Universal Subscriptions

Exact Editions has always worked to help publishers offer digital editions to existing print subscribers. Our first contract made provision for what we called 'Combined Subscriptions' a route whereby a publisher could add the digital sub for any of his print subscribers. In practice, this never worked too well (uptake was slight in most cases). For quite a few reasons:

1. Our web service is designed to handle annual subs (ie 12 months) and it was very difficult to build in more flexible alternatives without confusing the customer experience in the e-store. Many consumer magazines rely on quarterly subscriptions that are renewed 'automatically' via direct debits from the customer's bank.
   
2. Most consumer magazine publishers (back in the day) felt that they ought to charge a premium for providing print+digital subscriptions. And this has NEVER worked -- basically because consumers do not see why they should be paying a premium for buying the magazine twice .... To the consumer it seems obvious that the subscription is for 'one thing', the magazine in two different forms, no way would a rational agent pay twice for the same thing. To the publisher it seems obvious that the 'consumer' ought to be paying more for getting a better service. I do not know who is right, morally, in this dispute. In practice, however, the consumer is right. The consumer is always right, and purchasers will not pay for what we used to call 'combined subscriptions'.
3. We used to call them that, but we now call them 'universal subscriptions'. This is a term that we picked up yesterday from Colin Crawford. And 'universal' is clearly a better term, because 'combined subscriptions' sounds ugly and complicated. 'Universal subscription' connotes a simpler, a more open-ended and a more comprehensive solution to which existing print subscribers, the lifeblood of most magazines, deserve full access. But the Exact Editions service is more universal than 'combined' because it allows a publisher to offer the print subscribers, access through the web, through the iPhone, and the iPad. One might expect also to add Android access to that range of universal access.
4. The 'universal subscription' proposition is clearly better for the consumer than the prospect of paying extra for access to a digital or an iPad edition, but it is really much better also for the publisher, because the publisher or his distribution arm maintains control of the subscriber list. We can only guarantee to provide publishers with a reliable universal service if the Exact Editions platform can verify subscription status in real time. The big consumer publishers who have been nagging Apple with the demand that they have access to customer data have been pushing at the wrong door. Much better to retain control of the customer data on their own side, and then enable suitably qualified users of Apple iOS devices (ie existing subscribers) to access the accounts which are maintained at the publisher end. Some shrewd newspaper publishers are already using this approach (WSJ, Financial Times).

There is one odd thing about the evolution of the Exact Editions service towards supporting publishers with the provision of 'universal subscriptions': it was the arrival of the iPad which made this all seem like the right way to go. The advent of iPad apps and the need to provide existing subscribers with access to iPad apps for their own magazine subscriptions has been the catalyst which is encouraging many publishers also to provide access to web-based digital magazines. The iPad is in some ways a disruptive and innovative move towards a new idea of the digital magazine, but its introduction has helped publishers and consumers to realise that there is value in the simple proposition of a digital edition of the existing print publication.

An iKiosk for iTunes?

There has been a spate of news stories in the last few days about Apple preparing (or discussing) a central kiosk for newspapers and magazines. See Bloomberg and the WSJ. This is mostly speculation, but it may be well-informed. It is surprising that Apple have not already launched a common framework for delivering newspapers and magazines via subscription. Many observers assumed that it would be there when the iPad was launched, in much the same way that the iBooks app is there. In much the same way that iTunes is there so that users can buy music.

One reason that we havent already seen an iKiosk is that it is a challenging proposition to build such a service, and perhaps even more challenging to win the agreement of the major publishers who need to be signed up for it. In an excellent post M C Siegler at TechCrunch summarizes the obstacles. He points to four areas of difficulty:

1. Publishers do not want to surrender control of their subscriber lists and the associated or derivable data on individual use. Apple does not want to allow publishers to 'grab' intrusive information from users of Apple devices.
2. A thirty percent Apple-tax on subscriptions sold through iTunes is too big a chunk for the publishers to surrender.
3. Timely publication (especially of newspapers) is a challenge.
4. Handling full publications (and their archives) is a problem -- remember the first Wired App was over half a GigaByte.

These issues are in subtle ways inter-related, and I suspect that lurking behind them are two bigger challenges that Apple really cannot solve for the newspaper/magazine industry. The first, and the major challenge, is that the old prevailing model of newspapers and magazines being largely paid for by advertising is fundamentally broken. It is not coming back. That model can not be resuscitated (at least in the transition or medium term) by a digital solution. But the publishers' budgets and business models are so wedded to advertising revenues that they will not be able to embrace solutions which appear to abandon or de-emphasize it. Publishers will insist on securing more data on their subscription customers, but they will not be able to do very much with it. The digital advertising networks are not going to be publisher mediated or publisher controlled. The second major challenge, is that it still is not obvious or certain what the 'file format' for these digital publications is or should be. There is a radical unclarity about what it is that is going to be digitised.

Take the issue of 'timely delivery'. Magazines and newspapers that are fed to an iKiosk have to appear in their digital format a few hours after they have been released in print. Or, better, they have to appear in their digital format before they appear in print. The book publishers and Apple have weeks to play with in transforming files from a printed book into iBooks. But an iKiosk must be much faster. If digital newspapers and magazines are to appear reliably and pretty much instantly on the iPad/iPhone they need to be processed automatically from a content management system to an app service. How can this be done, without congestion and additional work in over-stretched design and editorial offices? How can this be done automatically by Apple? Apple can not afford to reach back into the editorial and content management systems of the publishers. This requirement raises in an acute form the question of what a digital magazine/newspaper really is. Is a digital periodical something like a web site or an RSS feed, something elastic and flowing which can be updated in real-time and adjusted from moment to moment through the period of live publication? Or is the starting point for a digital periodical the fact that it is a series of determinate issues, each of which need to be automatically transformed from something like a PDF file into something like a set of virtual pages? Are we talking feeds or pages? Or both?

One last point. These apparently well-informed (because repeated) rumours about an Apple News Stand do not tell us whether the service will be for iPad and iPhone or for iPad only. If Apple's new news service is aimed solely at the iPad, I think we can expect a very adventurous and cool solution, but in being tied to the iPad it will raise even more challenges for publishers who do not want to be platform-specific. If, on the other hand, Apple backs a much looser format comparable to the ePub solution used for iBooks, then we should be able to use and read newspaper on the iPhone with comfort.

Google Fast Flip and the Future of Magazines/Newspapers

We took a pot-shot at Fast Flip the other day. There are a few more lessons to be drawn. The Search Engine Journal take particularly struck me. My issue was really with their headline: Google Labs Rolls Out Fast Flip, Google Book Preview for News
Whilst one can "kind of" see what SEJ are getting at: images of the publication; full page views; a linear arrangement for navigation (but note horizontal rather than the predominantly vertical scroll in Books Search); the same database squirrelling away in the background to serve pages, searches and deliver links. The overall feel is certainly more like Google Books than it is like Google News. But what had struck me when I first sampled it was the way in which Fast Flip as an interface differs from that supplied for the books collection. The intention is also very different. Fast Flip is really about skimming and Google Books is a proto-reading system. There really are some big differences between Fast Flip and the way Book Search works.

1. Google Books Search does not present us with arrays of parallel book content, fast flipping between books, the emphasis in Books Search is to drill down into the book. In effect to read the book. If Google had launched Books Search with the manifesto: "In the age of the internet the atomic unit of consumption is the page and the Google library will allow you to fast flip between pages in different books using the relevance tags inserted by Google." there would have been uproar in the halls of learning.
2. Some magazines are included in Book Search (though periodicals, including magazines) are excluded from the Settlement) and they are treated pretty much in the same way as books. But again with horizontal layout and thumbnails as an option (primarily, I guess, because of the prevalence of double page spreads). But these magazines are the print magazines not the web services.
   
3. Google Books Search allows the user to preview the actual image of the book's page. But Fast Flip is entirely predicated on the fact that many newspapers have built websites which repurpose their issues to web pages. Google Books Search is deeply 'type-based'. Fast Flip is snapping images from web pages. Quite a different matter and much less predictable as web pages are often dynamic. In its approach to books Google presupposes that what matters is the actual printed text and its fixed pagination.
   
4. Google in the light of their probable/maybe settlement of the Google Books Search cases will be committed to selling individual books. Selling them in large packages to libraries, but also selling them individually. But Fast Flip has been launched in a barrage of Google comment that presupposes (along with much conventional wisdom) that newspapers and magazines cannot be sold through subscriptions on the web. Or only in exceptional circumstances. But Google has a business plan in which millions/billions of licenses to individual titles within Google Book Search are going to be sold to individual consumers (and held within individual accounts until the expiry of copyright or account holder)? If so, digital magazines should also be saleable to subscribers. As we know, at Exact Editions, that they can be.

Google Books Search has plenty of problems (not all of them legal), but in its conception and its goals it is much, much better than Fast Flip. Newspapers and magazines would do much better to pay full attention to the way in which the Google Books Service is shaping up. Fast Flip is an experiment, a jeu, from Google Labs. Google Books is a mammoth, a juggernaut, a tsunami for publishers. Not only for book publishers. Magazines and newspapers need to figure out how they can make money selling digital editions of their publications which sit alongside that juggernaut and which are database driven web services providing paid for and (on many occasions) free access to the content which would otherwise have been printed. If digital books are to be sold online to libraries and individuals why should not newspapers and magazines be licensed to subscribers in very similar fashion?

Joe Wikert's Magazine System

Joe Wikert works for O'Reilly Media Inc. and has an excellent pulpit at Publishing 2020 Blog. Yesterday he was blogging about his ideal magazine system.

Once upon a time I subscribed to more than a dozen different magazines. Keeping up was overwhelming at times, particularly since many of those magazines were a half-inch thick or more. (Anyone remember the good old days when Wired used to have some serious heft?!) Now I can count my magazine subscriptions on one hand. I still crave the content and the writers, but I prefer to read this information sooner than the print model allows. (A Model for the Magazine Industry)

The Exact Editions system gets close to being in his plan for the magazine industry, but we are missing the target on some of his goals:

1. Joe wants to have access (so that he can choose) to every magazine on the planet. Steady on Joe, do you mean that the system should support every magazine in every language?Tthat is a pretty big number. We are talking maybe 20 or 30,000 consumer and special interest magazines world wide. Long way to go! This is what I would call a reasonable unreasonable goal. But, I agree with Joe that this has to be the distant target: consumers will want a magazine system to support them if they decide that they want to read Spanish-language, English-language and Japanese-language magazines on a mix and match basis.
   
2. Joe wants to be able to read the whole magazine exactly as it is, the full contents, on his preferred device. We can comply with that and the Exact Editions system also provides access to the archived issues to all current subscribers. The archive will go back as far as the magazine publisher has provided us with PDF files. So the Exact Editions system is possibly giving Joe more than he asked for. Archives are easy for digital editions.
   
3. But archives are available because the consumers subscribe to magazines as branded entities. Joe Wikert is looking for a system which would allow him to have roaming access to any magazine that he chooses month by month (admittedly for a pretty high 'eat all you can' price of $50 a month). Selling a revenue-sharing model to magazine publishers for this universal access scheme is going to be a tough proposition.
4. Joe wants his system to deliver the content wirelessly to his various devices. Exact Editions can comply with that, provided that the device supports a standard web browser. PC, Mac, netbook, iPhone, Wii -- sure those devices are all fine (Joe may not yet be using the Wii for his magazine reading but he should try it out now). The problem for us is the Kindle. We dont yet support the Kindle, but I am confident that Exact Editions will support the Kindle just as soon as it supports standard web browsing and sells its platform in the European market from where most of our current magazines are sourced. It would be nice if the Kindle also had colour. Consumer magazines really need colour.

On one point, we completely agree with Joe Wikert. Magazine publishers absolutely need to get their digital offerings in place fast. At a price and in a format which all their consumers can enjoy.

Positive Consumer Behaviour

Our publishers get an account in which they see in real time the subscription activity on their titles. That means that we can also see real-time sales activity. So I keep a weather eye on the sales window when I am working.

This afternoon someone popped up and bought one title, and then 15 minutes later they came back and bought 4 more. I reckon that most of our sales are down to the strength and quality of the magazines in our 'shop'. But when we get a multiple subscription with five or more titles in one sub (12 at a time is our record) it is clear that Exact Editions is the factor which is making the multiple sales.

Gift Subscriptions

We are seeing a surge in gift subscriptions. Could this be a sign of Christmas? Or is it the first loosening of consumer budgets as we climb out of the recession? Your guess is as good as mine.

If Christmas shopping is on your agenda, here are some last minute ideas (we are 24x7 so you can even delay your shopping to Christmas morning if you expect to wake up before your nearest and dearest are online). Here are some suggestions: Whitelines for that troublesome snowboarding nephew. Taste Italia for the brother-in-law who wants to open an Italian restaurant. Prospect for your intellectual friends. Opera or The Wire or Jazzwise for your musical buddies. Finally, the Ecologist for anyone who cares about the environment and Red Pepper for the anti-capitalists in your network.

We don't yet cater for every special interest and taste (I wish we had something on Tropical Fish for Uncle Fred), but we are getting there.

Shopping Around

The Exact Editions service started with an 'aggregation' model for digital subscriptions to magazines. There is an Exact Editions shop where you can buy most of our magazines. Then we added 'shops' for magazine subscriptions in Euros, and another for Australian magazines. As we have started working for book publishers we have worked with a different model. We are building shops 'per publisher' branded for each publisher. There are now shops for Berkshire Publishing, Debretts, Alastair Sawday's, Profile Books, Time Out and recently Gower. There is a page on our service where all these shops and more can be referenced.

The book publisher's shops are branded for the individual publisher. Different shops, different publishers, different languages, different currencies -- but for the individual who buys a subscription there is only one account, one service. All his/her/its content goes in the same account ('its' for the institutions -- did not earlier mention the various 'institutional shops' we now support). As was to be expected, users are now buying collections of mixed magazines and books in the same shopping basket. This ability to buy, search and read books and magazines in the same way from different publishers will become an important factor in our appeal to small and medium-sized publishers.

Here is a mixed shopping basket, which has the 'look and feel' of the Gower shop because the two Gower books were those most recently added to it.



What you cannot do at the present time is buy books and magazines priced in different currencies in the same shopping basket. Mind you, this isnt a real limitation because you can buy in different currencies from the same account. PayPal or your credit card can see to that.

Site Licenses

It will soon be the first anniversary of our Institutional Shop, which we announced in November 2007. Institutional sales still form a relatively small proportion of our sale of subscriptions, but they have been an encouraging source of new business.

The system for making an institutional sale is completely automated, and web based. A number of institutions have bought their subscriptions and setup their IP-address based accounts with no intervention or action on our part. We knew that university and college libraries would be interested to subscribe to digital editions of magazines, but we have been pleasantly surprised to find that ministries, NGO's, businesses and schools are also keen to buy institutional licenses.

I am sure that our success with institutional licenses for magazines is partly attributable to the fact that individuals are buying the magazines for themselves, and then deciding that the digital magazine has good educational potential. There is an important lesson here for book publishers who want to make institutional sales. Make sure that the pricing for a single user is attractive, that way teachers/professors will buy before their institution makes a decision.

Shibboleth or שיבולת

The Exact Editions platform now uses the Shibboleth system for federated sign-on to web services. The system is Open Source and much used in the British academic universe, amongst others. Here is a video from JISC explaining some of the advantages (warning: the vides is a little bit 'corporate').

Federated services are always a good idea on the web? Such shared technologies all depend on trust....which is becoming ever more important in the web as services are layered on top of each other.

The Book in its Context

When a book is in the library, the library catalogue is a key part of its context. This is even more true for digital books, where there is little opportunity for users to find out about the books except through searching the catalogue.

Last week we realised that we could enable a small change which helps digital books to appear in a better context in the library catalogue. The goal is to help librarians to include a link in the catalogue which takes the reader straight to the digital book, and in the case where the library has subscribed to several titles from Exact Editions it should be immediately obvious to the user which magazine or book they will be searching/reading:

http://www.exacteditions.com/login/selvedge

or

http://www.exacteditions.com/login/peerage

It would be even better if the library Catalogue contained an image of the front cover which linked to the login page.



Many libraries now offer these links from front cover image as a way in. We will need to find an easy way to broadcast to librarians the availability of these login shortcuts. For the users its an important cue that we have provided the subtle 'branding' that goes with the individual book or magazine title. So the user is guided as to the specific part of the library's Exact Editions account that they are using. Preserving the branding and using the front cover of individual titles is an important part of the Exact Editions philosophy. The platform should encourage books and magazines to sustain their individual character in the digital domain.

Putting a book or a magazine in its right digital context is a matter of bringing out its digital identity, and of developing its character.

Omnivorous Magazine Readers

In March last year, somone subscribed to 6 magazines at once. Last weekend an existing subscriber, renewed his/her subs and went from 3 to 10 magazines. That seems to be a pretty convincing tribute to online access as a means of consuming magazines.

Magazines for Christmas

From today you can buy subscriptions to Exact Editions magazines as gifts.

Suppose that you want to give your best friend a sub to AnOther Man. You go shopping for the magazine.

Now you have a choice, so you click on the link 'Buy as a gift'. You will need your friend's email address and you have the opportunity to sent a suitable message, and you should tell us when to dispatch the email alert which will open his/her subscription. You could also buy him a subscription to AnOther Magazine or any other magazine and then he will have two magazines in his account. Choices, choices.....

Only 30 digital-shopping days to Christmas!

Institutional Sales

There is an old rule of software development which says that it is a very bad idea to talk in public about developments before you implement them. But this is August, and blogs are not press releases, so here goes.

We have had a growing chorus of requests for institutional access to some of our magazines. Mostly from universities, but not just from them, also from businesses.

We have decided that we will support institutional access via IP-addresses, but whether or not any specific publication will be available this way will depend on our publishers. If a publisher does not want to support institution-wide access it will not be available from us. We have also decided that our publishers will set the prices (all the prices in our service are set by the publishers). So we expect to support IP-based subscriptions to some of our magazines in Quarter 4.

Also, we will not be offering aggregated packages. It will be entirely up to the subscribing institutions, the libraries or universities, to decide which magazines they need.

Ordering Search Results

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

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

Shipping times

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

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

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

An intellectual and thoughtful reader

Has just subscribed to 6 magazines. It seems probable, by his choice of magazines, that he (for it is a 'he') is a distinguished intellectual. Anyone who reads all these magazines regularly is going to be very well informed; the choice, in the order in which they were selected:

London Review of Books
Prospect Magazine
Rare Book Review
The Spectator
Le Monde Diplomatique
Literary Review

We said that we would mention in the blog when we first sold a 'six pack'. Our next target is to have a subscriber who takes 12 titles all at once. I was confident that we would do a six-pack in 2007, but am not so sure that we will do dozen-at-a-time anytime soon; but we will try to note such an omniverous choice in the blog, whenever it occurs .

As we add more titles, the advantages of having several subscriptions in the same account becomes more compelling, so we should be finding a lot more triplets and quads in the months to come.