity to sell 30 day subscriptions via Apple: reserving to the publisher the right to sell annual subscriptions to readers who will enter a direct relationship with the publisher. There certainly are ways of using the Apple service in ways which suit the publisher.

The relative 'tardiness' of the major magazine publishers in getting onto the iTunes/iOS bus has other explanations. The first is that Apple has not provided a direct and recommended route to market, in the way that it has provided iBooks for Book publishers. My guess, is that Apple considered doing this and then decided not to do so, because the major publishers were not too enthusiastic about the shape of Apple's solution. And the probable reason that they were not too enthusiastic, is that Apple has shown little willingness to share much customer data with publishers (magazine publishers, newspaper publishers or any kind of publishers -- Apple regards the data that it obtains from the users of its devices as private and proprietary). The major consumer magazine publishers care about this because the majority of their revenues and their profits comes from advertising, and they are worried that they will not control and retain these revenues if Apple (or Google, or some other technology intermediary) manages and enables the advertising networks in digital circulation. Surrendering this ground to Apple looks like selling the family silver. I suspect that this is the biggest problem that the major magazine companies have with the Apple platform and the iTunes proposition. They are worried that they will lose out on advertising. This is not a very rational concern, because the plain truth is that the magazine companies are never going to own their digital audiences and the 'metrics' for advertising effectiveness of digital magazines in the way that they have held tight hold of print advertising audiences and metrics. The digital world (Google first and foremost) has changed that. But they can still make money out of advertising, especially with Apple if they get on the digital bus.

There is another reason that magazine publishers have been relatively slow to climb on to the iTunes system with magazine apps, and slow to see how effective for magazines the in-app purchasing option is: many who work in the magazine industry think that the digital future for magazines is somehow completely, or at least radically different from the magazines that they currently produce. They seem to assume that their digital product should be more like Facebook, or more like interactive TV, or more like a web site, than it would be like their existing product. The conventional wisdom in the magazine industry is that digital magazines need to be radically different from what has gone before. There is a marked difference between magazine publishers and book publishers in this respect. Since book publishers assume that digital books, or ebooks, are really very much the books that publishers have always published. Book publishers assume that their market and their business is going to become largely digital in the next few years. Magazine publishers seem to be strangely less confident about the continuity and convergence of their digital future on what they already do. Perhaps this is the biggest challenge facing the magazine industry at this point: to recognize that going digital is inevitable and is mostly a matter of doing what they already do only in a better and more economically digital fashion. Look for continuities and convergence before getting too preoccupied with the radical departures! Because there will be some, and digital magazines will be different.

Shared Access Codes

One of the requirements of the Apple iOS system is that an app should be shareable across devices. Speaking for myself, I now have three bits of Apple kit with the iPhone OS: an iPod Touch, an iPhone and an iPad. I also have a MacBook Pro -- and am wondering when Apple will enable apps to run across the desktop. Following the introduction of the iPad, the Exact Editions apps now have a system of 'shared access codes' through which the owner of an app can share his/her application across the various devices that he/she owns. This enhancement will be rolled out to all our apps and it ties into the iTunes account through which apps, content services and subscriptions are managed in the Apple ecosystem.

The shared access codes are short alphanumeric strings which the subscriber will input to any device that needs to run the app. The Exact Editions system from today provides subscribers with their shared access code through the Preferences page in the customer's web account, and this code can be entered on the panel which comes from the info button "?" on the app's toolbar.

The shared access code also provides an efficient mechanism through which users of Exact Editions web services can access their existing web subscription from within a 'branded app'. Customers who have an Exact Editions subscription and who notice the availability of an app from their Preferences page, will simply need to pick up the freemium app from iTunes and then run their subscription on the iOS device. So Exact Editions now provides a neat and free solution for those of our customers who have noticed that we are supporting branded apps to magazines which they have already subscribed to in their digital format. As it happens, we have also been receiving plenty of requests from print subscribers to magazines with corresponding Exact Editions apps available in the app store. Many such long-term loyal print subscribers evidently feel that they should have access to the iPad/iPhone edition as a part of their existing subscription to the publication. It is a fascinating fact that the development of the app store, and especially the successful launch of the iPad is giving the market for web-based content subscriptions a huge boost. Loyal subscribers to the print editions of Le Monde Diplomatique, the Spectator, and Music Week, email us in the expectation that they should, as of right, have access on the iPhone or iPad to a publication which they have paid for in print. We are also noticing that the publishers feel that it is appropriate to provide their print subscribers with complementary iPad subscriptions, whereas a year or two they were often somewhat indifferent about providing web-based digital editions. The iPhone, and even more the iPad is turning the magazine subscription into a digital proposition.


















When I was explaining how this system of 'shared access codes' works to a publisher, she asked me whether Apple minded about this. I guess her thought was that publishers would be able to offer access, via free apps, to web-based subscriptions for which the publisher might be charging a very full price. And Apple would not be getting a 30% share of this subscription sold directly by the publisher. The answer to this is that of course Apple does not mind if users of highly valuable web services start using those services through iOS devices. This has been happening since day one of the app store. One might say that the whole point of the app store is that it should encourage suppliers and customers to cater for the unique Apple-manufactured range of devices that use iOS. If some of these services bring hundreds and thousands of existing subscribers to the Apple hardware, Apple is not complaining. Apple is primarily a hardware company and if iOS apps encourage consumers to use Apple hardware, Apple is winning.

Nominalism, Realism and Digital Books

There is a quasi-philosophical disagreement underlying the steady digitisation of literature. A radical disagreement about what digital books really are. In a strange manner this dispute parallels the controversy between nominalists and realists in medieval scholastic philosophy about the status of universals (properties, numbers, virtues etc). Texts in the twenty-first century take the place of properties in the fourteenth. Are books more than texts, are texts more than digital file formats? Are these abstract concepts: "red", "thirteen", "chastity" real entities or are they simply instances and constructs based on our experience of coloured objects, groups of cakes and the people we meet? The nominalists denied the reality of these abstractions and the realists retaliated. Blood was shed. Now we find the digerati divided over the question whether a book is really more than a text; since the ebook nominalists, finding meaning in sentences and texts and not much else, would be be happy with books digitised as texts (preferably in the ePub standard) and the realists say that a book is much more than its text and that the pagination matters, the layout matters, the entirety of the book matters, the references and the citations to the book matter, and of course the illustrations matter; therefore in pursuit of realism, digital systems should virtualise the whole book, not just its text. While Project Gutenberg is at one end of the spectrum (nominalists carefully proof-reading and hunkered down in ASCII or XML), Google with its Book Search digitisation project is at the realist edge -- some would say 'hyper-realist' in its acceptance of blank endpapers and leather bindings, all part of the 'real book' as represented in a Google database. Google probably would, if it could, encode the sensory aura of historic books, the vinegar that comes from cholera-touched books.

But the modern predicament over books as texts, or books as virtual objects, is complicated by a dimension of uncertainty over the appropriateness of treating books as a collective whole as parts of a library and a literature, or of digitizing them one at a time as individual atoms; perhaps, in some cases, with unique and unusual bibliographic or structural properties. Digital nominalists are governed by a standard of simplicity and hold that a text is a text, is a text. But some nominalists are atomic, whilst others favour a more holistic and uniform approach, in the interests of creating a library or a reading platform, in which all books can be searched and individual books isolated as readable downloads. Correspondingly, on the 'realist' side sits Google with its holistic and scalable method, Google's whole strategy for digitizing books has been based on an assumption that all books should be accessed, searched and distributed through a single canonical library. Amazon, which has in most respects taken a 'nominalist' approach to the distribution of eBooks, it doesn't do ePub but its proprietary format 'AZW' is just another ASCII encoding standard, has also embraced a 'holistic' attitude. Amazon offers its customers global searching of the Amazon archive and encourages users to build up a collection, a mini-library of eBooks on their Kindle. Amazon, just as much as Google, would like to have a scalable and totalitarian solution to the whole of published literature. All Kindle titles are atoms in the same collective, distinguished by the fact that they can be sampled or acquired from Amazon, one book at a time as the consumer dictates and purchases.

Perhaps a diagram will aid the explanation of this digital predicament for computerized books:
















What approach to digital books heads to the top left quadrant of this matrix? Why, apps of course. If we think of books as apps, they do have a reality and concreteness which exceeds the flatness of the mere ASCII text, but the book as app is also highly individual. Perhaps a paradigm of this approach is the Atomic Antelope Alice App which has caused such a stir. The inventors of the Alice book found an intriguing way of applying 'physics', acceleration and gravity, to the Teniel illustrations in the Alice book. This is obviously a very special and un-generalisable treatment of a classic work, but as an app it is a brilliant proposition. Apps can afford to be sui generis since they stand on their own, and if this gives cataloguers and librarians a headache, too bad. The Exact Editions book and magazine apps are also in this segment of the diagram. It is, I would suggest, the potential inventiveness and the unpredictable future of the book as an application that has the most intriguing potential for the future of digital books (and libraries). If digital books do something completely novel and free-standing, something unprecedented in the world of print books, it will be because they are also software applications and can in that way assume a digital reality which exceeds our expectations of the traditional text.

Stone, scissors, paper: and the Digital Book Race

It sometimes seems that Google, Apple and Amazon are engaged in a three-way fight over the digital books space. They each have a very important area of strength: Google dominates search (and search-based advertising), Apple leads and designs the very best consumer devices, Amazon has amazing strength in consumer transactions (logistics). And the three fighters are subtly trying to manoeuvre the struggle into the terrain where their particular strengths dominate. So Google is building a massive library that will interact and benefit from Google's supremacy in search, and a lot of stuff should be free and any hardware device can access its service. Amazon is trying to build individual consumer accounts fed by their logistic strength and transactional breadth, obviously not limited to books, physical and digital, and Amazon care more about managing transactions in the consumer's account than they do about owning the device. Amazon only cares about consumers, so -- unlike Google -- they do not offer anything much to libraries. So Kindle books are readable on the iPad. Apple is trying to establish a superior hardware platform in which their range of interoperating devices cannot be matched: desktop, phone and tablet format working together. If Apple owns the superior hardware platform they will control vital pinch-points through their app store (so far limited to Apple hardware for apps and books). They are all fighting on several fronts at once. So Apple, is erecting a system of apps and phone-based demographics which will be immune to Google search. Google will be blocked in Apple's mobile domain, and Apple has built an e-commerce system that certainly rivals Amazon's, though it does not have anything like the breadth of the Amazon offering (yet). Amazon attempted to get into Apple's patch with a hardware device, the Kindle, which now appears to be completely outclassed by the iPad. Google does not want to be boxed-out by the Apple iOS, so it has launched its Android system which it hopes will attract the collective ingenuity of all the consumer electronics companies who are concerned that Apple might eat their lunch. With retaliatory ingenuity Apple is building an advertising system iAds which may seriously limit the Google advertising dominance. So the battle is three way and in deadly earnest.

Is it a game of stone, scissors and paper? Perhaps one being played in several dimensions. If so, Apple is the 'paper', they were always going to be on top of the rather dull 'Kindle' from Amazon: stone-coloured if not yet quite sunk. But Apple appears to be threatened by Google's incredible scissor-like sharpness in search. Perhaps the analogy breaks down with Amazon contra Google. Is there a way a battleground on which Amazon is beating Google? Amazon does appear to have the beating of Google in one area: third party, cloud-based, web services -- Amazon S3 etc. Perhaps this is the area in which Amazon might ultimately have the beating of Google's over-centralised approach to building a universal library. Amazon needs to build a digital book service which is more collaborative and de-centralised and which attracts libraries, authors and publishers as effectively as they have attracted book buyers.

Is there something that could change the dynamics of this three-way tussle? Lots of things. One development that would certainly change matters would be if Facebook entered the fray. Suppose that Facebook, live up to its name and did a deal with Amazon? We might then see an Amazon that really could outsmart Google in the relationships game. Cloud-based book networks.

Do you think that the Google Book Search judgement will come tomorrow? One of these days....

Optimising e-Commerce in the iOS App Store

It would seem to be potentially useful to report some experience as to what works in publishing books and magazines through the iTunes app store. Exact Editions has been offering iPhone app access for magazines with Exactly for over a year and we believe that there are some lessons that can be drawn and shared (without either revealing trade secrets or breaching the confidence of our publishers -- who own the sales data that we collect on their behalf). This picture tells a story:





















This diagram plots the Sales line for a magazine app (Blue) against the number of downloads of the Freemium app (Green) on a daily basis over a couple of months. A number of lessons can be drawn from this graph and the underlying data:

1. The 'freemium' approach works. A magazine/book publisher who makes freemium apps showcasing the content of the publication, and who uses the in-app subscription service supported by Apple, will have effective distribution of sample content and will make sales of that content.
   
2. Clearly, the sales lag the free downloads -- but not by much. One has to get potential users to sample the stuff before they buy, but the sales are likely to come in the next day or two. We haven't yet done detailed regression analysis on this, but the overall trend is clear (and our boffins are now closeted with powerful non-linear, non-parametric, least squared soonest mended black boxes).
   
3. The spikes in the data are strongly linked to the introduction of the iPad, first in the USA though this app didn't quite make it into the app store in time for the launch, and second at the end of May in Europe. Further the sales are more strongly linked to the second surge in free downloads, which tells us that this publication has a mostly European (rather than American) audience.
4. So far all the publications that we have introduced to the app store have had an acceptable uptake of samples. They are all clearly going to have at least several thousand trial installations. But there is a high degree of variability, and we do not know what makes the difference between a magazine app getting 10s of thousands of downloads in the first week or two and another magazine app getting a few thousand free installations. We suspect that prominent promotion by the publisher makes quite a difference, but it is certainly not the only factor.
5. Our statistical analysis has shown that iPad owners are much more likely to download magazine and book apps than iPhone users, and they are more likely to buy subscriptions to them. The extent to which uptake has been weighted to the iPad has really surprised us. Since the iPad was launched we have seen more sampling from iPad owners and more purchasing from them also. The majority of downloads and sales has been going to the 2 million iPad owners, not to the 70 million iPhone/iPod Touch owners. This disparity has really astonished us and several of our magazines have seen the sales ratio going in favour of the iPad in the ratio 80:20. Other sources have reported that the iPad is very strong for reading and very strong for selling books and magazines. The potential of the iPad for publishers and the reading public has been sensed, but it has still not been fully grasped. Many magazine publishers still do not have a clear idea of what an iPad/iPhone app is or how it can work to drive subscriptions.
6. Different books and magazines obviously have different 'conversion' rates. We will not speak about these in detail, but we have seen that magazines and books exhibit a fairly reliable consistency in their conversion rate. More installations of the freemium app will lead to more sales, and this allows the publisher to assess the value and effectiveness of their promotion activity. The conversion rates may appear to be somewhat low to the 'outsider', and we regard 1-2% as acceptable, 3-4% as good, but this is telling us that publishers should recognize that the app store is a great medium for having stuff sampled and evaluated, and there will be a lot of sipping and tasting without commitment or follow through. But you will be able to measure it.
7. Price makes a huge difference to uptake. If you publish an app with an in-app subscription price of £15/$20 you may get less than 3 in 1,000 samplers buying the app, however good the trial experience is!
8. We have not yet found an optimum ratio for free:closed in offering customers samples of the full content that will be available to them -- there are signs that a more open approach (over 20% a publication being open) maybe more effective than a 'tight' grasp of content. Perhaps this is related to the fact that there will generally be a lot of sampling going on, so having a slightly more convincing 'free' offer may in fact convince and convert.
9. Since Exact Editions, not Apple or the publisher, carries the 'cost' of sampling (Apple does not pay the server bills or handle the support) it is in Exact Editions interests for the conversion rate to be optimum and high!
10. The renewal rates on subscriptions are encouraging, but this is one area where the publishers and Exact Editions suffer from not having much, or any, access to customer information (Apple hold all this customer identity very tight). Since it is very much in Apple's interests for subscription renewal rates to be as high as possible (publishers and developers are aligned with Apple in this) it is more than likely that Apple will find it in its own interests to be more forthcoming with publishers and developers about this data.
11. Customers like these apps and we are getting very positive support messages from satisfied purchasers. Many customers also see the potential of this technology and are recommending that we further develop the apps in ways which will improve them. We agree with this assessment and often find that the specific recommendations are sound.

The most surprising outcome of our analysis has been the huge significance of the iPad. iPad owners are discovering the potential of this device much faster than publishers.

Why Beautiful Typography is Pixel-Indpendent.

Khoi Vinh a typographer/designer who works for the New York Times has recently delivered some fascinating comments on design for books and magazines and the iPad and the new iPhone. Here is a quote from yesterday's blog:

LESS-THAN-PERFECT VISION

Creating a beautiful display and patting yourself on the back for having good typography is disingenuous, I think. It’s a little like saying a high-definition television set makes for better television shows; an absurd claim at best.

That metaphor is imperfect, of course, because television manufacturers have nothing to do with the content that appears on their devices or with its production. But that, supposedly, is the unique value that Apple claims to offer: they build the whole widget. Not just the hardware and not just the software, but the divine unification of the two into transcendent commercial products.

Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple, repeated in yesterday’s keynote address, posits that the company operates at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. I think it’s reasonable to regard fine typography as falling within that mandate, but unfortunately, they are falling short of that promise. Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty. (Khoi Vinh at Subtraction)

There is a lot more in the post and much intelligent opinion in the comments.

While I can understand the typographers frustration at the way that Apple seems to have made some very funny (ie poor) decisions about typography and book design, and one sympathizes with Khoi in his shudder when Apple marketeers expostulate on screen about 'perfect' type, when what we see on screen is a 'typographic calamity'. Yes this is all very odd, and very odd indeed is Apple's decision to embrace the ePUB standard for iBooks and then implement it poorly (that calamitous page would be much better with a ragged right margin). This is odd because the iPad is showing that books really do not need to be as typographically simple and neutered as the ePUB standard encourages or presupposes them to be. But it is important to understand what is going on here. Apple really is just building a platform, they are not, contra Khoi, building the whole widget, or even the whole enchillada, and we notice that Apple are trying to encourage app designers and publishers to work with them. It may be that the most interesting things to do with books that Apple announced at WWDC was its decision to allow iBooks to incorporate PDF files directly (albeit in a different 'shelf'). With the new higher specification screens that Apple is producing the whole motivation for eBooks and the ePUB standard (reflowable text, translation of tables to ASCII, etc) is being undermined. Apple is belatedly recognizing this and acknowledging that many types of books (and most newspapers and magazines) will be very poorly translated to iOS if we need to rely on a file-text format such as ePUB, or even WebKit as a rendering engine. PDF is making a come-back.

The plain fact is that designers and typographers who work for digital media MUST NOT DESIGN their books, magazines, newspapers etc for display on the latest widget. They must design for 'resolution independent' display. Designers should surely notice that we now have 326 ppi Retina Display outputs, but they should then dismiss the fact, retinal displays are here today and gone tomorrow, and designers should be fixing books that will look as good as possible on any of the myriad displays that will be in the market next year, when Apple or one of its competitors will announce 'Leica Display' with 652 ppi. That means treating books and magazines as virtual editions which will be read on scores of different platforms, with many different screen resolutions. PDF files will not be the solution to this challenge, but the fact that they are being pushed back into the user's line of vision is an indication that the way the document looks and hangs together (in abstract, in the clouds, in the database) is still a key consideration. The form in which we virtualise books and documents must capture all the ways in which we might want to read, look at or use them. When we have that right we can deliver the document in as many different resolutions and platforms as we need. When books are virtualised appropriately they do not need to be rendered as typographic calamities.

Fred Wilson's Shopping List.

Fred Wilson, a vc at 'a vc', always has his finger on the pulse. But he may be missing something with his recent blog, I Prefer Safari to Content Apps On The iPad. Part of his message is that he would rather have free stuff through the web than pay for things through the app store, so you could say he has produced a non-shopping list. But we most of us do buy stuff from the app store and I think he has also craftily compiled a little public shopping list of a different kind. Mind you he certainly makes some reasonable points. Here are most of them:

1. Content apps treat pages as monolithic objects. No cut and paste.
2. There are no links to other content apps in mobile apps
   
3. No multi-tasking, so no multi-paging.
4. Every newspaper, or magazine, seems to have to invent a new interface
5. Sometimes the stuff I pay for in an app is free on the web
6. No connections with social media
7. You can't search content in apps (not with Google, sometimes not with anything)

Rather than get all defensive and point out that some of this is not true for Exact Editions apps (our apps do link to mobile apps, eg postcodes link straight to Google maps, and phone numbers are live to the iPhone. Take a look at the Congleton Chronicle app which has masses of live postcodes and phone numbers that do stuff on your iPhone/iPad. Our book and magazine apps do search their own archives, including issues not sync-ed to the iPad/iPhone). Moving gracefully from defensiveness to engagement, we can admit that he has a good list and Exact Editions already is one of the platforms that newspapers and magazines can use straight off the bat, no need to invent another UI if you pick up this one that magazines and people are already using. That scratches off point 4; we have a mini-platform that others can use!

But take another good look at the list. These are mostly solvable problems. Aren't these shortcomings obvious and tempting targets for app developers? Does anybody think that we are going to see a static picture of app development here? I have my doubts about Fred Wilson's blog, he really is a vc (venture capitalist). His blog helps his investing and distills wisdom from his experience of investing. He seems to be half out of love with his iPad and half in love with it. He uses his blog to change his mind. He uses it to think aloud. So he is not really complaining about the state of the app store, he has just produced a list of juicy targets that start-up companies in the mobile app space are going to have to address.

Take if from me, Fred has just given us the shopping list for the technologies and the companies that Union Square Ventures is going to invest in next. I would say that number 6, the interaction between apps and social media, is really a very ripe fruit. For two reasons. First, it is indeed a huge and gaping chasm in the apps universe, for the e-commerce system that Apple are building needs much more social interaction. Sure Twitter and Facebook have produced their first and very creditable apps, but getting beyond the app as 'account window' is the next step. Leveraging the plethora of apps out there is the challenge and entrepreneurs will crack it first. There is a lot of disruptive potential in getting hold of that space (software dilineating and inventing the appropriate mobile relationships between Facebook, Foursquare, content, location, music, app e-commerce and advertising). And, second, Apple will not be good at holding on to this territory for itself, much though it may wish to do so. Apple might hang on to mobile content search for its apps and to a good chunk of mobile advertising within apps but it can't/won't do the social graph for itself (far too crafted, planned and inflexible, though I would leave to see Steve, Mark and Ev in the same room).

If he hasn't already done so, I am sure that Fred will turn his list around and go looking for companies that are tackling these problems/opportunities on the iPhone and the Android platforms. But he is also missing the key change which the discovery of apps has thrown in the path of publishers. Once we start thinking of books or magazines as apps that can do, at their next iteration must do, some of this stuff (link social groups, facilitate and reciprocate Google searches, copy content, remind via citation, collect usage and reactions, or work with and through other book-apps and magazine-apps) publishing becomes a much more dynamic relationship between author and consumer. Apps are at the heart of this change and will encourage us to stop thinking of content as format-bound (boring old 'files'), but rather to view digital publications as media for engagement. Go for it Union Square Ventures. Show Fred how his apps should work!

The WIRED app -- Who is in Charge?

I recommend the WIRED Magazine app. If you have an iPad (it will not run on an iPhone) and have been a Wired reader do get the app ($4.99) to make up your own mind about it. These are some of the things I most like about it:

• Gorgeous graphics and 'interesting' design -- we will get on to that.
• Excellent and pithy articles on topics that any iPad owner will find interesting (lots of stuff: eg Steven Levy on why and how tablets will work)
• Helpful navigation through the 'layout' mode for viewing the whole magazine in article strips (icon at top right)
• I liked the interactivity in the Mars article (but its hard to read/navigate because a bit lacking in stability - patience!)
• Great ads and they are all there, sometimes with links
  

There is already quite a bit of controversy about the Wired app and it has had a painful birth. Originally, Conde Nast and Adobe were working together on a prototype that would have used Flash and the expectation was that Apple would support Flash directly on the iPhone OS, or that the Adobe cross-compiler solution would do the business. Steve Jobs shot down this idea. So they have clearly had to cobble together something pretty fast, abandoning a framework that must have cost them a lot of time and effort. The resulting app is massive (500 Mb) and has some obvious misses -- no search! But they will surely be able to improve the delivery when they move forward. Here are three important links if you want more insight into the reactions and the controversy:

1. Adobe's blog, welcoming the arrival of the app: 'The future of magazines is now - and it starts in a tangible way with the WIRED Reader.' (They must know that isn't right, they know that this version of the Wired app was a rescue mission and pretty much lashed together when they had to come up with something fast. Adobe do not come out of this whole affair at all well. They do not have a 'road map' for magazine publishers and had better come clean on that. See Bill McCoy's comments).
2. Interfacelab (Jon Gilkinson) has many astute comments and insights. Its also rude verging on insulting: "Sure, it’s a print designers wet dream – but it really should be a consumer’s wet dream. And it most certainly is not that." Gilkinson's answer is to put the business back in the hands of the web designers at Wired HQ and deliver the whole thing in HTML5. The circulation director or publisher is going to reject this proposal as there is some sign that users will buy apps, but not so much that they will buy 'urls'.
   
3. Print designers wet dream? Well try Oliver Reichenstein's blog at Information Architects to find out why it isn't that. This blog even brought in some thoughtful comments from one of the type designers consulted by Wired over the design of this issue of the magazine (Jonathan Hoefler)

Reichenstein's critique gets very detailed and very nerdy, but it is truly surprising that he focuses on the typography, not on the images, illustrations and navigation. His key point is foreshadowed in this objection:

But text is a different story. It needs a lot of rhetoric skill and typographic care to do what it should: to communicate. On the screen things become even more complicated. While WIRED journalists and graphic designers are still at the top of their game, the typography and the interaction design of the iPad app doesn’t come even close.

So Reichenstein presumably thinks that magazines should be root and branch re-designed for the iPad. "You can’t design iPad apps in InDesign and export them as flat files. That’s nothing short of amateurish. " But of course you can design magazines in InDesign and then export pages to an app, and this is a very strange comment unless you believe that magazines need to be re-designed in precise and granular detail for iPads. InDesign does not exist to design iPad apps, it exists to design magazines and other forms of document. But it is equally inevitable that most documents will now need to be read, used and presented on iPads (iPhones, Android devices etc). So a modern magazine, newspaper, book, catalogue etc better look good or 'reasonably OK' when it is rendered on some of these devices in widespread use. The transition has to be automatic. No text designers involved. Does anybody seriously think that text in magazines needs to be designed and then redesigned for each and every piece of consumer computing technology that comes along. Will magazines need to be 'redesigned' for next year's Android and then again for the 2012 super-iPad? So that they can support different screen resolutions or styles of 'text flow'? Magazines do not need to be redesigned for the iPad, their use and their usability as digital objects has to be understood before they are transformed to an app platform. This is not primarily a task for text designers, or even for magazine designers.

Wired has always had a deliberately various, bold, edgy, contrapuntal visual design. It has been a notable strength of the print magazine. The variety and confusion has worked so well in recent years partly because it apes in print the choice and chaos of the web; each Wired story carrying its own design conventions or layout, as though we were tipped into another web site as we turned the page. Each article node with its own style-sheet. I suspect that the post-modern jokiness and anarchy of Wired's visual design, which works so well when it is a print-only magazine, may be something of a weakness when it comes to its digital existence. Perhaps, as it heads to a new digital existence on the iPad and whatever comes next, Wired will need to forsake the promiscuous hurly-burly of the designer's chaise-longe for the sobriety and solidity of the app store.

Reflecting on this Wired app, which it has to be said is a bit of a 'curate's egg', I have been asking myself who has been driving this project forward? Adobe may have been at one stage, but they seem to have driven this proposition off the road (see Bill McCoy Wired is Tired). Conde Nast appears to have given the leadership role to Wired's distinguished designer Scott Dadich, but getting the digital strategy right is not merely a design decision, it is not just a technical decision. The project should now be driven by the publisher, even better it should be driven by the circulation director of the Conde Nast group. One can understand why Wired would be one of the first magazines from Conde Nast to have its own app, but whatever solution or platform is chosen for Conde Nast's magazines should really be one that can deliver across the group. Si Newhouse must have expected his premier publishing company to have chosen the best strategy for digital magazines by now. The solution is overdue and I think/hope they will get it right soon.

Exactly and Precisely

Exact Editions began with the goal of delivering magazines, issue by issue, as subscription services for web browsers. For various reasons, some of which I may have forgotten and some of which are deeply ideological, we took the view that the service had to be a pure web service. Every page of every magazine should be rendered as a web page, so that it could both link and be linked to. This is still the underlying, database-driven, system that underpins the apps that Exact Editions delivers for the iPhone O/S.

It is a year since Apple accepted our first app and it appeared in the app store (a year and four days), so it may be a good moment to take stock and review progress. One thing to say, loud and clear, is that we think Apple has built a great system. A system that is great for publishers, good for developers and very good for consumers. Apple gets stick, and its share of mockery, (and we occasionally mutter oaths under our breath when they inexplicably delay approval of a great revision to one of our/their apps) but they are doing a great job. Thank you Apple and thank you also for designing and building the iPad! The iPad is the crowning glory of the system that Apple has constructed and it is going to be very good for magazine publishers.

Exactly was our first app and it remains in some respects the lynch-pin of our offering. Through it anyone can read sample digital magazines on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and they can access their own Exact Editions account to read the current and archived issues of magazines that they subscribe to. We have been steadily adding functionality to Exactly in the course of the year. Six months ago we added content sync-ing so that the latest issue in an account could be stored on the iPhone/iPod Touch. This ability to sync has greatly improved the readability and speed of interaction with the apps on phones. Currently we have a further improved version of Exactly with the Apple approval process and this will allow double-page spread viewing and navigation on the iPad. Exactly will continue to improve as we move forward and as the Apple O/S develops -- multi-tasking is one of the features that Apple-followers are looking for in the imminent release of OS/4.

Exactly is a lynchpin in the Exact Editions product offering, but from our initial exploration of the iPhone platform we had taken the view that most magazines will benefit from having their own 'branded' apps in the iTunes app store. We have recently started viewing this complementary development of branded apps as a kind of co-relative of the Exactly proposition. Whereas Exactly allows the user and the subscriber to read and access her magazine subscriptions on the iPhone platform exactly as digital counterparts to the print subscription, the branded apps solution allows the publisher to project the title precisely branded for the iTunes market place. For the consumer a branded app works precisely as the Exactly app works, but with better branding for a particular magazine or title. But for the publisher the branded apps project the PRECISE brand associated with the magazine (or book).

Exactly is a 'white label' solution, it is neutral between the brands of the magazines that might be viewed through it, but the precisely 'branded apps' target and carry the design of the particular magazine. We are not going to make the 'precisely' label even a sub-brand for Exact Editions, because we think that the specific brands for the magazine itself is what matters to the integrity and brandedness of magazines. Precisely is an extension of the underlying Exact Editions app platform, a non-brand or place-holder for magazines that need their own brand in the iTunes economy. And that is the key point about the 'precisely' proposition, a magazine app which is branded for the magazine itself can be moved into the iTunes app store, with its own price, its own content offering, its own front cover etc....The magazine publisher who can place the magazine directly in the iTunes app store takes advantage of the existing brand recognition of the magazine itself and by selling subscriptions through the efficient Apple system the brand is of course further developed. Having the magazine directly in the iTunes app store, means that the magazine app can be sampled and bought by the 70 million people who already have iPhone O/S devices. The magazine sits directly in iTunes and there is no need for the subscriber to come to the content via the Exact Editions web service.

There are some additional immediate gains from this approach. First, the magazine app can be sampled (and in this way the App store becomes a very effective digital kiosk where some parts of the magazine can be browsed before the title is bought). Second, magazine subscriptions can be sold as 30-day subscriptions, which is a huge advantage because the iTunes market is still quite sticky about buying apps for $15 or $30 (typical prices for annual subscriptions) but much more accommodating about buying subscriptions (albeit only for 30 days) at the price of $1.99 or $2.99 that might seem appropriate to a publisher who sells print subs at $15/30. The Apple system of in-app purchasing works fine, and the low threshold for subs and renewals at modest prices are huge advantages of the iTunes e-commerce system. Apple is getting a lot of this stuff right!

A Summary of the Strengths of the Exactly/Precisely Platform

Exactly has:

1. Full digital fidelity for magazine issues and archives
2. Interactivity and in-page and in-issue navigation (live links for urls, phone numbers etc)
3. Search
4. Offline syncing
5. iPad and iPhone support

Precisely has all of that from Exactly and more:

1. Full digital fidelity for magazine issues and archives
2. Interactivity and in-page and in-issue navigation (live links for urls, phone numbers etc)
3. Search
4. Offline syncing
5. iPad and iPhone support
6. Branded app name
   
7. Branded icon
8. Branded splash screen
9. Branded app-store presence
   
10. Current issue preview
11. In-app purchase
12. 30-day subscriptions
13. Data on consumer up-take
    
14. Revenues from iTunes
    

That is all rather a big deal for magazines that want to have their own direct presence in the iTunes economy. The Exactly/Precisely platform can get a magazine up and running in the app store within two or three weeks (allow at least one week for the approval process), and most magazines which look for a strong consumer presence should be doing that now! However, we do emphasise to our partner publishers that we are offering them a branded solution from an underlying technology platform. We are not building customised app solutions. Sure there are plenty of choices and there are many issues where there can be some fine-tuning, but the platform is database driven and largely automated. It works the way it works.

Exactly and precisely that way.