Measuring Digital Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aligning app with print with web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Gramophone

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

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

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

Will Magazine Reading Be More Social?

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

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

The tablet (something like the iPad)

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Negroponte: Books will be Gone by 2015

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

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

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

The iPad is Magical but it is not a Mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Yorker App: Fabulous but Flawed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readerly and Writerly Apps by Emma Bradfield

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

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

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

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

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

Vintage Life Magazine

Vintage Life is the first magazine, projected to appear in print, to be launched initially as a digital magazine available through the Exact Editions digital magazine store.

• If you want to know how Lana Turner got those lips so crimson red.
• Or you hanker after Midwinter coffee pots,
• Or you would look good in a vintage dress,

then it may be time to take out a subscription to Vintage Life magazine.

Is there a small element of irony in this situation? The most obviously 'retro' magazine in the Exact Editions e-commerce system has started its publishing life with a digital edition of its first issue. Print can follow at the pace of print, but for immediate access and instant reaction a digital edition is the ideal offering. We will know that the magazine business has turned the digital corner when the big magazine companies start launching new projects as digital-only, or digital-first, products.

That the mainstream consumer magazine industry is in a bit of a pickle is embarrassingly obvious from this bizarre promotional video from six industry leaders released last week (Ann Moore, Chuck Townsend, Jann Wenner et al) "Magazines, the Power of Print" (YouTube, two minutes of cringe-making, hilarious, viewing). Of course, these luminaries are right: magazines are wonderful resources with huge attractions for their readers, but CEO's must be careful not to look and sound like rabbits caught in the headlights of the on-rushing internet juggernaut. Magazines need to get the power of digital.

In the eBooks Market, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal with it.

The headline has been stolen from Richard Wong's blog posting at TechCrunch: In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It.

One of the worst myths floating around the blogosphere is the wait by some for a “unifying technology” that will make things “simpler and easier” to develop services and apps for the global mobile market....

........Anyone who is waiting for a single silver bullet to solve fragmentation issues in mobile will be waiting a very long time, especially if they want to go after the global mobile opportunity. As such, it is important for mobile entrepreneurs to wade in and sort it out for themselves. No one is going to flatten the industry such as Microsoft did in the PC-era to make it simple.

I could have stolen the whole piece. Much the same is true of the eBooks market. In fact, the variety and importance of languages, scripts, publishing traditions and cultures mean that it is even more true of digital publishing. There is not going to be a single solution for digital books, in the way that Microsoft for a time flattened the PC market, or that Google has 'mostly' flattened the web search market (but maybe not if you live in China or Russia). Two years ago, many assumed that Amazon would dominate the eBooks space, then it looked like Google Books Search might provide a universal solution. Now Apple, with its soon to be launched iPad, looks to be on a big upswing. But surely these rapidly shifting fortunes for the major players tell us that it is unlikely that there is going to be a single solution for digital books (I would certainly not dismiss Amazon or Google or Sony or Facebook from the race yet). And then there is the business of magazines and newspapers as well as books. Surely, there is going to be an incredible diversity of solutions for digital distribution of stuff that was formerly printed. Deal with that. Live with that.

Some of the strategies that Wong proposes for the mobile entrepreneur apply to the publisher.

• Dont wait for the magic bullet
• Get down the user experience learning curve (there are markets already)

But some aspects of the publishing dilemma are peculiarly acute

• Publishers who operate across markets (selling to trade, educational, travel and academic, maybe books and magazines) need to be particularly flexible and experimental. It is not necessarily an advantage to be a very big publisher.
  
• Rights complications, copyright, and language issues make published books an excruciatingly convoluted market. It is not going to get much better and customers dont want the pointless complications.
• Quality and fashion are still keys to success in publishing
• Because fragmentation of the digital space is a problem for consumers and users: intelligent solutions to the problems of fragmentation will be especially profitable for nimble publishers.

I recommend the whole of Wong's piece.

Standpoint App Released

A free app for the magazine Standpoint is now in the iTunes app store. The free app provides access to a portion of each new issue of the magazine as it is published. The rest of the magazine's current issue is searchable and viewable via thumbnail. With Apple's in-app purchasing, the user can, at any time, upgrade to a 30-day subscription (for £1.79). Paid subscribers also get access to the archived back-issues, whereas the free app only has a sliver of content from the current issue. When the next issue appears the previous sliver will drop out of the app. The app in its free and premium modes supports syncing (of the current issue within a wifi zone). We think this freemium deal is giving a very solid and generous service to the free app's users. How generous? This issue of Standpoint has 11 pages at the front and 7 at the back fully open, and these same pages are also open in the web service (open for a few weeks while the issue is current). The publisher decides how much of the content to make freely available, perhaps changing the parameters issue by issue. This is the first magazine to be using Exact Editions' recommended freemium model for apps. Potential readers can pick up the app for free and will then get a generous sample of the magazine on their iPhone whenever a new issue appears. We expect magazine publishers will like this, because it is a way of using the app store as a magazine kiosk that encourages potential customers to browse through free parts of the magazine. As Daryl Rayner (Exact Editions founder and MD) says "Apple's app store is the best thing to happen to magazines since the invention of the kiosk". Should the user inadvertently let her paid subscription lapse, the free app will continue to offer access to a few pages of each new issue as it is published, providing a gentle reminder of the availability of the magazine.

I recommend trying this free app if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch. When have downloaded it from iTunes make sure that you sync the content to the memory of the phone/touch. This will take a few minutes in the background whilst you are exploring the content, and syncing makes reading and browsing speedier. Also, explore the 3 different orientations of the phone when reading (three different behaviours, one in the portrait orientation, and two distinct views of the magazine in landscape). Here are some screenshots:

• Front Cover of the March issue
  

• Slider bar, white patches denote free open pages
  

• Sliding through the issue ('these pages are only available with paid access')
  

• Message from the app for pages requiring subscriber access
  

• Live links in the Table of Contents. Note the app gives navigation clues from the bars at top and bottom of the frame (bottom: icons for 'ToC', 'Previous','Next', and 'Search'.
  

• Zooming in to the detail of a cartooon
  

Phoning with the Local Paper

Calling the Black Swan from the page of the Chronicle

The Congleton Chronicle which two days ago became the first (local) newspaper in the world to be published in its entirety and for sale as an app through Apple's iPhone platform, also marks an important break in the way local and regional newspapers will be used as mobile resources.

The 25 February issue of the The Congleton Chronicle contains over 500 phone numbers which are clickable to call from the page. In fact there are 525 clickable phone numbers in that issue of the Chronicle and that averages roughly 9 phone numbers a page. Local newspapers are full of phone numbers that are direct-response buttons for businesses and organisations that advertise in the paper. All live links in Exact Editions apps on the iPhone platform have a green highlight. There are also in this recent issue of the Chronicle, 147 web links, 72 email links and 63 postcode links. This represents potential interactivity in the digital newspaper, a great deal of navigational assistance to the reader.

The local newspaper which has all its links enabled, becomes much more useful to its reader (and for this reason also more valuable to the publisher and the advertiser). Of course the issue can also be searched.....

The local paper on a mobile platform thus becomes not merely a resource that can be carried in pocket or handbag to be read when convenient. The local paper becomes in its mobile embodiment the users' instant and easiest reference centre (via advertisers' phone numbers and weblinks).

Exact Editions is the only platform that consistently supports direct phone calls from the pages of digital magazines and newspapers. Surprisingly few web services enable this direct interactivity. They are missing a trick. This is a matter of considerable potential for advertisers, especially as more web access is from mobile platforms.....Craigslist phone numbers are generally not clickable to call. Even Google Maps listings do not usually turn the phone number, which is often given, into a live link. Newspapers and magazines should push for a tight integration with the phone, as a way of reclaiming some advertising reach and power. The iPhone has given them this opportunity and the Exact Editions database can power the connections.

PS Barry Mansfield is playing at the Black Swan tonight. I just checked, by phone. I recommend the beer also.

An App for The Congleton Chronicle

There is a new Exact Editions app in the iTunes app store. The Congleton Chronicle is a free app which gives access to the current issue of the weekly newspaper as it is published. Anyone who downloads the app from iTunes has free access, in full resolution pages, to some of the newspaper (currently the first 7 pages). The rest of the content can be freely searched and browsed in 'thumbnail' resolution. This is sometimes called a 'freemium' model. The basic app is free and will be available to anybody with an iPhone (iPod Touch, or an iPad) and at any time the user can upgrade to a paid for subscription which will give access to the full paper, and to archived issues (a 30 day sub costs £2.39 or $3.99, in comparison to £25 for an annual subscription to the web edition or £58 for a print subscription ). Making some of the paper freely available to anyone with an iPhone is a strong way of promoting awareness of the publication. The advertisements in this part of the paper will also attract additional attention. As is usual with publications on the Exact Editions platform, phone numbers are clickable to call; urls, email addresses and post codes are live. Readers of the newspaper will now include users of an iPhone app which offers a significant amount of linkage and interactivity available to the audience.

Publishers of newspapers and magazines deployed on the Exact Editions app platform can decide how much of the paper should be available in full with the freemium distribution. The free app will only provide access to the current issue (the old issue will drop out as the new one arrives), whereas paid subscribers using the app will have access to back issues.

The Congleton Chronicle is the first newspaper to have its own branded app in the iTunes store giving subscribers access to the whole newspaper. By making some of the news content free as a taster to anyone with an iPhone, whilst offering a straightforward in-app purchase to modestly priced subscriptions for full access, the Chronicle is pioneering a freemium distribution model which could apply to any local newspaper; and to any daily newspaper. The Chronicle is also first newspaper to have a free app with in-app purchasing to a full sub, which can itself be renewed through iTunes payments (we think!).

All Exact Editions apps now support syncing. We recommend first running the app within a wi-fi area so it can sync the latest issue to your phone - after that you can use it anywhere. With the free app some pages are sync-ed in full, the rest is sync-ed in thumbnail, with a paid subscription the latest issue is sync-ed in full , so members of the far flung Congleton diaspora can now read the first few pages of their favourite local paper for free on the Tokyo, New York or Sidney subways..... and when they get into the sunlight they can upgrade to a subscription (web connection is required for e-commerce and for searching).

iBookstore and the Format of eBooks

Increasingly I rely on my Twitter stream for arresting issues in publishing technology. First off, yesterday was a thoughtful blog post at Semantico on the choice facing publishers on whether to go into the iPad platform via individual apps, or via the iBook store. Richard Padley's conclusion:

For straightforward chapter based book content it seems clear there is no longer a compelling case for publishers to deliver e-books as apps. The extra cost of software development, combined with the slowness and lack of scalability in the approval process no longer make sense now that Apple have introduced the iBookstore. (iBooks or Apps? The Publishers Dilemma)

If this conclusion is warranted, it presumably follows that for books that are not 'straightforward chapter based' there remains a compelling case for going down the books as apps route. In point of fact, a very large proportion of books are not straightforward and chapter based. ePub is not a happy format for books with lots of illustrations and tables. So that should keep us busy at Exact Editions. But something else follows from his point: publishers and even worse, readers are going to have to make choices. We are going to expect our audience to read books in one way, as eBooks, on the iPad if they are simple books, but in another way, in another format, say digital editions as apps, if they are not so easy. The experience of reading books will become increasingly fragmented.

Sigh! Life would be a lot simpler if publishers were to consider whether all books might be readable straightforwardly as digital editions (so probably best delivered as individual apps) and then readers would not have to get used to reading books in one way (if they are the kind of book where it does not greatly matter how the page looks and is laid out) and in another way if the layout and design of the book matters. The really odd thing about this, is that the devices are getting better at displaying books as books that we recognise. Because the iPad has a much more generous screen, the need for texts to reflow, or to rescale on the fly, is much reduced. Most book pages on the iPad will be very readable as is.

Furthermore we do not yet know quite how the iBook's reading and display interface is going to work. There are lots of different ways of presenting ePub files. From another tweet, a link to an article in which Hadrien Gardeur notes

(I am disappointed by my).... first glimpse at the iBook's typesetting. "There's not even hyphenation on the page," he said. "If you're designing a reading system I think it's much better to offer optimized typesetting and really create something that's beautiful and easy to read rather than trying to replicate pages in a real book."

Although most readers don't think in terms of kerning and leading, Gardeur's concern was that when they start reading, they'll be able to tell that something's wrong, even if they're not sure why. (from Mediashift -- Dan Brodnitz)

I think its becoming increasingly clear that the ePub format is not going to work equally well across all the many devices that the eBook proponents want it to travel. Part of the reason for this is that the standard file format was designed to solve a problem of how to make 'reasonably straightforward chapter based' books flow and reflow across multiple screen-based systems. The original specification did not allow for the fact that scores of different and somewhat incompatible reading engines would be implemented so that the same text looks so different across different platforms. Here (from some email that Michael Jensen has allowed me to quote) is a heartfelt groan about this inconsistent rendering:

In my own experiments with .epub and other formats, I have yet to find a way of presenting, dependably, any visual model that works the same in Calibre as it does in Stanza/PC as it does in Adobe Editions as it does in Stanza/iPod....

We're still in the late-1990s world of "the same HTML webpages displaying differently in IE than in Netscape," as far as I can tell. Different proprietary software interpreting the same file leads to consumer confusion.

That leads to lowest-common-denominator design: sequential, linear presentations. Sure, leading and line length matter. But c'mon, if I can't have a callout? A wrapped-around image? A dropcap? What a mess, and it's more the rendering software than the format itself.

We are far from making the e-version anything but a pale imitation of the print -- because e-reading software is still in its infancy. For straight prose, it's fine. Anything more? bleh.

My .03 -- we are far away from anything that my ancient typesetter genes would recognize as smart presentation. Perhaps that will change, but I'm betting it'll be 18-24 months before quality and readability becomes dependable, across "e-book browsers."

One can get even more of this pain by reading Mike Cane's accounts of his heroic but frustrating struggles with the ePub format. I think that there is a chance that Steve Jobs is going to decide that ePub is not such a good idea after all (Adobe had a good deal to do with the ePub format and Adobe is Steve's current whipping boy. Can somebody gently point out to Mr Jobs that ePub is a kind of Flash for text -- a flexible but plug-in solution, which complexifies by over-simplifying, where we no longer need it?). Stick with pages! After all, an iPad really is a pad, which holds virtual pages, and Apple has a perfectly good page-oriented word processing program called..... Pages. Admittedly, page breaks in books are arbitrary but they are better than arbitrary implementations of standard files by an unmanageable and ever growing collection of rendering engines.

If all digital books have pages, life will be even simpler if they are all apps. We can then start doing clever stuff with the pages, like linking from pages in one app to pages in another. Will we call that a cross reference or a cross app? Or a page reference from within an app? The idea makes perfect sense. Apps should aspire to them.

What Happens when we get the 15" iPad?

The rumour mill was pretty accurate about the size of the iPad. Most of the speculation was about a 9" or 10" tablet and so we get a 9.7" screen device. I suspect that most users, when they lay their hands on it, will consider it objectively a little small (smaller than most books), but it will feel (subjectively) bigger than you imagined --just as the tiny iPod/iPhone, feels a lot larger than it seems once you get going. The touch screen with its easy zoom creates a sensation of spaciousness. The virtual page can be several times as big as the screen. The iPad has to be that not-quite-paperback size to begin with, since at the moment it is too tricky and too expensive to build a 15" touch screen iPad. Predictably, there will be bigger tablet devices on offer, in the months and years to come. From Apple, and from others: 3.5", 5", 9.7", 15" and 23". Expect even more variety. No law says that mobile systems and their media players have to have rectangular shapes, or even be flat! Look out for hexagonal shaped systems from Android makers, and perhaps spherical projected 3D gamespaces from Light Blue Optics.

Does it matter that media players will come in different shapes and sizes in the years to come? Not at all for most media. For music, the iPod Nano has already shown us that the coolest and most convenient music players can be very small. Music players only need to be big enough to give the user a convenient control panel, and if the control panel can be virtualised the music system could yet be even smaller than the Nano. Video, TV, photographs and film require more space for display and it will be these forms of media which are really pushing the boundaries for the 23" and 48" display iPads that we may be buying in the 2013 holiday season.

Printed media? That is another issue. Do magazines, newspapers and books, when they become digital, absolutely need the rectangular shape that we have come to expect from print volumes and editions? Do they need any particular shape at all, or will they become like web pages and blogs, infinitely extendable scrolls of information? Does the print-like page with its fixed and inevitably arbitrary page breaks still have a function? Will we still have editions and issues? Front covers and front pages? Tables of contents? Will books and magazines be parked or opened on the iPad interface in much the same way as printed books are placed on a desk or a shelf? Or will they morph into time-shaped, multimedia, evolving-structure aggregations in the manner of the web site, the RSS feed, the Fast Flip, or the blog? Exact Editions holds that the time-tested design and shape of books and magazines is far too valuable to readers and to our expectations for their to be any question of abandoning the format. Do not lose the design values when you abandon the paper version!

Most of the magazine and newspaper apps that have so far been developed for the iPhone are RSS-style apps. They take the news stream from the magazine/newspaper web site and repackage it in a blockier, formatted, tagged and streamed way for the phone's app. It is the web site, rather than the newspaper issue that is being repackaged. Some of these apps are very good (we like the New York Times app, the Guardian app and especially Le Monde's app), but they have been tightly designed for the tiny screen on the iPhone. These little apps, with their micro story-stream, will not do justice to their parent publications if they are merely 'blown up' for the larger screen sizes that are coming. There is a difficult decision coming: do you design two (maybe three or four, for Android and Blackberry) variant RSS apps for different mobile platforms, whilst still maintaining the original web service, and not forgetting the 'mobile' web pages, also? Soon newspapers and magazines which have committed themselves to this route will be supporting and repackaging their digital product into half a dozen variant forms. Worse, every time there is a significant new hardware form-factor, they will be pulled towards offering a tightly engineered solution for the new thing (15" iPad, Hearst Skiff, Blackberry Lozenge, Nokia Bottle, or Android Scarf etc).

The complexity of this enormously evolved format-offering has considerable impact on the overheads and production infrastructure of the publisher. But it also has a bad effect on the expectations and loyalty of the user/reader. The loyal reader is required to learn different navigational and editorial conventions for the different formats, and app interfaces supported by the digital newspaper/magazine.

Right at this moment, commercial directors of many of our major newspapers and magazines are considering whether they should develop and support two types of 'app' for their audience: a 'micro' iPhone app and a 'maxi' iPad app. They are also wondering whether the apps should be free, or part of a 'pay wall strategy'. The chief operating office of the New York Times or the Guardian, who contemplates this convoy of evolving digital formats, might ask him/herself the question: "If there is a digital newspaper format that can be used on all platforms, should we not stick to that?" Once this question has been framed, the attractions of the digital edition which just is the newspaper becomes apparent. The digital edition can be fed out to any number of platforms and should look the same on all platforms, though inevitably a bit slower or smaller on some of them. The advantage of the iPad, and even more of the 15" iPad, is that we will then be able to lay out the sections of the newspaper (or the issues of the magazine) as separate entities on the more generous screen canvas provided. The presentation to the reader is straightforward as front-covers, thumbnails over an app engine that work the same way with different packages of material. The sections or issues, yeah the pages, are all laid out and held together the same way as they worked in print. Of course, there still will be some value in an RSS feed, it is the way that you communicate to readers between editions, but it is not and should not become the skeleton on which all the content of the paper or the magazine is to be hung.

Once one starts thinking of digital editions of books, magazines and newspapers as just being virtualised editions of the print variety, life becomes a whole lot simpler for the reader and the distribution director (these digital editions also have a bit of magic web dust scattered over them and built into them). This approach also naturally leads to a subtler way of tackling the thorny issue of 'pay walls'. But we will tackle that subject on another day....

Where is the iPad Projector?

I am not sure how Apple were projecting the image off the iPad that Steve Jobs was using in his initial presentation last week. But since they are making such a big thing of the productivity suite iWork on the iPad, there is going to have to be a way to project Keynote presentations from the device.

When is this coming? What will it look like? I am pretty sure that there is not yet a reliable way of doing real time presentations from an iPhone (though you can do videos off an iPhone). It would be a good idea.....

Mind you, in a couple of months we should be able to do an intimate presentation straight off the iPad (one would be enough for a small group) and then pass the device around, clicking through to the magazine app under discussion, whilst the small group admires the trial magazine that we have also prepared for our demonstrations. We may or may not be able to pay you a visit, but if you publish a successful print magazine and would like to see a trial of the app we could make for you, do email us for a free test. With our test account you will be able to simulate the performance of your branded app, using our generic app Exactly. Drop us a line here. And then send us a complete PDF of a single issue, PDF of single pages rather than double page spreads, please.

What do Literary Agents Do?

The other day I was talking (mostly listening) to someone who works in trade publishing. That is the kind of publishing in which books are 'sold' for advances of £25K, or maybe £250K, or very occasionally more than a million smackeroos. This friend/acquaintance was explaining that the house she works for controls very few of the electronic/digital rights in the books they publish and she was frustrated that agents seem highly reluctant to grant any rights, or even to experiment with digital propositions.

This got me to thinking. What is the point of an agent who does not do deals? We do not hear much about agents doing digital deals. Are they just sitting on their authors' rights and not exploiting them at all? Or are there soon going to be a rash of direct deals by agents with the likes of Amazon, Sony, Apple, Plastic Logic, Google etc? Perhaps there will be some deals: a couple of months ago Amazon flew a dozen top literary agents to Seattle for frank discussions. A few days ago Amazon announced that they had done an exclusive deal with Paul Coelho, exclusive for all his e-books in Portuguese. I wonder how much Amazon had to guarantee or pay as an advance for the exclusive rights? But all the e-books rights for Portuguese Paul Coelho, (why only Portuguese?), does not sound like such a big deal (oh yes, I know he is Brazilian, so it is a fairly big deal).

I suspect that exclusivity is the key issue here. Agents are used to handling and dealing in exclusive rights, and they are working with the hypothesis that digital rights are going to be like the exclusive rights that they have learned to carve out of the traditional book-publishing contract. Identify and separate the rights and sell each of them for as much as possible to one counter-party. But are digital rights like this? Does exclusivity really cut it in the innovative market for digital books? It has always seemed to me that copyright owners would be better off, and publishers would also be in a stronger position, if digital deals were almost always non-exclusive. Why do an exclusive eBooks deal with one supplier if there are 15 different players in the market, each with their own 'installed base'? Why do a five year exclusive with Amazon if the market for digital is going to end up with Apple, or Google or someone else?

If you look at the couple of dozen eBook reading platforms that were announced, re-announced, released or previewed at last week's CES (Consumer Electronics Show), it would appear to be quite possible that the market for digital rights is going to become extremely diverse and based on many different types of non-exclusive exploitation. Are agents capable of handling this kind of fast moving market? Is your typical literary agent capable of identifying and negotiating deals with dozens or scores of technology partners? How many literary agents were at CES in Las Vegas last week? Not too many, and few literary agents are comfortable in evaluating technology propositions.

Perhaps agents should get used to the idea of granting all digital rights to the book publishers they deal with on a non-exclusive basis, retaining the right to do non-exclusive deals themselves in certain circumstances. That way publishers and agents will all be working for the trade authors they represent. Just at the moment, it appears that a degree of paralysis and ignorance is ensuring that as few deals as possible are taking place. We are seeing the emergence of a new class of 'neglected exploitation' rights, somewhat analogous to the 'orphan copyrights' which lie at the core of the Google Books Search Settlement.