Syncing Multiple Issues and Bonus Media in Apps

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

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

Bonus Media are signposted in the menu bar

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

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

Syncing multiple issues through the check boxes on the issue list

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

Business Week's New Business Plan

Business Week has been on the block for months, and by reports it will soon be sold. At the start of the sale process, the story was that the magazine might be sold for $1. Now there seems to be enough interest that it may be sold for rather more than that, perhaps to Bloomberg. That would be an ideal outcome. Bloomberg have the capital and the network to restore Business Week to its rightful place as the most important general business magazine in the US market.

What are the essential planks of the new business plan that Bloomberg should enact?

1. Advertising has been the bedrock of Business Week's revenues for decades. Until recently was a massive cash gusher; but it has fallen dramatically. In 2000 Business Week carried 6,000 ad pages (yes, that averages over 100pp a week). Last year fewer than 2,000 ad pages were filled and this year the total is heading towards 1,250 pages (source: 24/7WallSt.com). Since the page rates will inevitably have softened, it is likely that BW will in 2009 gather perhaps only 15/20% of the ad revenues that it clocked up in 2000. Do not neglect the print advertising, it is still far too important to the annual budget. But the business plan should not be predicated on rapid recovery in print advertising.
   
2. Do not assume that the web site advertising will hold up either.
   
3. Advertising is not the solution. A solid subscription base to the circulation has to be the bedrock of the new business plan. The easy part is to fix the print subscriptions and to do that by charging a realistic subscription rate that makes money for the magazine from marginal subscribers. Some print subscriptions are being sold at a 90% discount from the official rate. Such deep discounting undermines the list prices and there is no point in selling subscriptions at a loss when the advertising targets have been drastically reduced. Hold the print price and be prepared to increase the price....
4. If increased value is being delivered to print subscribers be prepared to raise the price on the news stand and through subs. Quality in the editorial matter is fundamental. Improve the editorial product, so that the magazine again becomes a must read for its core audience. The circulation may be pruned by reducing give away subs, but it can be rebuilt from a firm content offering.
   
5. Develop the digital subscription offering. This means delivering a digital edition service which is complementary to print subscribers (automatic benefit when they have communicated their email/user name), which provides comprehensive access to the excellent archive. Make it a genuine web subscription so that bookmarks work, so that special issues can be given away as samples via the BW web site, and so that the subscription works on all web-enabled devices (iPhones, TVs, Wii's etc).
6. The print circulation base to BW is just under 1 million. Some of those marginal subscribers will be lost as prices are adjusted, but it is perfectly realistic for BW to aim for a digital subscription base much higher than that. BW as a digital offering could become the leading international business magazine for consumer-subscribers. But it will take time to build the digital subscription audience to 100,000 and then to 1,000,000.
   
7. As well as offering complementary digital subscriptions to all print subscribers, offer digital only subs at a reasonable price (not too low, perhaps 50% of the real print sub price). This will mean that the digital sub is very good value for overseas subscribers. But that is an audience that BW already to some extent has, and needs to consolidate.
8. Do not muddy the waters by 'throwing in BW' subscriptions as part of the Bloomberg subscription. Tempting though that option is, the aim has to be to develop BW as a distinct and valuable subscription offering in its own right.
9. Consider carefully whether it really makes sense to offer BW via the Amazon Kindle, when Amazon is taking a 70% cut, and the Kindle edition is showing up without colour and full content.
10. Consider carefully whether it would not be highly advisable to sell digital subscriptions via the iPhone App store. Having a Free App is an interesting starting point, not an end game.
11. Fundamental rule. Believe in the value and quality of the magazine as a print product and as a digital service. The integrity and editorial substance of the magazine is its key asset and lies at the heart of its digital success.
    

Many of these recommendations amount to saying "Make Business Week more like The Economist". One can be sure that The Economist does feature in a competitive analysis of what has gone wrong with BW, but The Economist also has not yet figured out how to deliver a solid audience of digital subscribers. BW will have some advantages in getting this right first. This sale is a break with the past. So much has not been working out well for BW in its digital initiatives that it is time that some sacred cows were sacrificed and some simple steps taken. Building digital subscriptions is the obvious path that needs to be developed.

Controlling Your Own Destiny

It continues to amaze me that magazines do not take care to preserve an effective archive of their published issues. Most of the smaller magazines have learned that it is handy and useful to retain an archive of their back issues in PDF form. PDFs are an important insurance policy, even if the publisher plans to deliver the archive in some other way.

The biggest magazine companies often find it surprisingly difficult to lay their hands on a solid collection of PDFs. Sometimes all that they have managed to archive is the vectorised form of the PDF (which means that all the text information in the file is lost). We were running a test for a big magazine and the publisher was appalled to be told that the repro house would charge them £5,000 pa for supplying a PDF of each issue. In these straightened times publishers dont like taking on any additional costs. And why should they? Since spinning a PDF out of the workflow is simply a matter of flipping a switch at the appropriate moment, this is simply outrageous profiteering from the repro house.

Magazine publishers are a special case in this negligence of their archives. Newspaper publishers and book publishers have learned through bitter experience that having a solid archive of PDFs of their publications is necessary. And it is easy to do. The repro houses are only trying it on. If a major magazine tells its repro house that it will lose the business unless the PDFs are supplied on demand, then the repro house will jump to flip the switch..... The cost to them is zero.

Fast Flip: How Google Reads Newspapers and Magazines

Google yesterday launched Fast Flip at Google Labs. From the announcement:

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. See Googleblog.

This is a highly revealing way of characterising our on-line reading experience. It is as though Google thinks there are only two ways of reading. Search, of course. First, and foremost, search in which you know more or less what you want and use a search engine to find it. And then 'flipping through content very fast until you find something interesting.' Publishers and educators know that this is not the way that most serious and most recreational readers read. Although much reading is exploratory, the reputation of a title, an author or a publisher is and will remain important to readers of newspapers, magazines and books. Metadata matters. Titles, editions, dates, authors, correspondents, replies, corrections, editorials ....

Google makes this 'fast flipping' possible by hosting images from the newspaper and magazine web sites. Incidentally, they only use the newspaper websites. I did not see any pages which actually used the Print Image. They are building on the look and feel of the publishers web sites, not their magazines and newspapers as printed. The service is clearly aimed at attracting publishers through a revenue split, but the activity is hosted and managed by Google and one wonders whether the collateral advertising which appears in the margin of the page images can generate significant revenues. Paul Bradshaw thinks not:

Of course, by hosting screenshots Google are eating into one of the key metrics that publishers use to sell advertising: the time a user spends on your site. And given that many readers don’t read beyond the first few pars, there’s a good chance it will eat into the numbers clicking through to the actual page at all. So unless Google’s ad rates are significantly higher, what reason at all would a commercial publisher have to sign up to a scheme that devalues their own ad inventory in exchange for some pennies from Google? Blind panic in the midst of a crisis, that’s all. Google's Fast Flip -- A Cruel Joke on the News Industry

The commercial proposition is highly dubious. But Google is being completely sincere and genuine in offering its helping hand . Google is convinced that this Fast Flipping is the way that consumers want to read news on the internet.

"We have tried to build platforms and tools that build a healthy, rich eco-system online that is supportive of content. This is a new way of looking at content." Marissa Mayer quoted by BBC News.

Having seen the success of Google News, and keeping in mind the atomisation of music, and the considerable success of the iPod Shuffle, Google appears to consider that a rapid flipping (navigation) between atomised stories is the way to read news. The point has been clearly stated by their spokespersons.

...... the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper's homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.... Marissa Mayer Testimony to the US Senate on the Future of Journalism (PDF)

The Internet has changed the unit of consumption. The unit of consumption for news is now the article, not the newspaper. I still love reading the newspaper. But I use the Internet to look at a lot of news stories, too, and on the Internet there's a different way of consuming things. No one is saying that newspapers shouldn't make money...
William Patry, Google copyright expert, Interview with Publishers Weekly

Google News and Google Fast Flip embody the view that the context of publication in which a story is published is unimportant. News therefore works best on the web if it is atomised and decontextualised. Newspapers and magazines have to an extent prepared the ground for this. Their own web sites make it increasingly difficult to locate the story in the context in which it was published. Magazines are careless about the value to subscribers of the contents of their current and forthcoming issues. Newspapers and Magazines need to recover the confidence that reading the magazine or the newspaper is an experience that can be enjoyed on the web as much as it can be in print. The newspaper and the magazine as a digital experience have to offer sufficient value that a readers is prepared to become a subscriber to the magazine or newspaper. Subscription services -- especially of the digital edition and its archive will generate much more for most publishers, than a Fast Flip of streamed content which will catch a trickle of Ad-sense revenues. Of course, there are changes and more will be needed. Search within a publication is very important. Internal navigation is very important. The possibility of citation and book-marking is essential. External navigation is especially important when it is relevant to the reading experience. But, Fast Flipping? That may be about as much use as Shuffling the news.

Google Pictures and Google Books

Did you investigate the recent news stories about Google putting 14 masterpieces from the Prado into Google Earth, so that you can zoom and pan these great works in extraordinary detail (search for 'Museo del Prado' on Google Earth)? Over 3 months Google engineers/photographers took 8,000 highly detailed photos of the 14 paintings and in painstaking fashion they have been pieced together to form magnificent reproductions. Here is a tiny detail from Goya's picture of Executions on Principe Pio hill.



You would need to be peering very close to the picture to see this detail of the terrified eye of the victim.

This is a great project and for me it immediately raises the question: "Will Google attempt to do for pictures and the world's great art what it is now doing for books and all the world's published literature?" Namely: will Google capture all of art, the contents of all museums in image form and render it searchable and viewable to anybody anywhere? It is a perplexing thought, and I suspect that at some level of detail Google does want to do this. Remember the Google mission: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

While Google has immense ambition and vast technical appetite, I wonder whether they really can be planning to capture all the works of art held in the world's museums and galleries. There is an awful lot of it, and surely its unfeasible to track and record it in the great zoom-detail of these Prado masterpieces. And, who, after all, is to say that even this level of magnification and detail is adequate? A thorough and scholarly appraisal of many objects will require even greater resolution and magnification. It also has to be said that it is hard to see great potential for advertising revenues, still less subscription revenues, from a database which captures all cultural artefacts in 2D or 3D high resolution. At some point, the goal of collecting and organizing all the world's information, becomes an incoherent and an infinite task. Indeed at some point well before that infinite limit, any conceivable or realisable value in the aggregate of all the information in the world runs out. If Google does plan a collaboration with museums and libraries as intensive as the collaboration it is now running with 20 of the world's leading research libraries, it will have to take on board the principle that selection, focus, metadata, and priorities need to be established before you database the lot. Especially when you are databasing only some of the lot.

If Google is planning to put a very large, but necessarily selective, database of art and all museum-worthy objects into a database drawn from the world's museums, it is interesting that they have chosen to do this through the medium of Google Earth, rather than be a development of Google Images. So you see these high resolution pictures as though you were visiting the Prado, guided to them through an excellent 3D model of the building and indications of where, in which room, the paintings are hung. You do not come at them as you would in searching for 'Goya execution' on Google images, where you arrive at vastly inferior reproductions of the same painting, mixed up with other stuff.

I suspect that museums and art galleries will do a lot of this sort of work themselves. This virtual Prado does not carry any ads, but let us face it, its a spectacularly good advertisement for the Prado itself. Rival galleries must be envious of the attention this has drawn to 14 masterpieces in Madrid. Similar resources will be free to the public and advertising will pay a relatively small part in the funding process. Google will be much more interested in providing the search services and the indexes for all this curatorship and detailed photography than in actually doing all the heavy lifting. Mind you, if it turns out that museums and art galleries are quite capable of databasing their own collections, it may also turn out that more libraries decide to do a similar job for their own collections. The fact is that the tools used by Google for capturing information held in books, libraries, pictures and museums are increasingly available to us all. Capturing information on your digital camera or your iPhone is almost a democratic right. It will be very hard for companies to build exclusive monopoly holds over information which anyone can collect with a wave of their hand.

Google Does Magazine Search

Google Blogs the news and Danny Sullivan has an excellent summary of what the service does and currently doesn't do.

Here is a 2-page spread from New YorK Magazine on Tom Stoppard.

Google is mainly (entirely?) working from scans (yes I know that there were no PDFs in the 50's, 60's and 70's). I am not sure that there are any current issues in the archive I couldnt see anything yet from the noughties (correction Popular Science is there up to Feb 2008). In this respect the magazine service is rather like the historic newspaper archive that Google has also been working on. It is building up a large 'long tail' whilst the magazine and newspaper publishers dither about what to do with the short head (hint: think about selling subscriptions -- that is what Google is soon going to be doing for new books). Isn't this the strongest possible wake-up call for magazine publishers? Hey folks, time to get your current issues up and running on the web. Make your magazines searchable through Google and sell subscriptions to them through Exact Editions!

Thanks to Google for pointing out the way things should go. Thanks to Google for once again creating a proper web version of print objects.

Footnote: Google is now indexing magazines in the Exact Editions service where the pages have been made open access by the publisher. Google reads the ascii version of the pages, which is also there to aid the print-impaired audience. It would be practical for Google to index all our pages and produce search results for the whole content even the stuff behind subscription barriers. If any Google publisher-liaison person reads this perhaps they can tell us how to link up with Google on that!

Magazines Coming out of the Recession II

What would Google do? I think that the CEO of any magazine company should ask themselves this question. We are now in a really tough recession. Advertising is getting scarce, shrinking in print and going to the web. Subscriptions are tough. News stand sales are tougher. Magazines and periodicals are explicitly excluded from the scope of the Google Settlement with the Authors and Publishers. But what would Google do with magazines?

The short answer is that Google would not be doing what most magazine brands are doing. Google would not be building something other than the magazine which tries to capture, enshrine, repurpose, reposition whatever it is that great magazines do really well. Google, if it had its way with magazines, would be doing with magazines what it has won the agreement of the publishers to do with books. It has started doing this with newspapers (also excluded from the settlement), digitizing historic newspaper archives. It would be building a database system which coherently and elegantly puts magazines on the web exactly as they are and then selling digital subscriptions to those digital magazine properties. That is exactly what Google is planning to do with books and that is what the magazine publishers should be doing with their magazines. Working with Exact Editions consumer magazines can sell digital editions with no upfront costs. Just new revenues. The conventional magazine wisdom is that the magazine's web site needs to be somewhat like the magazine content but somewhat mixed up, that customers don't buy subscriptions to digital magazines and that magazine ads do not work on the web. Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

Magazine publishers who see their magazine coming out of the recession stronger than they went in, will realise that they need to build digital subscriptions and build them fast in a pure web platform. Make sure the magazine works on the web. Make sure that it works on an iPhone and Android. Make sure that Google searches it and that anybody can link to it.

This is a matter for CEO's. Its a matter for owners and for those who care and see the magazine in its total consumer space. The conventional wisdom that consumer magazines will somehow 'morph' into web sites needs to scrutinised very carefully. In few cases does it really work. A lot of consumer magazines are building themselves expensive and irrelevant web mausoleums. Portfolio, a great new magazine launched in 2006 has recently fired most of its large web staff. For a while it had a cool but unprofitable web site. But you still cannot subscribe to a digital edition of the magazine. The magazine is in most cases the best possible vehicle to put itself on the web. As a digital edition. Do that and then supplementary resources (blogs and competitions, newsgroups and communities) can be built around it.

If magazines get their act together and start offering themselves for inspection and for sale on the web, they will be in a good position to work with Google when it has finally got its act together and is selling millions of book subscriptions. That could be 2010. Get ready for the other side of the recession. The upside and the out-side. It will be more digital.

Google's Newspaper Project

Barbara Quint (always worth reading), in Information Today, has some interesting comments as she reports on the massive Google Newspaper archiving project.

Google's efforts in this space are undoubtedly impressive. But the readable quality of old newspapers is inevitably poor. Take a look at this 1944 issue of the St Petersburg Times. Google can break the newspaper up into articles and can find the headline "Russians Nearing Minsk" -- this is not easy and totally cool -- but the readability of a facsimile of a 1944 newspaper is going to be poor. I also find it a trifle intriguing that searching on the phrase "Russians Nearing Minsk" in the Google archive, or indeed on the complete Google web index finds no results at all. How can that be? Did I misread the headline?

There is a real question in my mind why Google is doing this. And I take it that their process is entirely (ok 99.99%) automated. There would be no justification for doing it if it cost them significant man hours. And I also take it that they are in principle willing to digitise every newspaper. Google does not usually bother to 'negotiate' about what content should be put into its system, anything that can be scanned and that comes from one of their partners goes in the maw. Google does not do things by halves: see the correspondingly outlandish projection from Chad Hurley, that Google's YouTube appetite will lead to exponential growth of video on the web and in the cloud.

It is highly intriguing the way in which Google's confidence that every newspaper edition is worth digitising contrasts with the widespread gloom in the mainstream newspaper business that they fundamentally have no basis for a profitable future, especially the local papers. It is very puzzling that very few newspapers have made proper efforts to sell digital editions to their current subscribers. Deeply puzzling given Google's appreciation of the value of archival databases.

Digital Newspapers and Digital History

Was it a coincidence that on pretty much the same day Google made an announcement about its massive newspaper archiving project, Plastic Logic announced its plans for an eInk newspaper reader? Both stories were caught by the NY Times: plastic papers here, and deep print archives here.

If Plastic Logic have their way you will be able to read any of today's newspaper anywhere in a digital format on a single fold away sheet, something like a napkin (perhaps they will have a gingham pattern when they are in idle mode?). If Google have their way you will be able to read any days newspaper anywhere, going back over 100 years. Space and time are melting before our eyes. Everything becomes readable. Not that we have any more time to read stuff.

Whilst welcoming these marvellous advances, I completely share Martyn Daniel's concern, that the propositions will fail if we need multiple reading devices for reading different sorts of digital print. A Kindle for books, a Plastic Logic napkin for newspapers, and no doubt an iMag reader of some kind for magazines. That way lies madness. Google have a better plan try to deliver everything through a web browser. That should work in the direction of universal access. I hope Plastic Logic realise that their device needs to run a standard web browser before they commit everything to a Kindle-like proprietary device.

Of course Google has to view the digital proposition in the way that it does. Google is a search engine. Google's newspaper announcement is a not so subtle reminder that digital stuff, even flakey yellowing newsprint from the nineteenth century, has to be searchable to be useful. From which it follows that it really has to be deliverable through a web browser. What is the point of having something searchable if it cannot be delivered through a web browser? From which it follows that proprietary formats and platforms are doomed. Amazon would be well advised to re-visit their strategy.

Copyrights and Back Issues

An important decision on a dispute that has been rumbling for years in the US

Back-to-back rulings by federal appellate courts in Atlanta and New York favoring the National Geographic Society will allow magazine and newspaper publishers to transfer their published archives to computer discs and sell them commercially without infringing on freelance contributors' copyrights. ....... the 11th Circuit majority determined that because National Geographic's digital library reproduced complete magazine issues "exactly as they are presented in the print version," publishers retained the privilege of reproducing them under federal copyright laws without renegotiating contracts with their writers and photographers. (see report at Law.com)

The British courts may not follow the American courts in this decision, but we have always felt that it is common sense that a magazine which is an exact and faithful replica of a print edition should be treated in the same way as the print issue from the point of view of licensing and copyrights (we especially like the phrasing of the court "exactly as they are presented in the print version," could the judge have taken out a subscription to Exact Editions before he coined his phrase?).

Photographers and picture agencies will feel that profitable exploitation of digital editions should have some beneficial consequences for photographers and illustrators. That should happen, provided publishers are able to develop effective digital publishing strategies. Not being able to include photographs or illustrations for rights reasons is not a practical way of developing a digital service. Without an effective digital publication publishers will be less able to afford fees for photos and illustrations. Lets hope that the British courts and the British picture agencies take notice of these specifically american rulings. Movement along these lines is in the interests of all the rights holders.

The Future of Search and the Future of Magazines

John Battelle and Danny Sullivan have been sponsored by Thomson Reuters to write some pieces on the future of search. They are two of the shrewdest commentators on internet search so the essays will be worth reading. John Battelle has an exceptional feel for the overall commercial space in which search operates. Danny Sullivan has a terrier-like persistence which means that when he has really researched a topic, you are unlikely to find a better or a more judicious summary of it anywhere else. These guys are definitely worth reading.....

John Battelle's first piece works over some ideas that he has been poking around for some time. Searching on the go, with interaction between the web and the environment in which you move. His is an example of geo-vino-price-sensitive searching for the best deal on a bottle of Stag's Leap Cabernet as he hurries through the aisles of a supermarket pointing his phone/camera at the labels on the wines he passes (this all seems a bit furtive to me and I wonder whether John really does the shopping in his household?). My own geo preference is for a similarly priced bottle of Castello di Ama and I am not going to nickel and dime the enoteca over the last €1.50; but de gustibus non est disputandum.

John Battelle also blogs yesterday about the future of magazines (zero/niente/nil future, sooner rather than later, is my summary of his view). He is far too gloomy about that. This kind of woe/weltshmerz tends to hit magazine people who have really migrated to the web (John was a founding editor of Wired which is not to be confused with our wonderful music magazine The Wire); they tend to lose sight of the potential for magazines to be reborn digitally on the web and for subscribers to enjoy them. Some magazines have more or less given up editorially in the face of the web (has this happened to Newsweek or Time?)-- whilst others, such as the Economist and the Scientific American just keep on getting better.

In one respect the post-Battelle retail future is bright for magazines:- digital ordering and digital delivery is a breeze. Magazines and books is one of the few product categories that have well organised UPCs (universal product codes, ISSNs and ISBNs) and they can easily become digital, so the magazine publishers will be doing OK when bookstore and newstand browsers realize that they can point their iPhone at the UPC on the back of the book/mag and order a digital subscription rather than lug the pile home. 'Sale or return' is going to be a real disaster when this starts happening and the kiosk owner is going to have a struggle. Furthermore with a decent digital magazine you get access to the archive (the vintage numbers). You can't do that with a bottle of Stag's Leap: you can't track back through the vintages or order digital delivery (yet).

Come to think of it, if you could do one you could do the other. I quite fancy the idea of subscribing to a digital wine with archived and digitally 'remastered' vintages.......

Orphan Copyrights

At the recent Tools of Change conference I met up with Peter Brantley, the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation. We had a very brief conversation about Orphan Copyrights and I suggested to Peter that he produce some thoughts on the subject for the Exact Editions blog. He has produced some specific and intriguing suggestions in an essay which should attract discussion. Since his essay is in part a call-for-action which may involve lots of parties -- the posting is now up on his Shimenawa blog.

I particularly like the features of Brantley's proposals that amount to an Adoption Agency for Orphan-ed copyrights (improved access, digitization, take-down provision, escrow account, and reconciliation of public and private interests). This is a set of important issues which is best tackled by the broadest possible range of interests.

The Importance of Magazines?

Mark Chillingworth at Information World Review reports that Google are unlikely to extend their book search program to magazines.....

Google has damped down speculation that it will extend its Google Book Search platform to include magazines with an ISSN number. Technical difficulties with digitising magazines and a lack of existing archives were cited as the main reasons.

Chillingworth quotes Jens Redmar (Director Google Book Search in Europe) as saying:

"Magazines describe a trend at the time. A historic book has more valuable information than a historic magazine." Periodical publishers have also failed to create archives of their content, which Redmar sees as essential to a successful search tool.

We can agree that consumer magazine publishers have by and large failed to create archives of their content (amazingly many still do not archive PDFs of their current issues), but this has nothing to do with the value of these archives. It is really very odd to say that a historic book is more valuable than a historic magazine. What on earth can he have meant? Historians find contemporary magazine archives an invaluable tool.

IWR is a reliable magazine, indeed a valuable magazine, but I am not sure that this report really stands up. Google Book Search after all already includes a great number of issues of historic magazines. Here is one from the Bodleian and here is a typical page [Though the Google meta-data gives me a shudder: "blackwoods magazune By william blackwood sons" where did the magazune come from, and has the apostrophe gone awol?]

File conversion or interoperating services?

A few years ago, the standard view was that magazines and books needed a suitable digital file format in which they could be stored (something which might become an industry standard like the MP3 was for music). The internet was the powerful new way in which publications would be shipped. To this way of thinking, digitization was all about electronic delivery. It seemed kind of obvious that this was the road ahead, and most of the companies, our competitors, that offer a digital magazine platform have this kind of technology. It usually means a proprietary and non-standard file format, often a modified form of PDF.

There is a huge amount of baggage that comes with this way of looking at things. First, it seemed that publishers would only work with this sort of system if there was a workable technology for DRM (Digital Rights Management and there were lessons here from the music industry). Second, once we see the web as a way of providing users with issues as downloadable files, we have a lot of problems about making magazine archives searchable, and over co-ordinating the usage of copies of stuff that ought to be handled through a network resource. Third, there was a big problem in deciding whether digital books or magazines should be adapted and deformed so that their format changed in a digital version from what it was in print.

All these issues are being chased to ground by a consortium which works with book publishers. The International Digital Publishing Forum with its new proposed Open eBook Publication Structure Specification.

These standards may serve a useful purpose, but it could all be a real diversion. The Google Book Search way of handling digitization may be the way forward. In which case DRM was always a bad idea. Print will always be page-based and digital print will respect the conventions of pagination. Archives should only be searchable via a network service. References and citations should always target the source. Search services matter and distribution services are beside the point. And file formats need be of no concern to users. Access management is key, just as digital rights management is otiose.

In this new world the standards that matter will be to do with making different web services inter-operable, not with harmonising the formats in which texts are held.

Open Archives (5): Mousetraps and Cafes

The business of selling subscriptions has changed. Fifty years ago, the 'mousetrap' model of subscription-selling ruled. There are two parts to this commercial strategy: first you must have a fantastic product, a piece of cheese which smells terrific and which appeals to all the mice; second you need to have a well designed and secure cage -- and for consumer magazines, quarterly direct debit payments and a continuous flow of new issues, fitted the bill. Once the first piece of cheese had been tasted and the direct debits were in place, the mice tended to stay in the cage and renew their subs. Everyone was happy.

In fact, publishers, fifty years ago, had another factor working in their favour -- the mice were mostly hungry. The system worked even better if they were starving (there were no satirical magazines when Private Eye was launched, and Rolling Stone showed that rock could be intellectual, so these magazines grew like topsy).

Things have changed. The marginal cost of supplying information through the web is close to zero. It is effectively zero. When printing on paper, the marginal cost of supplying an additional copy is always significant. The web is now a medium through which vasts amounts of information are available to anyone with a broadband connection. Too much. The smell of cheese no longer has an attraction. With this abundance comes a wandering audience which knows that it can have everything, or at least anything that is particularly relevant.

On the web users are always one click away from something else, and the idea of a content cage or content silo makes little sense. Increasingly we are moving to a 'cafe' society, where abundance prevails and users expect to help themselves in a convivial atmosphere. The publisher is no longer a gatekeeper (severe frown, rejection looms), but an orchestrator and a host or service provider (friendly smile, no need for bouncers here). In H A Simon's words "Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention".

Acquiring a subscription is still an attractive proposition, but it has to be presented more as club membership, as bestowing privelege in the core audience, with a premium service. If some are excluded, that may be an unfortunate commercial necessity. But in an information-rich culture our consumers value their priveleged information more if there is the prospect of sharing this (albeit after a lag) with the broader community, and they wish to be seduced with attention and selection rather than swamped with everything. Information subscription services need to be self-selective, individually definable, in an age of abundance.

The moving wall of a potentially Open Archive helps develop this 'cafe' society: of provisional exclusivity and selective membership.

There is still a role for subscription, but its use is primarily to enable the consumer to select the sources which he/she particularly wishes to receive and to enjoy them in the best possible ways. Excluding others from the information is not a primary objective (except in highly competitive situations).

There is a balance to be struck here and how the balance is struck will vary from one magazine to another. So the wall can be a moving wall -- in two senses, (1) month by month, issue by issue, more is included (2) if the publisher decides to stretch or reduce the gap between publication and Open Access, then this can be done.

Open Archives (4): Citeability and Moving Walls

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

The Budapest programme specifically limited its recommendations to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Archives (2): The First Two

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


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

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

Open Archives (1): How Open?

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

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

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

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

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

Rolling Stone soon to be Archived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harper's and Magazine Archives

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

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

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