iPad Usage is Shooting Through the Roof

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

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

















33 visits from Bari and 71 from Bologna.

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

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

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

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

InterDependent Content?

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

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

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

Battelle goes on to point out:

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

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

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



















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

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

Magazine Publishers and Horse Dentistry

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

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

What publishers and consumers need from Apple is a real digital newsstand, which would allow:

1. One-stop shopping for multiple publications
2. The ability to buy a single issue or subscribe
3. Capability to connect print and tablet subscriptions, including any package discounts
4. A central location to access purchased or downloaded publications
5. Sales via iTunes or a publisher's own circulation system, with royalties adjusted appropriately

Damon Kiesow 3 strategies emerge for charging for iPad publications

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

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

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

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

Adobe's Magazine Solution for the iPad

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khoi Vinh's Indigestion and the iPad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Apple's Mission Statement?

We all know Google's mission statement: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (Google: Company Overview). Amazon has a vision statement that you may have encountered: "Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online." (Amazon: Corporate FAQ's). I bet you did not know that Apple has a 'sort of' mission statement on its investor relations pages:

"Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone."

That doesn't get me too far. It sounds more like an overly-potted history than a mission statement, it is also somewhat out of date, since it doesn't even mention the latest revolutionary step: the iPad. I subscribe to the view that Apple has incredibly ambitious goals which it probably does not even articulate to itself. It is determined to invent and own the high end of consumer computing, which is going to be the only safe place for a computer manufacturer to be in five years time (see Charlie Stross on "The Real Reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash", or as John Gruber has it 'The iPad really is The Big One: Apple's reconception of personal computing' from "This is how Apple rolls").

So Apple's mission may be so audacious that it would be unwise to articulate it fully. But it may also have crafted its trajectory in such a way that it does not become too obviously monopolistic. Apple wants to revolutionize the world of personal computing (that is what Jobs and Wozniack did first time around in the 1970s) and yet the company does not obviously want to monopolize the market. Carving out the high-end, deluxe end, of the consumer market should be enough. Is that the way that publishing will work in the future? There will be a high-end platform for those who like to buy into Apple standards, and a more chaotic, Android, world of confused standards where stuff is cheaper, where there is more stuff and wilder stuff (including Flash and porn) but perhaps also less reliability and consistency?

Book Pricing, the iPad, and the Bvlgari Book

Some months, shortly after the iPad was announced, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan published a much discussed and influential blog on the pricing of books and the 'agency model'. This was influential because it articulated the reason why Macmillan (and most of the other large publishers) were going to use the advent of the Apple iPad as an occasion for reasserting publisher control over the pricing of books. Digital books that would be sold through the iPad's iBook store, but also for reasserting control over the pricing of books that would be sold by Amazon through their Kindle. Publishers through the agency model would set the price of the book to be sold to end users and allocate a set percentage of that price to the distributor/retail channel, or technology partner (30% is becoming the norm for distribution share). Amazon by implication would no longer be allowed to set, and to lower, prices to $9.99. Amazon would have to put up with some loss of control and a higher but pre-determined margin.

The ructions caused by this blog posting are on-going, but the comment that most struck me in Sargent's blog was an aside and a promise:

I have not addressed illustrated books or books for young children. That will be a topic for the future as the technology advances beyond e-ink screens. John Sargent Macmillan Blog

We have not heard any more about the special case(s) of illustrated books or books for young children. But why should they be different? Why should the pricing and availability of books of different types be subject to quite different considerations? Well no doubt a part of the answer is that illustrated books (and many children's books are essentially illustrated) will not work well on e-ink screens. Mind you the iPad is not an e-ink screen, but I suppose one could say that the iBook store does appear to be catering for books that would otherwise be suitable for e-ink screens. Illustrated books and some other types of high-design books are evidently not suitable for the iBookstore or the e-Pub format used by most e-ink devices. So illustrated books do seem to be a bit of a special case and more suitable for deployment as free-standing apps directly in the iPad system.

It is surprising that we have not yet seen more high-design books implemented as free-standing apps in the iTunes system. The iPad is eminently suitable for rendering beautiful illustrated books. How will the pricing work when they arrive? Will beautiful virtual books on the iPad be priced higher or lower than other books?

There is an argument for saying that beautiful illustrated books will be much cheaper as digital books on the iPad (or on Android tablets etc) than they will be in print. Perhaps the clever strategy now for a publisher of beautiful books would be to move rapidly up-market, towards a luxury option for printed books, whilst simultaneously making digital versions of the books available at highly competitive prices. This strategy would chime in with a prediction from Alberto Vitale that printed book prices should rise as digital book prices inevitably fall:

"a book that sells today for $27, $28.95 may be selling within the next two to five years at anywhere between $37.95 and $45."

"Eventually, I believe the market will bear the higher price -- publishers will have to experiment with the price. The economics of book publishing are not very good now," Vitale said, adding he did not expect "appreciable resistance" from consumers to higher hardback prices.

Vitale further predicted that the cost of e-books will drop ........ "E-books will become the equivalent of the mass market. Mass market is not down market, it's just a market accessible to a larger number of people. That's why I believe e-book prices have to be lower than they are today. The consumer is not stupid, he knows the e-book is a lot more economical to produce than a regular paper book," (See full article from DailyFinance).

This is pretty cogent thinking. I think it is especially persuasive for highly illustrated beautiful books. For the following reasons:

(1) Whatever publishers say, the pricing of printed books has something to do with the costs of producing and manufacturing them (the official line is that pricing should be set by market expectations, but in practice all publishers pay attention to unit costs when setting print prices). The costs of printing and manufacturing the marginal, or run-on copies matter to the traditional publisher. Especially is this true for high quality illustrated books which have very good paper and complex printing. Good colour costs if the book is to be manufactured. Colour costs nothing in the digital case. In fact the marginal cost of another digital reader or licensee is essentially zero as it is with any digital book. The run on cost of all digital books is essentially zero. There is no reason that big and beautiful digital books should cost more than any other kind of book, mass market or otherwise. There is no cost penalty for being a big book, or having full colour throughout if the book is digital.

(2) Furthermore the perceived value of a print book will be increased if the standard of production and of reproduction is increased. From which it should follow that the price of the print product should be increased to the point that the 'exclusive' and 'exceptional' value of the physical object is enhanced. Physical books of high quality should increasingly be priced according to the rules of Bvlgari and Gucci, not according to the standards of Marks & Spencer or the Gap. Publishers of such books: Thames &Hudson, Phaidon, Yale, Rizzoli and so on will find it profitable to improve the quality and reduce the print runs for their best books, because

(3) Selling relatively cheap digital editions will not only increase the market reach of beautiful books, it will also help to sell the more expensive printed books. There are potentially large markets for beautiful digital books at prices in the region of $5-$10, merely for reading, even though the printed book may cost $50-$100. Very attractive physical books will be very attractive digital books, especially as the quality and fidelity of electronic devices surpass that of the iPad, which they will. Larger digital sales will in effect promote the desirability of exclusive and less affordable printed editions. Customers who might like to possess a very expensive book, and to handle it, to put it on their shelves, or to collect it, are more likely to do so if they have already seen and probably purchased a digital version of the book.

(4) For as Vitale so eloquently observes, the consumer is not stupid. The consumer knows that the marginal cost of a digital book is close to zero, just as she knows that the cost of beautifully produced printed volume may be close to the manufactured cost of a Gucci handbag (ie quite possibly less than 10% of the price that may be charged, but a lot more than zero).

Of course this argument does not completely follow if there is a significant degree of substitutability between beautiful printed books and the same book as a digital edition. But there surely is not? If a physical book is valued because it is expensive, because it can be handled, because it is potentially rare and collectible it will not be substituted by a digital edition which is none of these things. I suspect that we shall soon see some quality art publishers putting this thesis to the test and they will do so, because for many of the best illustrated books there is quite a large audience that merely wants to read or consult the beautifully produced virtual object. For the beautiful book that is merely going to be read there is no case for charging more than $5 or $9.99 or whatever becomes the 'normal' price for a digital book. I agree with Vitale that this 'normal' price will soon be coming down. Partly because consumers are not stupid, but also because competition is at work and lower prices will sell more books. Always has done. Always will. But there still should be a very nice market for the beautiful physical book. Why not? We also like beautiful handbags.

Suppose all Books are Apps?

The idea that books might work as apps on the iPhone first struck home when I heard someone say that the idea did not scale well.... So for me this 'books as apps' meme started with the negative idea that books would not work too well as apps in the iPhone economy. But sales in the iPhone app store suggest that books as apps are working very well (customers are buying them) and in the last few months the notion has been tickling me that books really will be apps on the iPhone and this is a significant breakthrough.

But let us step a bit and ask (in non-technical terms): what is an app? FOLDOC has a reasonable definition: "A complete, self-contained program that performs a specific function directly for the user." But the term has come to mean a bit more than this and now seems to broadly correspond to this family of features:

1. Apps are client side programs (relatively small packages of code that operate in the phone).
2. Apps have a rather well-defined function; even if like Accuweather, or the Google Maps app this function is very wide-ranging and comprehensive over a significant domain; or like the Brushes app, or a camera-app, the function is highly generative and capable of incredibly rich output.
   
3. Apps are elements of software which are not system software (which means that users can and will choose whether or not to have them. The world is not going to collapse if you do without the 'project management' app or the 'slimming' app)
4. Apps are sourced from an app store (or something like that), which might well have a complex set of purchase options and advertisement-related rules.
5. Apple's apps are not (yet) multi-tasking, but they are to a degree interdependent. It is a big achievement of the iPhone O/S that sets of apps can work rather well together (social network apps become much more powerful by leveraging the output of other web service apps; camera apps can provide input for augmented reality apps, etc)
   
6. Furthermore, many apps are internet dependent even though, (see 1 and 3 above), they are client-side and optional. This means that many of the most useful apps, like the Google Maps app, are crucially dependent on an internet service, a cloud-based database system, or for a Twitter client such as Tweetie, on a pre-existing a web application (Twitter) to give them their scope and real-time functionality.

While these several features may not give us a necessary and sufficient set of conditions for the definition of 'app' and its precise meaning, I think they show that this notion is a really rich concept which is taking on a critical role in the way that we think about mobile computing and the web. And that is the key point to understanding apps: the web and the internet is the ground on which they operate. Apps are merely toys if they are not open to, and using web services. This is also a very reassuring point about the app concept.

Some critics of Apple, such as John Battelle and Jonathan Zittrain, believe that the company is trying to close off developers and tie down consumers to a purely Apple walled garden. Whether or not Apple are trying to do this, and they clearly are trying and succeeding in policing their own app store, it is obvious that Apple cannot hope to achieve an exclusive domain and an effective monopoly in the distribution of media content. The way apps work -- using internet services to get any breadth, currency or scale -- is far too open and web-dependent to allow anybody to make a real walled garden for apps. These web services are inherently too pervasive and leaky. Apple cannot do this because its software system is crucially dependent on leveraging the economies and technologies of the internet and the web. So long as the Apple system supports standard web browsers there will always be competition and effective competition in the iPhone eco-system from web services and web apps. Further it is pretty clear that Apple's success in building an app store and an e-commerce system for media properties on their platform will breed competitors. There are plenty of burgeoning competitors to the Apple app store and some of them will be successful (Android looks like the best bet for serious competition). No app developer or media publisher is going to rest easy with an Apple-only media landscape.

The funny thing is, it now looks as though Apple is beginning to fall back from the idea that books are apps. The big launch event that book publishers are anticipating with the release of the iPad is the arrival of the iBooks application in which books are treated as digital files (with an ePub file format), not as individual apps at all. This is a bit strange, because Apple is putting itself on all fours with its obvious competitor for books: Amazon which already has a well accepted and free app on the iPhone for its Kindle customers. We will see how that works out....Exact Editions at least is working on the assumption that some books are certainly best treated as apps, and that magazines also will work best on the iPhone and on similar platforms if they are launched and developed as internet-driven apps.

The Ibis Reader is Well Done

The Ibis reader was released a week ago and it gets a very solid review from the Wired blog Gadget Lab:

Ibis reader is an e-book reading application that does everything that you’d expect an iPhone e-reader to do, with one big difference: It doesn’t come from the App Store. The app runs on any iPhone or iPod Touch and offers full offline access to your library of books, and is as fast and responsive as a native iPhone application. It manages this through the magic of HTML5, which is supported by Mobile Safari and - crucially - offers offline storage for web-sites. (Ibis reader for iPhone a web app that thinks its a native app)

It also runs on Android, of course it should -- it is a web app, though I have not checked this out myself. At Exact Editions we dont care too much about eBooks and the ePub standard. We think digital editions are much more important. But we like the style of the Ibis reader, and we definitely think that eBooks should be done well if they are done at all. Doing them well should encompass, doing them in such a way that users do not get locked down into a proprietary standard, nor is it good if publications are made available only through a sole e-commerce solution (whether Kindle, or iTunes or something else). There has to be consumer choice; and Ibis is also an elegant piece of software development which works nicely on my iPhone and on the desktop. All round it is to be applauded.

Having decent reading solutions outside the Kindle and the iPad is a sure way of keeping Amazon and Apple competitive. Note also that this independent piece of software almost certainly can/will run on the iPad and without Apple permission. This actually is a strong vote for Apple and underscores the point that the iPhone/Pad can never be a completely closed environment and of course Apple intends it to be a developer environment in a way in which the Kindle really cannot be (despite Amazon hand-waving). But there remains a compelling case for publishers to put stuff through the iPad and iPhone ecommerce solutions. iPhone apps have a lot going for them....as will become increasingly apparent in the next 6 months. Being in the iTunes e-commerce environment is all about being discovered, tried and sold for profit and pleasure. Publishers who want to be a part of the commercial success of the iPad platform will have to grin and submit to Apple's rules and commercial charge (30% commission). The Ibis service will appeal more to publishers who have a very defined market in mind and are primarily interested in selling ebooks which do not need the hurly-burly of the Apple market place and can be well rendered in the ePub format.

Making Life Difficult for Android

I am sure you noticed that Steve Jobs was reported as really going at Google, and particularly targeting Android. There has also been a good deal of discussion on the Apple:Adobe kerfuffle over Flash. Some of the best points are being made by John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

Here’s what I mean about Flash Player’s performance being a distraction from the underlying story: Even if Adobe solves Flash’s performance problems, I still doubt Apple will want to include it in iPhone OS.

It boils down to control. I’ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There’s no bug Apple can’t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can’t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for. That’s just not true for Mac OS X, where a component like Flash Player is controlled by Adobe.
........
I say what Apple cares about controlling is the implementation. That’s why they started the WebKit project. That’s why Apple employees from the WebKit team are leaders and major contributors of the HTML5 standards drive. The bottom line for Apple, at the executive level, is selling devices. It may well be true that Steve Jobs doesn’t really give a shit about the web in and of itself. It’s just good business for Apple to control a best-of-breed web rendering engine. If Apple controls its own implementation, then no matter how popular the web gets as a platform, Apple will prosper so long as its implementation is superior. (Yet More on the Unfolding Future-of-Flash-and-the-Web Saga)

Its all about control. And you could say much the same thing about the recent row over Apple throwing out various dubious bad taste, vaguely ridiculous and smutty apps. Again this is really Apple asserting its ability to control not only the implementation of its hardware, but also the environment in its e-commerce operation. Its all about controlling the environment and the implementation. Of course, iPhone users and iPad owners will still be able to access and play bikini-shaking apps on their iPhone. It is just that they will have to be web apps. There is lots of wicked, I mean really bad stuff on the web and it will run in the browser but it doesn't go in the catalogue. Users will still be able to access any kind of pornography or worse, but Apple are saying loud and clear that they are not going to have them in their iTunes listings or in their e-commerce mall. It is pretty much the same issue of control as when a shopping centre landlord says: "No massage parlours and no abatoirs in this 5 acre park. Sorry, no boiling of bones here."

Why does control of this sort, both of the operating system and the environment, matter so much to Apple? It matters because the quality of the consumer experience is affected by these issues and Apple is trying, succeeding, in mapping out a high-end and smarter consumer experience. That is it.

But it isn't quite all. Have you noticed, how by asserting these standards and insisting on control Apple is parenthetically giving Android a tough hand to play? Android looks like being the number 2 (maybe it will be number 1, but it is starting at number 5 or 6) mobile platform. Apple is giving them some nice assets to start building their consumer experience: here you can have Flash. And a lot of the early Android phones will make much of the fact that they can run Flash. Here: you can have all the developers who produce Apps in lousy taste. Clever developers, ticked off with Apple who have a tendency to produce wobbly boob apps. These are what chess players call 'poisoned pawns'. There is no way that Android will not be able to welcome these gifts with, gritted teeth, open arms. But could it be that Android's playing field is being subtly polluted? Google really doesn't much like Flash either, and I suspect Eric Schmidt is not a great fan of iBoob, still less of BabyShaker. Is Android going to be the environment in which Flash stuff runs not too well? How are Google/Android going to navigate the smut field? Part of the point (a large part of the point) of Android is that it is a much more open environment than the traditional smart phone O/S. A large part of the point of the Android e-commerce system is that it will not have those 'ridiculous' Apple controls. Steve Jobs is totally and absolutely delighted that Android will suck up this stuff that he is throwing out of his shopping trolley. Couldn't be pleased-er when the Android e-commerce mall gets the reputation of having dubious apps.