Portfolio

Portfolio is a big new business magazine from Conde Nast. Jeff Jarvis today has an intriguing preview on his BuzzMachine. The magazine itself is not out until next week, and there is then a big gap (advertising dictated) until the second issue in August, when the magazine will become monthly. It looks like its playing in the same general space as Monocle (blogged yesterday), but my sense is that it will be more businessy, perhaps a little less avant garde. The one will have a New York focus/locus, the other a London/European one. Jarvis emphasises the cloud of bloggers -- but we wonder whether bloggers can be integral to the success of a monthly business magazine. The Portfolio web site is broadcasting interviews which form a part of the first issue. Same plan as with Monocle and a good way of giving tasty context to browsers who may decide to buy or subscribe. This comment of Jarvis's gave me a shudder:

Having said that, Portfolio is doing some things quite right. Start with the fact that all the content of the magazine, with the exception of a few difficult-to-translate graphics — will come online the same time that the magazine goes on sale.

Why allow the exception? This sounds like a re-purposed version of the magazine. The publisher loses a lot more than a 'few difficult-to-translate graphics' when a beautiful magazine is repurposed. Loyal readers need the web version of their magazine to look and be the same as their print version. Oh dear. Lets hope that is not what they have done.

Low impact only for a Week?

The Week magazine is going to produce an online-only magazine issue, about environmental issues. The issue will be sponsored by Lexus as a showcase for its hybrid products. According to the New York Times Lexus will be spending over $500,000 on the sponsorship of this special issue.

The extra issue is scheduled for April 20 and will be available online for a week. Its theme will be the environment. That, the publishers say, is another reason the issue will not be the usual paper and ink. It will save, a spokesman said, a lot of trees. (see report in The Press Gazette web site).

If there is any environmental benefit in this exercise, there is a compelling case for producing a digital edition of the weekly magazine on a regular basis. Being environmentally sensitive just for a week is a nonsense. The Dennis spokesman who says it will save a lot of trees is talking through his hat. The Week should be publishing a regular digital edition for ecologically concerned subscribers. That will save some trees.

Monocle

Monocle is one of the most interesting magazine launches of recent years. It is inspired by Tyler Brûlé, whose previous magazine launch was Wallpaper*

Monocle has a very strong visual design (as one would expect from a Brûlé concept). Black as a cover, which gives it a strong contrast on the news stand. It is also a very ambitious editorial project (as one would expect). It is particularly interesting in the way the web service includes broadcast and is conceived of as complementary and distinct from the magazine. This is a magazine publisher taking a new look at the potential for web services which differentiate and develop the magazine print offering.

Leaves plenty of scope for a digital edition, and arguably necessitates a digital edition. Since Monocle publishes 10 times a year, at over 200 pages an issue, the subscribers will soon need the benefits of a searchable archive, of the echt magazine. This monocle needs a powerful lense for its back issues.

Here are some comments from Juan Antonio Giner. His first reaction was more enthusiastic some of Juan Antonio's screen shots. Third issue is out next week.

Interesting notes from Jeremy Leslie on the tricky art of naming a new magazine.

Harper's and Magazine Archives

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

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

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

Publishers Grumbling

Book Publishers seem to have given up on negotiating with Google and are relying on the various court cases to stop the "Do not be evil" Bad Guys. There was an extended example of book-world whingeing in Charkinblog yesterday (reproducing in full (?) a piece by Nick Clee from the Times Literary Supplement -- not available online). Here are some representative grumbles:

A victory for Google [in the various court actions] – or an extension of legal wranglings to a point beyond which its opponents run out of funds – would raise the threat, the book industry believes, of a severe compromise of authors’ and publishers’ rights.

Let me see if I understand this right. Is Nick Clee complaining that Google may have an unfair advantage in the litigation because they have deep pockets? Were these not cases brought by the publishers and the Authors Guild? Google can hardly be blamed if the publishers run out of patience, or money, in the court cases they have initiated. After a lengthy whinge about Amazon and the erosion of territorial rights (for one brief moment I thought that we were going to have protests about Virgin Atlantic's cheap flights facilitating the import of low-priced American editions), there is a very odd final complaint, again about Google.

Piracy will certainly be widespread on the internet. Protecting texts against it is a huge problem, not only because of the skills of the hackers, but also because digital rights management (DRM) systems are unpopular with consumers. However, it remains likely that most people will continue to buy texts from official sources. Let us hope simply that the dominant official source for books is not Google. Or else we shall all have to find another way of earning a living.

This is a completely cock-eyed conclusion, because the the Google method for delivering books on the internet (which does embody the most user-friendly form of DRM) is much more secure, much harder for any commercial or systematic piracy to cope with, than any of the other distribution systems which publishers are using. If piracy is the big problem then the publishing industry should rush to embrace Google distribution. Google Book Search is effectively unusable unless you are connected to the web and to Google: the 'copies' which Google makes are good for a mere snippet. They are en masse useless, unless you have the Google search engine (or something similar which is not at all easy to build).

The potential monopoly power of Google should be much more of a concern to publishers than the way in which it is digitising books. There is no point in publishers grumbling about Google unless they can articulate a better way of doing it and have confidence in their ability to publish digitally.

Disclosure: Richard Charkin is an old friend. He has also been generous about Exact Editions. We think that he and Nick Clee (I vouch for his recipe for lemon whip here) need to represent the way book publishing should be digital.

Web Sites and/or Digital Editions?

Yesterday a publisher asked me why a user would prefer a digital edition to a comprehensive web site which reproduces all the magazine's contents? It is a good question. There are at least three reasons why a publisher who cares about his subscribers and has a comprehensive web service will also want to offer access to a digital edition:

1. A digital edition just is the magazine on the web. It has all the design qualities and stylistic strengths of the finished article. The magazine nearly always looks better than a web site and a digital magazine will have those same design values. A comprehensive but 'repurposed' website is really another thing. Another edition of the magazine with reduced style and impact.
2. Comprehensive web sites are not (ever?) strictly comprehensive. They do not include the advertisements. There is a kind of 'editorial' bias that says that the ads do not really count as part of the magazine and that a web service will do well enough if it reproduces all the editorial in the magazine. But of course the ads do count (they really, really count for the advertisers) and funnily enough they also matter to the readers. That is why advertisements in magazines work. So a publisher needs to think about the digital edition as a way of adding value to and through the ads in their magazine.
3. This is an ALSO question. The digital edition should not be seen as choice a which excludes the 'comprehensive web version'. Some readers will prefer the HTML version of the magazine, especially if it has been running for a while. But some readers will certainly prefer the digital edition. The digital audience is likely to grow (see what has happened with Scientific Periodicals). It may be an interim measure, but cater for both parties.

One thing is certain: no publisher should think of the digital edition as replacing the magazine's web site. There are plenty of services (blogs, podcasts, user forums to name but three) which need to happen on the web site and NOT in the digital edition. Putting out a digital edition is just a part of the comprehensive range of services which a magazine publisher will use in developing the magazine's brand on the web.

Are newspapers catching a new wind?

The British Press Awards 2007 took place on Monday night. The UK Press Gazette which organises and sponsors the event has a full double page spread with portraits of the delighted winners.

This is a new free trial issue of the UK Press Gazette (sporting our new largest format page size). You can probably tell that the earlier free issue's largest format is a bit smaller than this new one, perhaps too small for comfort.

The article which most sparked my interest was the report on the Newsroom Barometer - a Reuters-co-sponsored study on the future of the newspaper industry. Surprisingly optimistic, is the general tenor of the industry. Don't you like the comments of Monique Villa, of Reuters? She says 'If you think that News International spent in the last three years $1 Billion on their printing presses, it completely blows away the argument that print will die in five years.' She is spot on.

But the editor of Press Gazette is also quite right to put an information box in the article which notes the massive move of advertising money to the web. Newspapers are certainly not going to die, but they also need to find out how to carve out their advertising revenues on the web. Apparently the UK is the country with the highest proportion of the advertising budget that is allocated to online advertising (11% or £2 Billion in 2006).

Death of LIFE

Did the caps give it away?

Time Inc. have announced that LIFE will cease. This news came to me via an interesting new blog MrMagazine.com. Why is Paris Match still roaring away when Picture Post and LIFE -- arguably similar publications for the UK and the US markets -- have bitten the dust (its the third time of dying for LIFE)?

Another new (for me) blog, magculture.com/blog/ takes me to Magazine Death Pool a register for last issues. The editor of this narco-blog has an exuberantly dyspeptic view of where we are:

Although many are still in denial, the golden age of magazines is over. Advertising is being sucked like a vacuum cleaner to the Internet and television. Newsstand sales are in freefall and there's no sign of stopping. Junior would rather IM and download music than read a magazine or a newspaper. Time inc. is laying off and taking buyouts.

There are some magazines which simply have no excuse for existing anymore. Even if the world of publishing was as peachy as a Good Housekeeping cover, they just do not have a reason to live.

These new blogs (and this roving around the magazine graveyard) come via wanderings from Andrew Losowsky's blog. We mentioned his new book yesterday. These magazine bloggers clearly have a keen interest in the design qualities of magazines and I suspect their interest in magazine graveyards is probably diagnostic, if not medical. Do magazines die primarily because their information-design, their visual-design and/or their usability-design is no longer suited to their markets? After all it was TV, not the internet or the web, that did for Picture Post and LIFE (at least the first time around). Magazines with strong design (visual/information/usability) will thrive with the web. One of my colleagues suggests that we offer to curate any major magazine that is bowing out of this world...... If it is a major magazine with an archive of PDFs we will do it for free (or rather for our share of the Google text ads).

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.

Magazines have a time and a season

Magazines are born and magazines die. That is part of a healthy market. Andrew Losowsky has a nostalgia piece in today's Independent about his ten favourite magazines that have died in the last 50 years. Its a good list. I remember reading or looking at most of them, but not Sniffin' Glue (which unsurprisingly had a short life -- 1976-77) and two of them, Lilliput and Picture Post had died before I got interested in magazines. We can think of good one's that he has missed. What happened to the wonderful Illustrated London News? Wikipedia suggests that it is still published bi-annually, but its a long time since I have seen a copy. I also (occasionally -- and I am not yearning and pining for them) regret the absence of The Listener (d 1991) and New Society (merged with New Statesman in 1988).

From John Battelle's Search Blog I caught the news that Infoworld is ceasing print publication. In the 1990's Infoworld, with its tabloid format, colour throughout, multi-column newsprint, and entertaining columnists Metcalfe and Cringely, was my weekly bible on software development and happenings in the PC market ... but that was before the web and when a personal sub airmailed from the US cost over $200+. Magazines, especially B2B periodicals, need to work with the web and exploit it or they will be rolled over.

Copyrights and layers of creativity

John Naughton wrote one of the best introductions to the internet, a kind of hymn to the web: A Brief History of the Future. He blogs regularly, and elegantly, and is also a sage columnist for The Observer (which hides out on the Guardian Unlimited service, since the Guardian does not publish on Sunday). His piece today is excellent. Sir Arthur Sullivan, Tom Lehrer and now a new work by Mike Stanfill. The chances are that you have heard the Lehrer Elements song, it ends

These are the only ones of which news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others but they have not been discovard.

But you will get a new take on the song from Mike Stanfill's Flash implementation which is a great commentary upon, and new kind of performance of the recording. I can not believe that the Lehrer estate is going to sue Mike Stanfill, as one very much hopes that the Sullivan estate did not try to extract royalties from Tom Lehrer; but such marvellous examples of layered copyrightable, creativity, need to be encouraged not prevented by the regulatory framework. Did any lawyer think to question the cubists for using labels of wine and absinthe bottles in their collages (not only copyright but trade-mark protected)?

Digital technologies facilitate collages, parodies, commentaries, mash-ups and emulations that are not simple knock-offs. Media convergence creates the new possibility of copyright convergence. So copyright should be loose enough to accommodate invention. It will have to be. Another Lehrer song reinforces the point: genius may be close to plagiarism.

Google Book Search is a boon for scholars of the 19th Century

Tim O'Reilly has an interesting post on the way that Google Book Search is transforming scholarship.

Google will have to settle its fights with copyright holders. But no one should doubt that the way it is building a global electronic library system can lead to extraordinary richness and access to wisdom. The Google Book Search system will get better -- inexorably and rapidly as more content is added and as the functionality of the software improves. Publishers and librarians will have to match and complement the depth of the vision or they will be left behind.

Broadsheets and Renewals

Overnight there was a stealthy upgrade to the Exact Editions service. Ideally nobody should notice but we can talk about some of the silent enhancements here.

Gutenberg was not thinking about the web when he invented the printing press. Life would be a lot simpler now if he had made a press which could only print on one size and format of paper. We could then optimize everything for a single reading frame. But alas, with the Exact Editions system, we have to cater for 100's and potentially 1,000's of different page sizes with some more or less regular image sizes (no more than 11 at present). We reserve the largest 'page' sizes for the magazines that really need them, because offering a larger image puts more burden on the not-to-be-overworked scroll-bar. Our largest JPEG just got a bit larger, 1,700 pixels across. But it will be a few weeks before we show the broadsheet that will take advantage of this.

Of more immediate interest, we can now renew our subscribers automatically. 'Renewals' are available from the user's 'Preferences' link on your account page. They of course work fairly, in the sense that the renewal starts from the date from which the current subscription expires. This has the incidental advantage that a user can now subscribe for 2, 3 or more years by simply renewing the subscription as many times as needed.

Newspapers and Magazines -- what to do about the web?

PaidContent has a report on a gloomy review of the newspaper and magazine industry's reaction to the web. There is also a link to the International Herald Tribune's report on the Magazine 2.0 Conference -- a satelite event to CEBIT.

It is quite extraordinary that some publishers are developing a digital strategy just because they feel the need to respond to advertiser's expectations.

"We are making a lot of sales online, but over all we are still making a loss," said Andreas Wiele, the president of [Axel Springer Verlag]'s magazines and international businesses, which are based in Berlin. "But we basically had no choice. Our advertisers are demanding an Internet strategy and we have to have one."

The prior question has to be: Can the publishers develop digital editions which serve their readers in a convincing fashion online? If the readers will not read the publication online the advertisers will properly have no interest in advertising in an online magazine or newspaper.

Hachette has been running digital trials in France which it will expand to the UK. Hachette has put 200 magazines into the trial and has had uptake from 20,000 consumers (the trial has been running since August).

Hachette sells access to digital facsimiles of four magazines for just €9.90, or about $13, a month. Consumers download the magazines, which are enhanced with embedded audio and video, and read them off line. They can switch the four titles each month and there is no yearly commitment.

I wonder whether it is really attractive to tell subscribers that there is 'no yearly commitment' and they may switch their choice each month? Interesting also, that they should have chosen 'four' as the proper number for a multi-title offer. However, at least Hachette is trying. Quite a few publishers appear to have given up. PaidContent concludes: 'the industry will wait for the electronics industry to save it by developing a hand-held newspaper and magazine reader.' PaidContent is not counting on this to happen in the medium term. Tough times ahead? Or it could be time to try a digital edition which is a simple web application?

Digital Editions and Greedy Networks

Digital editions avoid most of the wasteful practices which bedivil the print magazine industry (paper not needed at all, physical distribution costs gone, wrappers and collateral offers virtual or abolished, landfill for used magazines spared, no returns from sale-or-return etc.). But there is a worry that the environmental savings will be wiped out by the unsustainable and resource-greedy growth of the internet. Steve commented on this yesterday and he cited a fascinating discussion of the issues -- concentrating on Second Life.

Larry and Sergey, the idealistic Google founders, are anxious about the growth in power consumption for their data centres and users' network devices. When one starts to worry about the ecological impact of digital publishing, power ends up being the only real concern. On all other concerns the business is much, much cleaner than print publishing. If Larry and Sergey think that there is a problem with excessive power consumption, I am not going to contradict them, but it is notable that the profile of the problem has changed. What matters now is not, how much power and paper publishers use and waste. The key question now is what resources will users expend and will their pattern of digital consumption be very greedy? With traditional print publishing the resource use and the ecological impact stems from the printing process. There is a shadow, a trail, of ecological impact from the printing plant outwards. The only way users add to this ecological impact is by switching on the lights so that they can read the magazine that has been so laboriously shipped to them. But with a digital information system, the ecological impact and the power consumption is much more a matter of how and how much the system is used and what devices are operating at the periphery. The publishing function uses relatively trivial power and cash resources. In the next generation, the consumers, and their network devices, not the printing plants and paper factories are where the ecological impact is to be located. Brewster Kahle gave a fascinating lecture at Rice University two weeks ago, in which he pointed out that the Library of Congress, all 20 million volumes of it, could be stored in a tower memory box no larger than the podium from which he spoke. A large memory disk system of that capacity can be had for $60,000 (as he noted that is the cost of a garage or a good party in Silicon Valley) and the power used in running that box for a year is comparable to the central heating costs of a large house. Having and powering a very large digital library is cheap and getting cheaper. All the magazines and newspapers ever published could easily be accommodated in such a box. But it is the way consumers use digital resources that will have the environmental impact. If consumers care about ecological impacts then ecologically efficient systems will be built and used.

I find this an oddly hopeful thought: however the ecological challenge of global warming is to be met, it is only by a broad shift in consumer behaviour and expectations that we will see any effective action. Governments and business groups are getting concerned about climate change and ecological issues; but we can be sceptical of all treaties, targets and policies unless and until they have widespread popular support. Consumer behaviour is the key. Which will be my contribution to today's conference Green and Lean: how will publishing survive?.

Support and Customer Feedback

Is mostly great -- but its a matter of degree. If one gets too much feedback or call for customer support something is clearly wrong, (eg First Direct's problems this last week in changing procedures so that, among other disruptions, Safari, the default Mac browser, is no longer supported). Occasionally feedback is simply positive and gratifying to hear. Blush, blush, this came in through the feedback box last night:

Super .............new media format
I really enjoyed buzzing around the magazine
like a wasp looking for sticky jam
ZZZZZZZZZZZ must go ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZ and have a look again ZZZZZZ
THANKS

Kevin's message is great, but I have a small, ever so tiny, issue with it -- an abhorrence of wasps. Could someone else please send us some feedback saying they are a butterfly seeking nectar, a bear with a honey pot, or even a bee with a jam jar? Wasps and smeared jam just gives me the heebie jeebies. Especially the ZZZZZZ..... This is a trial issue to Kevin's magazine.

A small change to our service this week - which hardly anybody noticed (zero feedback so far). The largest size for our large format magazines, just got a little bit larger. The change is not retrospective but will apply to new issues coming through, so you will need to subscribe to one of the relevant titles or wait for a new trial issue. Take my word for it they are bigger. Here is a page in the older small size from the Press Gazette, and another from the LRB. New pages: area roughly 40% bigger than a week ago, more virtual paper but no environmental impact.

Project Red Stripe

The Economist is outsourcing and collaborating with its audience in an effort to reinvent itself. Project Red Stripe is a small group of employees charged with coming up with some revolutionary ideas and implementing them in a 6 month time-table, the mission:

We're a small team set up by The Economist Group, the parent company of the eponymous newspaper. Our mission is to develop truly innovative services online. We already have some ideas, of course. But as champions of free markets, we abhor the concept of a closed system. This is why we would like you to submit your idea (or ideas). Just think big - and we'll do the rest.

They are about half way through their timetable, check up on their progress here (webcam).

The Economist has been getting steadily bigger and better for the last generation. It is a tough proposition to maintain that kind of track-record. We subscribe and read it regularly but it is much better in print than on the web.... So Red Stripe has to succeed! Few magazines (those who work for it, call the publication a 'newspaper' but I persist in thinking of it as a magazines) would have the chutzpah to do this in public (but it is comparable to The Guardian's blogmosis). Surely it is a noble goal and good luck to the team. It could be time to suggest that there was a proper digital edition of the magazine, umm I mean newspaper.... Here is their suggestions box.

Are publishers taking environmental problems seriously?

This is one of the questions we have been invited to address on a panel discussion at the Innovation in Publishing conference at the London College of Communication on Thursday 15th March.

Are we yet taking it seriously? Is the question that I will address in the 3-5 minutes allotted to each panelist. But since there is a lot to say and a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps the thing to do will be to link to this site, with its 180+ pictures of waste from the London free sheets war.

The short answer to the question is that publishers are not yet taking these issues seriously, but readers and consumers are. The magazine industry and print publishers as a whole need to get their skates on.

Google vs Microsoft II

There have been many informative follow-ups to the Rubin speech mentioned here 2 days ago. Surely the most insightful analysis comes from Danny Sullivan. If one follows some of the links in his posting one can see how amazingly thorough Danny is. The bravest posting was mildly critical of Microsoft from the Microsoft-employed blogger Don Dodge. Tim O'Reilly speaks eloquently in Google's defence. He usually does on Book Search. So does Lawrence Lessig. Andrew Grabois's follow-through in the O'Reilly posting, comments on the spuriously inflated percentage of orphan copyrights, seems to reduce the force of O'Reilly and Lessig's argument. The Grabois points took me over to the PersonaNonData blog, for Michael Cairns's own comments. The pnd blog also alerted me to the mournful post from Peter Brantley. That is the contribution that would most worry me if I were the Google Book Search product manager (eek!). But today's PaidContent note on Google's Chinese library efforts leads one to the conclusion that Google is now so far in, it just has to get it right.

Google surely needs to settle with the publishers, listen to its friendly critics in the library community and work with other players in the digital book space. That is the only way to get it right and the only way to

organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful

Whenever Google plans a new information service, someone in the Googleplex should intone 100 times that it is the world's information, not Google's. Google is great and it needs to stay that way.

Management by Blogmosis

Blogmosis denotes the tendency for business and management decisions to be implemented, presented and conducted in semi-public. BuzzMachine has a great example of blogmosis this morning. When Alan Rusbridger OK'ed Jeff Jarvis blogging this company-wide, strategic, pep-talk, did he realise that so much of what he was saying would ricochet around the blogosphere and presumably echo in all competing boardrooms? Probably not, but it really does not matter. Indeed, widespread interest may help in the process of change.

I was fascinated by the tidbit that the Guardian already appears in 10 different 'platforms'. The print edition, the digital edition, Guardian Unlimited, the short PDF version G24, Guardian Weekly, Guardian Monthly.... makes 6. But where are the other 4 on Rusbridger's PowerPoint? Stumped. Which only goes to show that from the management standpoint, one of the advantages of blogmosis is that it doesn't give everything away.

PPA course on Digital Magazines

The PPA (Periodical Publishers Association) provides a fabulous amount of information about and for the magazine industry through its publications, web sites and member services. It also provides training courses for the industry. So it is good to see that it is now running a one day workshop on digital magazines. It is being run by John Weir who has a blog Digital Magazines which we find a useful source of news on developments. I have no idea beyond the course description what the day will cover, but John Weir has asked us some pertinent questions about how the Exact Editions system works and what we offer publishers. So he has definitely been doing his homework, and where else is a magazine publisher going to find out what there is to know about digital magazines? I think the PPA will get a full course.

Google vs Microsoft

Microsoft has usually beaten its chosen opponents. Google does not look like such a straightforward proposition. In this case most of my sympathies would lie with the upstart, however Microsoft has chosen its ground carefully. Microsoft will have plenty of allies in questioning Google's attitude towards copyrights. Google has fights here with the Association of American Publishers, with a group of Belgian newspaper publishers, with many TV companies over YouTube, etc. Too many fights.

So Tom Rubin, Microsoft's Associate General Counsel for Copyright has chosen a good moment to publish an opinion piece in the Financial Times, just as he appears at the AAP annual conference.

Google will not want to be seen as the enemy of all copyright holders. So it is lucky for them that Springer have just announced that all of its 29,000 titles are available for searching through Google Book Search. Google needs to start making peace with the publishers and put through a few more deals like the Springer coup. Putting 29,000 books online is a tall order. Note that the announcement says that they are all up, not that they are all going to be there one day. Well done Springer and Google. I dont know why GBS thinks it has 46,000.

Reading Devices and the Limits of Access

Mathewingram's blog notes that HarperCollins and Random House have popped up with widgets on their home pages which allow one to browse and search quite a few of their in-print titles. If you want you can take the widget off and plant it in you own web page or blog. This is an interesting experiment and may help to sell a few more books, but it does not seem like an adequate response to the Google Book Search project. Do we need transplantable widgets that search individual titles? Blogger doesnt like the Random House widget or I would have given you one here. The Random House title that I tested, Alex Espinoza's novel Still Water Saints, worked; the widget found me 64 occurrences of the word 'night', but the flash environment loaded slowly, and seemed to create a rather cramped and inelegant reading environment. Most of the book was 'off limits', but it was reassuring that at least the search worked across the whole title. Could this kind of widget-based reader grow up sufficiently that it becomes a solid reading environment? Maybe. The jury is out on that one.

From the other end of the spectrum. Boingboing carries a piece about a new memory-stick device that contains the whole back run of the New Yorker. That has to be one of the most valuable and entertaining magazine archives in the cosmos. What would James Thurber have made of it? I think he might have written a piece about forgetting where the memory stick was that had all his cartoons on it. The moral of the fable being that those who forget their memory sticks will have to rely on their powers of recollection for the enjoyment of their cartoons.

It is strange indeed the way book publishers and magazine publishers in New York are moving in different directions. The book publishers are making fragments of their work available through a software reading device which permits any web browser anywhere on the world wide web (that is 'any browser capable of handling Flash') read snippets of their books, whilst a magazine publisher from the same city is making the whole of his archive available through a highly specific hardware device which is limited to a single publication. You can have some of he stuff everywhere, or all of the stuff in one unique place. Having everything, everywhere is still a way off.

Publishers do not think first and foremost about scaleability, which is why Google will probably win this race.

Microsoft's new reader

Time to declare an interest (several of them). I use a Mac and I am not a great fan of Windows or of its latest release Vista. So I have not yet tested the new Microsoft reader which is clearly in some ways pretty spiffy. Bobbie Johnson reviews the Daily Mail's implementation here. But the new Microsoft system is clearly in some sense a serious competitor to the Exact Editions approach (another interest declared). Nor am I too sure how this new environment is being marketed against the old Microsoft eReader which everyone except the Microsoft web pages seems to have forgotten. Should I get off my backside and buy or borrow a new PC with Vista on it? Should I take out my subscription to the new digital Daily Mail? Or should I stick with the old newspaperdirect one?

Not yet. There is something puzzling about the positioning of the new reader. Matthew Ingram has a recent post which surveys some of the problematic issues. If lots of newspapers are going to create their own proprietary implementation of the new eReader, that seems like an awful waste. Surely there should be someway the user can get a bundle of content in the same reader etc? There has also recently been a thread on the disadvantages of PDF-based digital editions of newspapers on the Greenslade blog. These guys are not going to be much happier with a Microsoft download than with the PDF issues. I wonder whether these PDF critics would find the same problem with the Exact Editions system, which does not use a issue-download, but provides access to a full text database of the publication? Maybe 'yes' maybe 'no', but the comment of Ingram's that really caught my attention was the suggestion that this style of controlled distribution appeals to traditional media executives because it precludes 'linking from the outside'. Does he mean this would be seen as a recommendation? I think so.

If traditional media barons still see this as a plus, they have a long way to go in their efforts to understand the twenty-first century. That is the trouble with these issue-based downloads, they are on the web but not of it. The awkwardness of linking-to or citing content is the nail in the plank of most of the issue-download eReaders out there. And if you can not easily link to ads which are themselves interactive links, what is the point of having advertising in digital newspapers? If someone will link me to the Daily Mail's classified ads pages in the new Microsoft format, I promise to go and take a look.

All Out Cricket

Monty Panesar gets five mentions. 'Five' means five pages in our language -- ie there are five pages in the trial issue which have 'Panesar' on them. The name might appear more than once on some pages, but our search counts pages. Google works the same way counting pages rather than 'occurrences' in the strict sense. Techie point, to keep you awake in the slips.

Cricket attracts obsessional supporters. And I used to have a deceptive off-cutter in my medium pace repertoire, but I am in two minds as to whether Lance Cairns is really 'Better than Sex?'

Dickie Bird handles the Readers' queries.

ABC figures for 2nd Half of 2006

The ABC figures are out and they are a tale of woe for the men's magazines market. The women's magazines sector has done better and especially the relatively new trend for weeklies, eg Grazia. Stephen Brook has some comments in today's Media Guardian.

Stephen Brook suggests that one cause for the collapse in the men's titles could be the rise in digital subscriptions, he cites the new Dennis publication Monkey. But it could well be that the digital challenge is coming from the web as a whole not from quasi-magazines (ie from Google, YouTube and Facebook) and experiments such as Monkey are a rather small scale response. Hardly enough to cause a circulation collapse in their parent publisher's key titles. Dennis are also proposing to sell the men's magazine list, again Stephen Brook has the story, which may not be a vote of confidence in their digital future. We encourage magazine publishers to get their titles on to the web, just the way they are. There are signs that it is working for our publishers.

The Library Thing

A tool for cataloguing your own library and for sharing information with like-minded readers. Why would one need that? The Library Thing may seem pointless to people who don't use the web, but to those who do, it is compelling and subtle -- especially those of us who like to organise stuff. It is still quite young but has grown like topsy and has had a massive response. The Library Thing only encourages its users to organise books, not records or magazines. Scope for development there? How well would it work with eBooks? Rather well, if they worked ....... but that is another story.

Yellow Ink: the Missing Link

The BBC is carrying a fascinating story about how Fujitsu is developing a technique for printing concealed hot-links to web sites and phone numbers in print. The idea is that you will be able to point your mobile phone at an ad and it will call the appropriate number or link to the web site. If every page carried its own web address in invisible ink you could point your phone to book mark any page that interested you while you were reading it in print.

The Exact Editions system already automatically spots and marks up email addresses (seven on that page), urls (over 20 on that page) and phone numbers so that they become clickable links (only the numbers in international format are live on the cited page; and the saved search highlights 'Tel' so that the numbers are easier to spot) . This sounds pretty straightforward, but it is a bit smarter than you might think, because with the EE system these links are not occuring in ordinary HTML, they are 'hot spots' on the JPEG image of a page which is what we deliver to the client.

The neat thing about Fujitsu's yellow ink and the EE hot spots is that the print image becomes a real partner in the development of the web. It is the ability to link from print pages to web pages and from web pages to inky pages that promises so well for the future of print. The web becomes a natural extension and 'reservoir' of print as well as a replacement for it. Another reason for print publishers to cheer up.

Digital Editions and Environmental Impact

There are sound business reasons for using Digital Editions. The bottom line is what drives most publishing and distribution decisions, and an investment in digital technology can improve the performance of all magazines. Yet there are also sound ecological reasons for the appropriate use of a digital platform. Publishers who have a concern for the ecological impact of the magazine business should consider these five principles in forming their digital strategy:

1. Provide the consumer with the choice of a digital edition. Your readers will increasingly expect the option to have web access or a digital subscription and all of us are spending more time on the web. But make this a choice -- not a forced move. Print still has its places and many readers prefer print, in which case they should have what they prefer.
   
2. Promote with digital. Use digital editions to promote magazines and to recruit new subscribers and readers. For trial purposes a digital edition is almost always much cheaper than a physical copy. There is much waste in the traditional, newstand based distribution channel. A responsible circulation director will consider digital promotion and know how cost-effective it is in relation to 'sale or return' print copies, many of which will be sent to landfill.
   
3. Price digital access fairly. Do not load the dice against the digital edition or the digital subscription by excessive pricing or other forms of discrimination. Users will expect a digital edition to be cheaper than a print copy. They will expect it to include all the content available to print subscribers.
   
4. Deliver an enhanced service with appropriate web techniques. Empower your readers by providing them with additional value: eg fast access to a comprehensive archive, live links from the web edition, and the opportunity to bookmark or cite key pages.
   
5. Ensure that advertisers also benefit from the appropriate digital strategy for your magazine. Support your advertisers by giving them the benefits which accrue from a digital audience and digital delivery, especially through improved response rates, interactivity and audience metrics.

We offer these principles, in draft form, and welcome any comments on them.

Google's Book Search or The Turing Library

Philipp Lennsen tells me that he thinks that Google's superfast "0.00" search results, previous post, were caused by a mistake that Google has now put right. So Google Book Search probably never was faster than the web search. Perhaps speed is not, after all, as important as extent or comprehensiveness.

In which context: Andrew Hodges' wonderful biography of Turing, reproduces a stunning passage, written by Turing in 1947, which prompts the suggestion that Google Book Search should be re-styled, or should aim to become, The Turing Library:

We could even imagine a computing machine that was made to work with a memory based on books. It would not be very easy but would be immensely preferable to the single long tape. Let us for the sake of argument suppose that the difficulties involved in using books as memory were overcome, that is to say mechanical devices for finding the right book and opening it at the right page, etc. etc. had been developed, imitating the use of human hands and eyes. ..[later].. In my opinion this problem of making a large memory available at reasonably short notice is much more important than that of doing operations such as multiplication at high speed.
LMS lecture quoted in Hodges Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence p 319.

This passage does to a remarkable degree anticipate the methodology of building the Google Book Search system. Google have virtualised Turing's thought experiment. It is also fascinating that in this passage Turing considers that a 'library' (books) would be 'immensely preferable' to the abstract 'Turing machine' concept of an endless tape with which he had developed his mathematical and computational results. This paper of Turing's is fascinatingly parallel to, but more deeply digital than, Vannevar Bush's 'As We May Think'.

If Andrew Hodge's book were in Google's Book Search, I would link you to it straight away. It surely will be and perhaps this is one of the reasons why a Turing library is, indeed, immensely preferable to the endless Turing tape. The Turing library is actually coming to pass.

Has Google Book Search slowed down?

A couple of months ago Philipp Lennsen, on his Google Blogoscoped, reported that Google Book Search returned results in almost no time at all: zero-point-zero-zero seconds, which is very fast even if it really is taking '0.002' seconds or something which gets rounded down to zero. This blog post got me wondering and it produced some interesting and amusing comments.

To my surprise, Google Book Search has now slowed down quite a bit. As Alex Ionut emphasised, back in December 2006, any Google Book Search was coming back in '0.00' seconds. Today searches on Google Book Search are only a little bit faster and sometimes slower than the same search on Google Web search.

Mind you Google Book Search is still amazingly fast. It takes 0.05 seconds to find the 13 occurrences of the phrase "bliss was it that dawn" in the million odd books that Google may now have scanned, and on the web Google this morning found me 34 occurrences in 0.04 seconds. Does it matter if Google Book Search has slowed down a bit? Would it be better if Google Book Search really was blindingly fast, faster than web search?

Guardian notes success of digital magazines

Stephen Brook in this week's Media Guardian has a piece about Exact Editions and the way our platform is being used by specialist publications. He notes our emphasis on Searching and on building Subscriptions, and it is interesting that he also quotes from the Royal Mail's head of publishing services. One would think that digital distribution and mail delivery are competing channels -- they are, but they are also working in the same direction to help publishers establish direct relationships with their readers. The Royal Mail is also benefitting from the increasing shift to subscription-based circulation (unlike the USA the British magazine market has traditionally seen distribution via retailers rather than direct to subscribers). Brook says that an astonishing 87% of consumer magazine circulation is still via the retail channel.

One thing Brook misses, is the huge benefits to the publisher from using the digital edition to promote a magazine. Elsewhere in the Media Guardian there is an interesting piece about the unstoppable flow of new product launches in the magazine market. About 500 a year says Jim Bilton. Since a new magazine launch can be incredibly expensive (apparently £9 million for Look -- launched last week), and since a digital promotion even of a big title should only cost a few thousand pounds, one has to wonder why most new magazine product launches do not include provision of a free trial promotional copy?

Velo Vision

• A bike without pedals
• Travelling in style
• This makes me nervous
  

A Careers Guide for the New Scientist

The current issue of the New Scientist is using a 72 page Careers Supplement on the Exact Editions platform. Follow the links on their home page to the Careers Guide.

I guess we can all benefit from Alison Motluk's advice on Six Steps to a Stress-Free Career.

DRM (Rights Management) and Access Management

Earlier this week Steve Jobs started to blog on the Apple web site. His is a fascinating argument and surprising in some ways, since Apple has the most successful DRM system on the planet.

But he is right. It must be in the interests of music publishers and creative artists to move to a marketplace which allows device-independent music acquisition. The trouble is that publishers and artists are understandably nervous of a technology (eg the MP3 file format) which facilitates unlicensed copying. Print publishers (whether of newspapers, magazines or books) are in a better position because an alternative model is feasible for print markets. Namely: to license access on a subscription basis. The trouble with the DRM solutions that have been developed for music and film is that they depend on managing (or on trying to manage and inhibit) the copying. There has been less emphasis on the possibility for offering access to a library service.

It is also in Apple's interests. Things are changing and they are changing at Apple. Unlike the iPod, the iPhone will have built in broad-band connectivity. Access management through subscriptions to a comprehensive service become a feasible distribution channel. Perhaps the music and film industries would do better to develop subscriptions which allowed users to acquire access rights to huge libraries through an iPhone or any other consumer device. If large libraries of film or music could be easily accessed through the web they would soon become incredibly popular. That is why YouTube is such a winner.

Because print needs to be searched it's best off as a network resource not a consumer durable. Access through the web is more important than the local copy. Think libraries not copies: texts not books: magazines not issues.

Ecological impacts

We have blogged before about the ecological impact of the magazine industry. We would like to muster some arguments that could show the extent to which digital magazines really are a sound ecological development as they appear to be.

Before we get too committed to this approach, here is a thought from left-field: perhaps we should really be persuading magazine publishers to print magazines white on black, rather than mostly black on white? In this way the magazine industry would adjust readers to a mode of presentation and design which will have significant energy savings when the switch to primarily digital magazines is complete. Mark Onktush calculates that if Google were to switch from a black on white display, to a white on black display, there would be a saving of about 750 Megawatt hours a year.

Hmm... this is a topic to which one is tempted to return in early April. Right at the beginning of the month.

Rare Book Review

• Some rare books are very valuable
  
• Lots of Skypeable numbers for Rare Book Auctioneers. 51 on this page.
• Maggs is a distinguished name in the Rare Books world. This one, surely some relation, has a rant on monosyllables.
  

Incremental changes

We made three small changes to the service last week. Small enough that probably nobody noticed. I remember when software development was like loading an omnibus with passengers for a guided excursion. There alwasy a concern that some notable passenger would miss the bus. Finally the development build up would lead to a laborious and risky period of alpha- and beta-testing, revised documentation and eventually a new release would be shipped to customers (floppy disks and all). If it worked properly there were no complaints but there was a huge amount of upheaval and everyone noticed what was going on. What a pleasure that software development is no longer like that.

One of the minor enhancements is that our feedback form now gives our audience the opportunity to specify which magazine the feedback is about. That is certainly a minor change, but it helps a great deal with the customer support -- since, before the change, we often had to guess as to which magazine a specific feedback was about.

When you think about it 'web' was a darn good metaphor for the invention of Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink structure must have been the main driver for the choice of the web metaphor. but it is also web-like in its growth and stability. Exactly like a web, the way a small change can be made to one tiny node and it very gently shakes itself over the whole connected structure and imperceptibly beds itself in. When TBL was specc-aming his hypertext system I bet he never considered that his invention would lead to the death of the software *release* and the prevalence of incremental changes. Will Microsoft's Vista be the last of the major software releases?

Where is in this magazine?

The heading is barely grammatical, but it is prompted by a fascinating mashup of Google Book Search and Google Maps. See here for details:

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2007/01/books-mapped.html

I should warn you that some of the links in the Booksearch blog do not always work as required (ie there is no book-specific map), probably for arcane copyright-related reasons. But there are good maps of the places mentioned in War and Peace and Around the World in Eighty Days. At least I was able to get to these with a UK registered IP. No such luck with the 9/11 Commission report or "A Problem from Hell": America and the age of genocide . I leave you to find the Marco Polo trail for yourself. I always thought he made a more northerly route to China than is suggested by this Google mashup. Perhaps that is the way he came back, and he only knew where he was going on the return journey?

So can we look forward to a time when we will be able to see a map of all the places mentioned in a particular issue of a magazine? I have no doubt that it will come to pass. It will also probably be feasible through the web to find out which magazine issues mention a specific place and that too could be quite useful. Give it five years. The web is weaving an extraordinarily rich and suggestive gossamer around all information objects.

Google Books and Libraries

Google is doing something very interesting with books (see Google Book Search), and it is likely that they are going to spring some surprises on us this year. The Guardian's Vic Keegan had an insightful piece on this at the weekend. Keegan is the kind of journalist who gets behind the press releases (see his account of how to get your book self-published with Lulu). He gets his finger on the pulse.

But about one thing Vic Keegan is off-beam. He says:

Books are different from videos, emails and photographs, because for current
titles it is necessary to do deals with a comparatively small number of big
publishers rather than millions of individual users.

Which is sort of true. But it certainly does not follow, as he implies, that it will be easier for Google to negotiate with a few commercial publishers, than it would be to harness the energy of millions of web users. Most of the big publishers hate what Google is doing. Jonathan Rée, has written a thoughtful piece on the Google Book project in the current issue of Prospect, we also have a trial issue here. It is an excellent article and a brilliant magazine. I recommend a subscription.

Rée makes clear that the key advantage of the Google project is that it will allow the instantaneous searching of whole libraries of information. It is a curious fact that the Google project is really a Library project, so it is really misnamed as Google Book Search. Searching books is pretty straightforward. Searching all of the published literature is the Google goal - terabytes of information: the Library of Congress, The British Library and more. I am not sure whether the publishers who are worrried by this would be more worried, or pacified if Google were more explicit about the hugely ambitious goal. Oddly enough, its for the very reason that this hugely ambitious goal is so valuable and enlightening that for this very reason the wishes of millions of web users, who sense that searching complete libraries is completely feasible, may begin to count and Google will in the end be able to persuade the handful of mega-publishers that it is a good idea.

Acceptable Magazines

We have not yet been asked to sell subscriptions to any 'top shelf' magazines. Our current thinking is that were we to be asked we would politely decline. Decisions of this kind are hard to justify and its very hard to demarcate any borderline of taste. There does not seem to us to be any sensible way of offering a 'topshelf' in a virtual magazine store, but perhaps we have not thought through the issues. The physical topshelf is handy because a 12 year old probably can not reach it and anything at that level is relatively unobtrusive to the majority of the population.....

We really do not know what the right policy would be. There are enough magazines that want to get onto the web as Exact Editions that we probably do not need to resolve the problem for a while, but if you have any views, please post a comment. It now occurs to me that we should probably follow 'best practice' among those film download sites that handle Adult Material.

Reading a magazine on your PDA

I dont recommend it, but I am very impressed that people will try it out. Here was some interesting feedback from Philip:

Just subscribed to the Baptist Times Exact Edition. It looks good and works well on my PC, but there is one drawback. If I save the .pdf pages to view on my Palm PDA they are much too small to read. I suspect it may be because the pdf file is based on an image rather than on the text.

Philip is exactly right about the last point. Also the Baptist Times is one of the largest formats we work with, so its bound to be harder to squeeze a usable PDF onto the PDA. But of course we were taken with the idea, and a good half hour was spent in the office checking out how easily we could save PDF images of the magazine onto our mobiles and then navigate the pages. We reckon that the Nokia N70 is a better bet than the assembled Blackberries, but it may be that we havent yet spent enough time on tweaking the Blackberry.

There is a brand new spiffy Blackberry out today so we will have a shoot out with the Apple iPhone later in the year. Meanwhile I would say this is only to be attempted by the most committed digital enthusiast. It is not the easiest way to read a magazine.

Contemporary Magazine

Bernard Frize.

Grid-defined paintings.

Peter Zimmermann.

We now have some very strong magazines in the fields of design and visual arts.

Advertising and Metrics

This week's Media Guardian had a very informative article on the changing ways of measuring the effectiveness of web advertising. The article is by Jeff Jarvis and its also available from his blog.

Its a very helpful summary of where the industry is at. Namely, in a bit of quandary when it comes to providing good metrics for advertisers. Jarvis doesnt explicitly draw this conclusion, but it follows from his analysis, that the responsibility for providing trustworthy data and ROI information to publishers is increasingly likely to fall to the publishers directly. In the traditional print world the publisher could rely on the information provided by the Audit Bureau (ABC or BPA etc). The publisher might limit himself to emailing the advertiser a copy of the ABC certificate as a PDF file and to making darned sure that the records kept on the distribution side meet the audit requirements of the Audit Bureau. But in a world of effective web sites and digital editions the advertisers will increasingly look to the publisher to have a system from which the success and the audience of each advertisement can be measured. This will mean providing vastly more data to the advertisers if they want it. It will mean having systems which allow for this data to be easily/automtically polled by the advertiser.

We are now providing such a comprehensive service for our publishers. The publisher of the Ecologist can now find out exactly how many times this page has been looked at, month by month, and exactly how many people have clicked through from the link to Riverford Organics. We do not have permission to tell you what those numbers are, but it is fair to say that a live link buried in straight prose, such as in that context on our system, has a click through rate of roughly 4% (4 click throughs for every 100 page views). A prominent url in a display ad will do better. Those click-throughs are gold dust, and a decent stats service should tell the publisher and the advertiser where the gold dust is.

Feedback is good even when you it leaves you puzzled

We had a very busy weekend. On Friday we launched Le Monde Diplomatique (LMD) through the Exact Editions service. LMD did all the right things: they emailed a list of supporters, they had an advertisement on the home page of their English edition (they have many language and regional editions -- 57!). Its the same old lesson: if you do the right thing with the web, the right things happen. We had a flood of subscriptions, lots of trial usage, plenty of feedback and some of it was telling us how great the digital edition is. EG:

Just a couple of months ago, I have renewed my subscription for the print edition of Monde Diplo for another 2 years. I like the new digital edition for several reasons (search function, environment (saves paper), looks, easy access). I would like to exchange my print edition for the digital edition starting with the next issue.

This sounds like the kind of reader for whom a digital subscription is exactly right. If you value searching, you are concerned about environmental impacts and you are keen to access your subscription from anywhere, the Exact Editions works very, very well. Or...

I love this service. Thank you.

But I'd like a few more preference options, for instance how many issues I'd like to view per page on the home page. It needs more functionality.

But still, brilliant, keep up the good work!

Useful feedback and I am sure it will be logged on our list of possible improvements. Rich is right that we could do more to offer user-preferences. And then there is the reaction that you don't quite get:

As much as I like to read your Newspaper, I am not in a position to adjust it into a proper reading mode. Some better method must be found.

That is a little disappointing, but one wonders what Werner is getting at when he says that the he is unable to 'adjust it into a proper reading mode'. If he is thinking of reading the magazine/newspaper on his lap or adjusting the angle of vision in the way that might for a tabloid print publication -- well of course he is right. The monitor or laptop screen through which digital magazines are currently read is not something most of us currently feel completely comfortable with. When the iPhone arrives we will be reading digital magazines in the bed (even in the shower?) but till that time comes, we are stuck with our existing methods, and reading a digital magazine means sitting oneself in front of a typical monitor or laptop. Adjusting the person or the posture rather than adjusting the position or aspect of the magazine itself. And there will always be a better method; Werner is right a better method will be found. Keep on telling us what it should be.

Estimates and Guesstimates in the Guardian New Media Blog

Daryl Rayner, our MD, is quoted as guessing that we will have 150 titles in the Exact Editions shop by the end of 2007.

Our MD is usually right (we need to be careful what we say), but, if she meant exactly 150, the chances are she is wrong about this one. Anybody got a better guess? Please log it as a comment if you think you discern the course of events in the months remaining to 2007.

While we are at it, I would like someone to tell me which will be our 100th title. Last night someone suggested this list of desirable additions: 'Rolling Stone, Fast Company, Travel, GQ, Vogue, Esquire, ID etc' and then came back and added Esquire and Maxim. Phew, that will keep us busy, but it doesnt get us to 100.

New Humanist

Transhumanists?

Laurie Taylor -- who must be one of our funniest writers.

Laurie again, interviewing John Mortimer -- the funniest playwright.

Le Monde Diplomatique

This monthly magazine has a circulation of 1,500,000 copies in 26 languages and 67 editions. As yet only the English English language edition is available through Exact Editions.

(later) Need to change the sample links. The trial issue was switched just after we launched. Here are some new links.

The idiocy of 9/11 conspiracists.

Ikea -- some of its secrets

Wars and witch-hunts.


But you should really subscribe as the John Berger article on Passolini, now behind the subscription wall, is compelling.

FAQ #3

The FAQ is now up. We think it will answer most of the most frequently asked questions. If not, it will get longer.

I like the boldness of our claim that we support any current browser which supports images. Could be that will become a hostage to fortune -- Oh well we have said it now!

(Any current browser) of course includes, Safari -- the default browser on the Mac. Whoah! that means I should be able to read magazines on my iPhone -- which is the sensation du jour.

Plastic Magazines

A company called Plastic Logic with a clever technology from the University of Cambridge has raised $100 Million in Venture Capital funding to build a factory for plastic semi-conductor subtrates. See the FT report.

$100 Million is a lot of money for a manufacturing plant and the technology sounds brilliant. It will also, apparently, work very well with another clever new-materials technology, E.Ink, (If you havent heard of E.Ink, you may know about the Sony Reader -- think miniature golf balls arranged in a matrix, each ball with a black face and a white face, in this matrix the faces flip black/white in a pixelated array). E.Ink has so far been stuck with rigid semiconductor backing. Stuck with it and stuck on it. Inklike microballs in a matrix and plastic substrate, when you fuse these two inventions you have a foldable, re-usable, high-resolution, glare resisting, print-carrying, cheap surface. All the complaints about not being able to take an e-magazine into the bath go down the plug-hole. These inventions are definitely bringing nearer the moment of the wearable magazine or the T-shirt-as-newspaper. Consider a T-shirt newspaper which is always displaying the latest issue of Metro (or The Guardian). Can you imagine what a tube journey is going to be like when half the occupants are wearing today's newspaper and the other half is trying to peer at the relevant column? (Before she gets off at the next station).

This is a great future, and I expect that conventional print replacement (and conventional t-shirt replacement) will be one of the areas in which Plastic Logic is deployed. But the big challenge for magazines and newspapers is not to do with improved and cheaper media for display. These media are coming and will surely be there and improving at the rate of Moore's Law. The challenge is to figure out how magazines and newspapers will be accessed, organised and used through the web. There is not a lot of point having a magazine on your restaurant napkin, if you cannot search it, refer to it by a link, and/or even subscribe to it.

This is fun but before we get too excited about the plastic New Yorker, note that colour will not be available in the first generation of the Plastic Logic substrates.....He does not say how long the first generation is, but I would guess this means three or four years with only black and white.
Our reservation about the Sony Reader applies.

Magazine City

This blog has Google text ads running in the margin. I find it educational to keep a weather eye on what appears there. An advertiser that recently caught my attention was Magazine City, a fairly standard re-seller of magazine print subscriptions through a web interface. The web site looks efficient and they cover many hundreds of US magazines. It is always interesting to see from such sites how really substantial savings are available on US magazine subs. But the item that really caught my attention was a reasonably prominent link to Ordering magazines for inmates.

Is that really a market worth catering for with a link near the top of the interface for an e-commerce site? It must be so, which is a sorry corollary of the number of prisoners in US correctional facilities. Clicking on the link brought up this message:

Often, a magazine subscription is the best gift money can buy for a loved one who's incarcerated at a correctional facility. We've processed thousands of orders for inmates in jails and penitentiaries across the country, so we've developed a level of expertise concerning inmate subscriptions.

I have no idea how penitentiaries handle web access, but the idea of private subscription to a digital magazine through the web is going to be a No-No for some time to come. Pornography on the web is too big and too obvious a problem.....so its going to be some years before we need to develop a level of expertise in handling inmate subscriptions.

Shopping for magazines

Today (at 2.00 am UK time) we made an important change to the Exact Editions shop.

Subscribers no longer have to wait for an email to give them login details. They set up their account and choose a password before paying, so as soon as they have confirmed their purchase, their new sub is ready and waiting and they already know how to log in. It's a small change on the surface but a lot smoother.

The new foundations will make it possible for us to do ('real soon now') some things we have wanted to do for a while. Such as: (a) gift subscriptions (b) 30-day trial subs (c) provide more support for the purchase than comes with the standard Paypal interface.

This is the new page.

Its early days, but the new shopping system appears to be working smoothly. The second customer to use it bought 3 subscriptions. A good augury, but we still await our first 6-subscriptions-at-once magazine purchaser. That should happen this year.

Magazine Making News

The Scientific American has a coup with its article by Bill Gates on A Robot in Every Home.

I like this sentence which comes near his conclusion:

In fact, as mobile peripheral devices become more and more common, it may be increasingly difficult to say exactly what a robot is. Because the new machines will be so specialized and ubiquitous--and look so little like the two-legged automatons of science fiction--we probably will not even call them robots.

That may be a truer summary of the situation than the title of his article, but the right headline for the right person can still make the news. Check it out.

New Consumer

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall being funny about oranges. Serious too.

Ethical baby shoes.

The greenest way to subscribe to this magazine?

Art Monthly

Marcel Duchamp still has the power to shock

Henry Lydiate has been contributing to this magazine for 30 years. Not bad?

Unusually, except for its covers, this magazine stays with black & white as a matter of design principle. It seems to work very well as a digital offering without colour. What do you think? Here are one, two and three effective examples.

Predictions for 2007

Wired's Wild predictions are funny and interesting. But this is one that I really do NOT buy:

Print to Web
A major newspaper gives up printing on paper to publish exclusively online.

No major newspaper is going to do that, certainly not this year. But there is a great deal of gloom in the newsprint world, and to a degree it is creeping over to magazines. Today's Financial Times has an insightful analysis of the situation -- especially with respect to advertising. These figures from Bain & Co are arresting:

An analysis by Bain & Company, a consultancy, illustrates the problem. For an average US newspaper, a subscriber generates about $1,000 a year from advertising. For those newspapers that base their internet strategy around being a content destination, each viewer generates an average of $5.50 of advertising revenue.

That tells you why NO newspaper will jump from print to web-only: $5.50 per subscriber/regular reader is not enough. Our prediction for 2007 is that this is the year in which print publishers WILL start to figure out how web-based advertising can work for them.