Free Magazine Apps: What do they Achieve?

Time.com the web site for that great magazine Time has recently released a Free App for the iPhone, which you can obtain here. It is one of the best Free Magazine Apps that I have tried.

The App combines thumbnail images and content elegantly:



Cool that you can Tweet an article as well as email it:


I am highly impressed by the design and software intelligence that has gone into building this App. But one has to question the fundamental business strategy.

• Why distribute an App for free which does nothing to help to sell subscriptions? Maybe I missed something, but I found no link or information on any part of the App about buying a Time magazine subscription, either in print or in digital format.
  
• If you are going to distribute a free App which gives a thin/medium thick layer of content from each issue of the magazine you really must offer an iPhone App which gives a subscription to the whole magazine. This Athletics Weekly video shows how subscriptions to magazines can be sold through the App store.
  
• My guess is that giving away 10/15% of the content of the magazine does not seriously undermine the value of the subscription in print form, but one has to question the advisability of giving away, via the App, content which is going to appear in next week's print issue (eg a news story from today about Afghanistan). What is this real time generosity telling Time's print subscribers, who are increasingly the life blood of the magazine?
• What about the advertising? Perhaps the real point of this excellent App is to generate advertising revenues, and one notices that Siemens ads appear throughout the App and are credited on the web site with sponsoring the venture. We have no idea how much Siemans will have paid for this privileged position, and there is no way of telling whether this sponsorship is really additive, or coming at the expense of additional revenue to the existing web accounts. There is no way of telling, but the lack of visual punch in the in-App Siemens ads, and the fact that Apple release very minimal demographic data, tells me that the advertising prospects for Apps of this style cannot be great.

The bald truth is that magazines are repeating with their free magazine Apps, the mistake that they have been making with their web sites. In most cases the web strategy has come unstuck. And these Apps, which are essentially re-packaged RSS feeds from the web sites, are not going to help at all. Partly because of the demographic obscurity of the Apple customers.

It is not a good idea to give away content on the web or through the App if this is undermining the value of your core subscriber proposition. Advertising-funded web and App developments will only work for magazines that have tremendous reach, or a very high value audience. There are very few of them. It is becoming increasingly unlikely that any magazines fit that bill. Time should really be building its subscriber base with its App. Magazine publishers have gradually learned that a lot of their subscriptions do come through purchases made on the web. It is time that they drew the obvious conclusion that subscriptions to digital magazines will also be purchased through the web and through the iTunes App store. Exact Editions will be pleased to help Time to develop a branded App for Time magazine (not Time.com) which will enable any iPhone/iTouch user to purchase a subscription to the entire and visually compelling magazine....

Digital Book Clubs

A few months ago there was a burst of enthusiasm for Twitter book clubs. We participated in some of the excitement around the Wossy bookclub. Like a lot of good ideas, this one seems to have fizzled. There have been other Twitter bookclubs, but like the Jonathan Ross experiment, it seems that they quickly need to invoke the aid of a more substantial platform (wossy went to a news forum), Facebook or an email list. Perhaps Twitter with its 140 character limit doesn't really have the bandwidth for the conversation engendered in a proper book club. That may be part of the problem....

But a more serious, and remediable problem with these book clubs is that it is very hard to share the reading experience through the web if the club is using a print book or even a traditional eBook. eBooks dont generally facilitate straightforward citations and bookmarks. This is of course where a platform such as Exact Editions (or the pre-eminent Google Book Search) come in. Such digital editions can be easily shared and precise passages cited and even excerpted by their book club readers. It would seem to us that there is big scope for the revival of the book club idea through the web. This could either be the informal 'reading group' style of book club that has become so popular with readers in the UK and the USA in the last decade, or the special interest type of book club for a relatively mass market, which was the foundation of Bertelsman's fortunes in the 1950's and 60's.

Such book clubs would work well with a subscription service which gave their members access to a book for a period of time. Our interest in this idea was sparked by a suggestion that the Guardian is planning to create a readers club. That could well be the basis for a valuable subscription service: valuable both to the Guardian, its readers and the publishers and authors of books who might be very willing to grant the Guardian very favourable leasehold rights.

But in some ways the most obvious sponsor for a new wave of digital book clubs will be found amongst publishers. Publishers could now launch digital book clubs (for a small annual fee, say £9.99 per annum) which would give limited access (a month or two) to books, 3 or 4 a month, with rights that they control and with audiences which they can develop. The advantage of a private book club for a publisher are several:

• It can become a premier layer in the catalogue (a title which is selected for one of the slots each month) is gaining additional promotion
• Providing full access to some books, to club members for a month or two is in most cases not likely to preclude sales of the title to club members (but perhaps the lightest forms of fiction would not be suited to such temporary loans).
• Selling print copies of the books that are on digital loan for a month or two would be a key objective
• As would be the option of selling digital subscriptions to those titles. Sales direct and indirect would be encouraged by promotion through a digital book club.
• Publishers who have a direct sales operation in place will be particularly interested in these opportunities.
• Bookclubs will foster word-of-mouth success. Digital book clubs will merge into digital word of mouth (even as some of the book choices inevitably die through word-of-mouth).
  
• The publisher who develops his direct links to a reading audience is well placed to develop other attractively 'social' elements of the reading experience (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc)
• A key value of a book club is the proposition of membership. The publisher who can boast of having 5,000, or 10,000 or 40,000 members in his history book club is going to be in a very strong position to attract new authors. And new members.
• Choice, but 'limited choice' is also a key value, both for the members and for the publisher in negotiating rights (and negotiation will be needed, not all authors and agents will immediately recognise the advantage of having their new book out with 4,000 members on a 2 month loan)
  
• Publishers like propositions which develop their unique role as a builder of lists. It is the publisher with a strong and coherent list, or strong and coherent lists, who can most successfully launch and possibly 'twig' such book clubs. But above all publishers should like this proposition because it is non-exclusive. Developing your own bookclub is not going to stop you selling books via the Guardian book club, the Tesco bookclub, or the Walmart bookclub if and when they come to pass. It certainly is going to help you sell eBooks to Amazon or Sony if you can point to some of the opinions that have surfaced on your own readers' comments and reviews.
  

'Book clubs' are an attractive idea, and as the web becomes more social and more content oriented, their time will come again. The concept of a book club is so much more attractive than the concept of an ebook, or a digital edition, don't you think? But I suspect that the bookclub may be a key part of making ebooks that flourish.

The Athletics Weekly Branded App

Earlier this week Exact Editions release through the Apple iTunes App store a branded magazine App for the UK's leading sporting periodical Athletics Weekly. If you have an iPhone and work in the magazine business you really need to treat yourself to a short subscription to this publication. Direct link.

To speak frankly, this is a breakthrough for the magazine industry and it has not yet been properly noticed. One key point: on the iPhone, a magazine is an enjoyable read in just the spatial arrangement and layout in which it is printed. Exactly as printed. The text is readable, column by column, and of course can be expanded or shrunk with the touch gestures that iPhone users love. We were lucky that the App became available just as Usain Bolt produced his amazing runs in Berlin:





Even more important than the readability of the magazine text, is the new shape and potential for digital browsing. In its iPhone implementation, 'pageflow' encourages rapid browsing of the whole magazine. Here is a still shot of the coverflow feature (comparable to the coverflow with which iTunes users survey their CDs).



Pageflow is a crucial step through which digital magazines can benefit from the quality and the design values of the print magazine. Pageflow in action gives the digital reader the quality, the artwork, and the design built in to print magazines. Magazine publishers have for too long worked on the assumption that it is their task to adapt the magazine to the web by 'repurposing' its content and its design values. Nonsense. The web, or at least an iPhone rendition of the magazine, gives the publication its full visual quality. Perhaps even better than in print (though I would rather be judged on this claim once Apple has produced its new Tablet device. The 10" tablet with a digital magazine will be more sumptuous than many printed versions).

Finally, the key point about a magazine App is that it is for sale. This is commerce: the iPhone is a way of selling subcriptions which simply are the whole magazine and as much of its archive as the publisher cares to offer to iPhone subscribers. Athletics Weekly offers subscribers access to over 100 back issues, which makes the weekly subscription price, of £1.19 amazingly good value. From the magazine publishers point of view, the key thing about a branded iPhone App is that this is a way of selling magazine subscriptions. Athletics weekly is now being offered through weekly or monthly subscriptions and readers are buying subscriptions and making in-App purchases for renewed subscriptions. The Apple iPhone App-ecology is working. This is some really good news for the magazine industry. Sell subscriptions to iPhone users and iTouch users. There will soon be over 50 million such digital customers waiting for their magazine subscriptions.


The sad truth is that much of the magazine industry is so stunned by the way that advertising revenues have collapsed that business strategists are finding it hard to think about anything else, about anything positive. But the community of iPhone users is a huge market to which magazine publishers should be selling subscriptions.

It is amazing how slow the industry has been to see and to seize this potential. We know of no magazine which currently makes itself commercially available in its entirety through the iPhone App store. Athletics Weekly is the first magazine to show how it can be done, and it came through Apple's unpredictable approval process in the very week in which Usain Bolt showed us that 100 metres can be run at lightning speed. Some of our biggest and best magazines are slow off the mark!

We have a short video which provides a brief overview of the way this App technology can work for a magazine. Note the way that telephone numbers become call-able off the page. There can be no doubt this is the way that magazines should behave on an iPhone. All phone numbers should be callable from digital editions that work on phones. This is another big step for the industry, and one that has key potential in reviving those advertising budgets.

Lessig on the Google Books Settlement

Lawrence Lessig contributed a 40 min discussion to the Berkman Center's seminar "Alternative Approaches to Open Digital Libraries in the Shadow of the Google Book Search Settlement”. (In the 'shadow' of the Google Settlement -- doesnt this make it sound a bit ominous?)

He opens with a comparison between Tiger/Kitten and Tiger/Tiger. Google has to be the Tiger. So although not explicitly anti-Google, his rather mournful assessment of the Google project is moving away from it. Watch out for the claws. He recognises that the GBS Settlement may represent progress and have some positive results, there are even so a lot of downsides: "We need a framework to encourage experimentation"; "We should not trust our culture to kittens that turn into tigers"; There is a tendency in the extraordinarily complex settlement agreement "against the ecology of free access which we have had since the invention of printing".

Lessig's position is not hard and fast, and tries to avoid being anti-Google. There is something rather soft, touchy-feely, about his extreme example of what is happening to books: it is far-fetched, in my view, to suppose that books will be as ham-strung with temporary permissions as documentary films. It is not clear what his recommendation really amount to. The 'appropriate or the best ecology of access' is a vague idea.

But Lessig is putting his finger on some of the tender issues in the Google project. There is a worrying tendency for the Google Books project to dissappear in a vastly complicated and centralised network of permissions, concessions, exceptions, pettifogging access restrictions, content omissions and database-driven implementation decisions which may yet stifle the project. Or, at the very least, cramp its style. With Google Book Search, code is very much becoming and making law, but not in ways that Lessig can welcome. Something looser, more rounded, more democratic and multi-polar is needed. The ultimate and inevitable failure of Google's project as it is currently shaped is that it is not putting books in the centre of its intentions. Books are not being given room to breathe.

Wisden on the Ashes

Wisden on the Ashes, (the authoritative story of cricket's greatest rivalry) published by Bloomsbury, is now available through the Exact Editions platform for an annual subscription of £10. With 500+ pages of detailed reportage and statistics this will be on the shopping list of every geeky cricketer, or cricket enthusiast.

I was never much of a cricketer, but I have always been a geeky cricket buff. So what do you think of this scoreboard?

Strauss 22
Cook 10
Bopara 0
Bell 18
Collingwood 13
Prior 7
Flintoff 32

Doesnt that have an all too sickeningly familiar feel to it? And for your reassurance Bradman is mentioned 122 times in the book. England may be one up in the series but I have a feeling that Ponting, 41, may walk off with the Ashes again.

PageFlow on the iPhone

I have been taking another look at PageFlow in the Exactly App on the iPhone. Here are a few screenshots taken while using the App to skim through the current issue of Dazed & Confused:

Starting at the frontcover

By stroking the pages you pull them across the screen

Picking up the bead on the slider is a way of zipping through the magazine

The slider bar indicates how far through you are (here 98/132pp)

Exploring this PageFlow is a most enjoyable experience, but it is also leading me to think some more about the uses and advantages of pagination in the magazines and books that we read as digital editions.

1. First, a note of thanks to Apple. The new o/s 3.0 for the iPhone is nifty and is making Apps like Exactly much faster and more fluid. Exactly must be using a fair amount of computation to throw those perspectival views of pages through the small screen at a rapid rate. The images in PageFlow mode are only thumbnails, but they are after all images...
2. The Exactly App provides the page-flow view of the publication when the iPhone is oriented 90° counterclock-wise. This is 'natural' to the extent that the horizontal iPhone is appropriate for an open book/magazine. But it is very handy that the device can also be used (the other way up) for reading a selected page with a full horizontal screen (more space for long lines, which one finds in magazines and large format books).
3. It turns out that Exactly needs to know whether pages are recto or verso..... it is funny the way that even small corners, and seemingly recondite corners, of our traditional understanding of what a book is, turn out to be important. The reason in this case is that the way Exactly works, recto and verso pages have different perspective views projected on the screen, verso pages only flow on the left of the screen and the recto flow on the right, as is only to be expected! Of course that matters, but who would have thought that mattered when we started out. Why (in abstract) should digital editions care about recto and verso?
   
4. This idea of a magazine or book with its PageFlow coursing through the device is compelling. So it is completely appropriate that the pages are indeed flowing into and 'out of' the device as the App is being used. The magazine is not stored on the device. The cloud is delivering the flow and, although pumping out richly illustrated pages may look like an 'expensive' solution for a mobile reader, the fact of cloud-based delivery means that what was expensive is now 'cheap'. The iPhone is turning out to be a general-purpose device which is wonderfully complementary to cloud-based services.
   
5. Although the Exactly App does not store the magazine or book on the iPhone, it does 'remember' where it was the last time the App was used. This ability for the App to open again at the page (in PageFlow mode if that is where the reader was) is a charming and personal touch. The reality of books and magazines is that we remember where we are in them, and if our software does this for us that is a lot better than dog-earing the paperback.
   

Twittering Friends and eMail Friends

One of the really great things about Twitter is the way that it enables you to build up real, but virtual, and in some cases one-sided, friendships with people in other countries that you would otherwise never have met. I now have about 30 such Twitter friends (as well as 100+ Twitter acquaintances) whose postings I usually look out for. Here are a few of them, in an East to West order: Virginie Clayssen, I like that her tweets are mostly in French, Ian Davis, whose technical tweets are worth attention, Eoin Purcell, whose taste in sandwiches is probably reliable,, Jose Antonio Furtado, with an unrivalled stream of topical epublishing tweets, @Personanondata, who should probably be forgiven for being a Man U supporter, Fred Wilson, a NYC VC with lots of ideas, @MikeCane whose tweet stream is sometimes too fast and fran/phrenetic for me, Don Linn who has a dry sense of humour and a touch of Damon Runyon in his tweets, KatMeyer who has a Pacific Coast style of tweeting, as does DannySullivan (roller blades) and Kirk Biglione (shades and cocktails), who in typical Californian style, between them know so much more about search engines and DRM than I could ever get to grips with.

Thanks then to my Twittering friends and twitting aquaintances (are there really 124 of them?). I learn a lot from them every day. This is all by way of also thanking an email friend (Alain P) who sent me a link today to a blog post by Bill Hill, all about advertising in newspapers and magazines. I like this line in the blog:

Web technology today doesn't yet support ads you really want to view.

Bill Hill thinks that getting this right -- making ads really glossy and seductively attractive is one of the next big tricks for advertising on the web. I wonder if he thinks that this free and open service from Dazed & Confused is yet doing that? The Exact Editions platform is pretty close to delivering high quality photo-shoot ads such as are found in Dazed & Confused in such a way that you really want to look at the ads. These rich visual ads are of course even more seductive to subscribers who get the full size page. Put this rich visual delivery onto the iPhone and the fact that all the phone numbers in the directory are clickable, is a step which delivers exceptional value to customers and advertisers alike. I dont think magazine and newspaper publishers have yet taken stock of the fact that iPhone digital editions will greatly leverage the value of direct response from the ads themselves. See this direct customer response from printed phone numbers in the Exactly App video. The screen of an iPhone is already crisp and bright enough to deliver a really good view of a glossy ad, the trick which the advertising and publishing industries now need to solve, is how to make those phone numbers as valuable to the advertisers as they are convenient to readers. This is not a big step.

Dazed & Confused in page-flow mode in the Exactly App

The Idler

The Idler joins Exact Editions. This is not the original Idler in which many of Samuel Johnsons Essays were first published but (to quote Wikipedia) " a bi-yearly British magazine exploring alternative ways of working and living, still published today." Reckon that 'still' is a bit cheeky. What does Wikipedia mean? The Idler has just joined Exact Editions. Wake up wikieditors!

• ToC
  
• The Wit and Wisdom of Andy Warhol
• The QI Manifesto (Ten Steps to Making your Life more Interesting)
  

Exactly: A Magazine App for the iPhone

Exactly is a free App for the iPhone which can be downloaded from the Apple iTunes Store here.

If you have an iPhone and are in the magazine business you should download it and check it out with the hundreds of free sample magazine issues that are open to any user of the Exact Editions store.

If you dont have an iPhone this short (c. 5 minute) video will give you a good overview of the power of digital magazines on this platform.

There are three major advances which magazine publishers should focus on:

1. First, PageFlow (similar to CoverFlow for CD collections) allows users a rapid and compelling way to browse the whole magazine and feel its richness and visual quality. You need to see this segment of the video for this alone.
2. Second, all the phone numbers, email addresses, web links, and Post Codes (Zip Codes) will be live and clickable and this gives the user/reader many more ways in which to respond to and interact with the magazine and its advertisers. This is a digital magazine which is much more responsive and dynamic than any 'page turning' or 'brochure-ware' version that one may have seen a few years ago. (Small qualification: a few of these links may not work. This will almost certainly be because the page, or the area of the page, on which the 'dumb' phone number appears, was vectorised before the PDF was printed. In this case information is wiped from the file before the Exact Editions database has access to the information).
   
3. Finally, this highly interactive digital extension to the magazine really just IS the magazine in a digital format. Because the Exact Editions process is largely automated, it is -- in principle -- rather straightforward and efficient to create a digital version of any magazine. In fact we will do a sample issue that can be trialled through the Exactly App for free (offer open to all mainstream magazines). It also follows that the existing audience will recognise and respond to the magazine in its digital form pretty much as they do in print. There is not a big learning curve for users (there is a small learning step as they figure out how to use the touch screen and the orientation of the device -- but this is the kind of 'playing' that iPhone users like to do with Apps).

This last point is particularly important to magazines because of the crucial importance of branding in the magazine world. Magazine publishers often talk about their digital activities as 'brand extension', but the prospect of being able to simply park your magazine (with all its back issues) on the iPhone platform is really as much a matter of brand consolidation as of brand extension. Publishers have to do this to defend and to extend their presence in the consumer's mind-share.

The key importance of branding and the need for magazines to develop the value of their brands (usually corresponding to the magazine's title: Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired etc are all bigger brands than their owner Conde Nast). Enabling a publisher to put their own branded magazine App directly in the iPhones App store, and for sale in the Apple e-commerce environment will be our next step. Stay tuned.

Is Google Making the Celera Mistake?

Celera was the company founded by Craig Venter, and funded by Perkin Elmer, which played a large part in sequencing the human genome and was hoping to make a massively profitable business out of selling subscriptions to genome databases. The business plan unravelled within a year or two of the publication of the first human genome. With hindsight, the opponents of Celera were right. Science is making and will make much greater progress with open data sets.

Here are some reaons for thinking that Google will be making the same sort of mistake as Celera if it pursues the business model outlined in its pending settlement with the AAP and the Author's Guild:

1. The task and the cost of curating the data cannot be separated from the responsibility and the expertise of those who generate it. Celera's hope for massive private value in its private databases was undermined by the preference for publicly funded research to go its own sweet way into the public arena. Does Google really want to manage and control, assume the responsibility for all those who write books and how they can be distributed? Does Google and the Books Right Registry really think that Authors want their activities to be regulated in this fashion?
   
2. Genomic databases are extraordinarily valuable, it does not follow that you can sell them as big ticket items. Is there a massive market out there for closed subscription databases to millions of books sold to institutions? Celera did make some sales of its promised proprietary databases, but it was never believable that there was available funding to support a market for billions of dollars per annum on genomic databases. Those chimerical numbers were needed to support the astronomical market cap Celera briefly touched. Google may not have such sky expectations of its digital library subscription revenues, but I wonder how well the expectations that it does have, match with the funding currently available to the public library system and educational institutions?
3. PE was very good at building automated sequencing systems and selling them to researchers. Very, very good. It turned out to be not nearly so good at building a business to manage, curate and exploit genome databases that would be licensed to scientists and researchers. Such different activities do not mix, and your customers are likely to suspect a conflict of interest, and this is one reason why Celera was spun-out from Perkin Elmer. Google is very good, six times "very good" at managing search-sensitive advertising and large scale intentional databases drawn from web use. Are Google's customers going to be happy working with a system in which their reading attention, and referential record is always being calibrated and used to influence their buying pattern and subscription budget?
   
4. Hubris. Almost certainly in the case of Perkin Elmer, but they did have the sense to pull back. With Google it is hard to say..... hubris and ambition are sometimes confused, or mistaken, the one for the other.
   

There are plenty of differences between these two situations. Nor am I suggesting that all literary copyrights should be put into the public domain (nor indeed should all genomic data be treated as public). Differences and contrasts abound, but Eric Schmidt should put Sulston and Ferry's book The Common Thread on his summer reading list.

Magazines on the iPhone with Exactly app

Good to see magazine publishers alerting their subscribers to the use of their publications on the iPhone and iTouch.  In this week's Athletics Weekly the column below appeared. Nice!

Publishers working with Exact Editions can now offer their subscribers their content on-the-move, anytime, anywhere. Very cool! And with the new 3GS iPhone announced yesterday download speeds are going to be even quicker.

Athletics Weekly

June 4, 2009

Page 9

If you have access to iTunes you can download the Exactly app for free.

Why the iPhone is a Better Reading Environment III

The Berkshire Encyclopedia of China in coverflow mode

The Page-turning feature that one frequently finds on Flash solutions for digital magazines or digital book readers, has always struck me as a dire software innovation. Unecessary, slow, boring -- because the page turning is always the same experience. Gimmicky: I have even seen versions which emulate turning a creaking page of parchment! An example of software ingenuity which is orthogonal to the direction of travel. I suspect that the method was originally introduced because Flash can be quite slow with large book files and the page turning covers up the download delays.

So, I was not overjoyed to see the first Dutch review of Exactly comparing the App's 'pageflow' feature to page-turning Flash catalogues (read the review in Google's englished version here). The review is otherwise OK, (I think its quite polite, but Google or I may have misunderstood something), but this seems to be a false comparison. Pageflow has some crucial advantages which page-turning does not match:

1. The context of the book or the magazine is preserved in pageflow because the reader actually sees the pages flowing past in rapid sequence (it will be rapid if the connection is good) This is giving us a lot of information and it is preserving and in some respects enhancing the utility of the print object. The codex was a great invention! With a book you have a sense of 'how far' through the book you are. Using the slider button in Exactly you can actually navigate, slide through, the whole package and you can't do that with the merely serial page-turn in Flash.
2. Although thumbnail pages do not give you enough detail to read a page properly, they give a surprising amount of information, even in books that are mostly full of plain text. The advertisements in magazines or illustrations in fancy books are clearly very handy in the thumbnail mode.
3. Connected point: some of the puritanical types who argue for eBooks, seem to assume that the only point of a book is to read it. Perhaps because we have also lived with magazines, we think that skimming is good. There are many ways of reading a book or a magazine, and reading some of it and skimming the rest is OK (in my book). The pageflow mode is ideal for skimming. Please skim with a good conscience using pageflow.
   
4. Final point: the ergonomics of the iPhone. Taking advantage of the iPhone's shape and size, pageflow enables the iPhone to be useful in different ways according to the way you orient it. The portrait mode (right way up) is obviously the right way to read a portrait page. With Exactly the reader has two landscape options, 90° anticlockwise which puts the App and the iPhone in pageflow mode, and 90°clockwise which gives the best landscape mode for reading close text. I hope that this option set (which I have only as yet seen in Exactly) becomes a general convention for iPhone Apps that want to use pageflow or coverflow. Notice that the small size of the iPhone makes this use of orientation as giving alternative modes of navigating the text an even easier and more attractive option. I am sure that the mooted iPhone/tablet will also support these features and gestures, but if Apple had started with a tablet the size of the MacBook Air, we might not have seen orientation as such a strong element in their 'touch' interface.

Using pageflow to find a specific page

Swing the iPhone to read the page selected

Once again the small size of the iPhone is, in a curious way an advantage, in that it has pushed Apple and App developers to innovate. The Kindle did not originally offer a landscape mode, but perhaps under the influence of the iPhone it now does. It is a matter of some interest to me that the 4th side of the iPhone (180°rotation), the portrait mode -- wrong way up, has not yet been found a use within the Exactly App. Perhaps this should become a way of navigating a library, of switching between books or magazine titles within a subscription? I am sure that the development team will think of a better use and a better solution.... but turning the book upside down surely has its uses?

A New iPhone App: "Exactly"

Apple yesterday accepted the digital editions App that we have been developing for some months. It is now has in the App Store. Exactly is the Free Exact Editions App, from which any title on the Exact Editions platform can be read on the iPhone.

Search for 'Exactly' in the iPhone App store and you will find it there, with this brief description:

Exactly brings magazines and books to the iPhone in their original full-colour format. Each page is delivered just as it appeared in the print edition, but with live links to web sites, phone numbers and more. Access free content from over 80 titles, or use your www.exacteditions.com subscription to read the latest issues on the day they're published.

• Pinch or double tap pages to zoom.
• Swipe pages left and right, or tap the page edges to flip to next/previous page
• Use the animated thumbnail view to flick through the pages.
• Tap any page links to web sites, email addresses, phone numbers or maps.
• Tap contents-page links to jump to a particular article.
• Network connection required.

Free, gratis, etc

More stuff will be added to the App in the coming months, and we expect to deliver Branded Apps through which magazines and books (maybe newspapers?) will be sold directly on subscription through the App store. This is an exciting new stage in the development of the Exact Editions reading platform. We think the iPhone has a lot going for it and we aim to make it work well with digital editions.

Maybe the coolest feature of the Exactly App is the way that it gives the user a new way of accessing a publication. 'Pageflow', similar to the 'coverflow' with which users can skim their CD covers on the iPhone. The 'pageflow' feature comes when the iPhone is twisted 90° anticlockwise.

Pageflow of the magazine Opera

When the iPhone swings back to the portrait mode the publication will be open at the page reached in skimming the pageflow. If you close the Exactly App and then open it a few hours or days later, it will open at the title that you last looked at, exactly at the page you had reached when last reading the magazine or book. I find this most helpful. The framework Apple have built for making these Apps is ingenious. I am sure that there will be lots more good stuff coming, from Apple and from the Exact development team.

Twitter and the Wossybookclub

In conformity with our policy of conducting R&D on the project of a Twitter Book Club in public (see earlier posts here, here and here) and in response to the first session of Jonathan Ross's wossybookclub, which took place yesterday, it seems appropriate to give some provisional reactions to it in the open:

1. The session clearly worked. It ran for an hour and wossy must have been busy, since everything went through him (as a retweet or a response by him). 130 postings in an hour. The style of discourse was thus more like a chat-show on radio -- with no possiblity for genuine group discussion. This does put a lot of focus on the keyman, and suggests that the specific format (a 'star' formation with everything going through wossy) may not be completely scaleable. Would wossy be able to cope with an Oprah-size audience? The @atwossybookclub currently has under 6,000 followers. What happens with 60K followers at a book group? Managing 130 interactions in an hour of tweeting strikes me as pretty good going, and I can't see Jonathan Ross wanting to do this for two hours.
2. As well as the public and official record of tweeting at @atwossybookclub, there was a parallel search stream at #wossybookclub; making this an official back-channel may be a way of broadening the audience without putting wossy in hospital with RSI
3. The author (Jon Ronson, on holiday in Sardinia, and tweeting from his iPhone) contributed to the discussion. A book group with the author present and listening! That clearly works, and perhaps the idea needs to be adapted, shall we say Twitter-twigged, so that Twitter becomes a medium for online 'author signing sessions'. Kind of virtual 'author tours'?
   
4. The web service at our end also worked: The Men Who Stare at Goats was open to the whole web for precisely an hour. This time the switch was flipped manually, but it could easily be automated. 30/60/90 minute sessions pre-set to be open for particularly topical books or TV shows? Usage increased, it was busy, but it certainly wasn't overwhelming (the servers were not seen to emit clouds of white smoke and steam). Next time the publisher may wish to consider opening the book up for discussion a few hours before the discussion begins, that would encourage Tweeting participants to reference the digital edition, which in turn will encourage more people to buy the digital edition.
5. There was one reference to a specific page in the book, and wossy RT'ed this. Since we put it up using bit.ly, we know that it was activated nearly 300 times. A citation that went into the #wossybookclub was only hit 23 times. So the audience was looking at the links as well as reading wossy's tweets. For a first time live book club session on Twitter that looks to be a pretty strong validation of the concept.

Wossy has said that he does not want to develop the vehicle for personal gain. We can understand that position, but it might be worth reconsidering. If Wossy wont, I hope that Stephen Fry will. Doing 50 books a year would be A LOT of work and for the publishing industry it could be a highly significant new sales channel. The concept of 'celebrity-led' book reading and online book discussion has a lot going for it, but it will work even better if there is a stronger commercial infrastructure (perhaps funded by sales of the digital editions that would be used in the Tweeting). We look forward to seeing the proposition evolve and to working with publishers who are keen to develop the digital audience -- Picador and PanMacmillan have been excellent partners and promoters of this exploration, as has Jon Ronson the author.

I enjoyed the book (read the digital edition, of course) and you can still buy a subscription to the digital edition here (limited to purchasers in the UK and Eire); and in all parts of the world you can read the clever opening chapter here. Having read the book and raved about it to one of my children, I am now committed to buying a copy in print (son is out of webshot) and will certainly catch the film when it comes out later in the year with George Clooney and Ewan McGregor.

Twittering Publishers

Twitter may be a lot more important for publishers than most of them (us) realize. Few publishers would have a clue as to what Twitter means to their business model. Since Twitter still has not worked out its own business model, a matter of some general amazement to the illustrious VC's and industry watchers who follow it, this may not be all together surprising.

But here are three reasons why publishers of books and magazines should be VERY interested in Twitter:

1. A great deal of Twittering is really about linking your friends/followers to stuff that you have seen or read. Twitter is an ideal medium for sharing information about good books or magazines, especially as they get on to the web as genuine web resources. All those tinyurls and bit.ly's are citations. This is the direct response network that the web has promised publishers and authors.
   
2. (With apologies for a fragment of technospeak here), the Twitter 'social graph' with its asymmetrical follow/follower relationships is functionally analogous to the 'lectoral graph' of our reading patterns. You may have read a lot of the books and magazines that I have read, but there will certainly be a lot of non-overlap, and we will be as patchilly intermittent in our following as many of us are in our reading. Being able to connect to people who have read the same stuff as us, may be as important to us as being able to search the books that we have read or will read.
   
3. The key role of 'bestsellers' in the world of publishing and the importance of 'celebrities', or 'real experts', in the world of twitter. Trade publishers know how important celebrities are to publishing, so we had better figure out how this celebrity-hood in Twitterdom can multiply or interact with success in bookselling or digital magazines.
   

I have no more idea than anyone else what the ultimate or even the proximate business model of Twitter is going to be. My own hunch is that 'real time' search is not the key issue, much more important is the pattern of relationships and the elaborate web of communication that the service is weaving between its millions of users. This is why we have been following the Twitter Bookclub rumblings with avid interest, and helping the wossy project to get going with a digital edition of the first selection The Men who Stare at Goats. Something interesting will happen in this space in the next few months, if not with the wossybookclub, then with something similar. By this time next year Twitter will have found a business model and I will not be surprised if some strands of that model are quite closely intertwined with what publishers have done and need to do.

If writers and readers enjoy talking, twittering and sharing their experience of reading, then more books will be read, more books will be sold and the publishers who facilitate this will have played the part of concierge, that is their digital metier.

PS You can follow my Twitter stream here. And you can follow Daryl's here.

Goats and Crop Marks

There has been rapid movement on the Twitter book club front, since our posting of a few days ago. Twitter moves very fast and wossy has announced his first few titles. As luck would have it the first pick, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was in short supply in the bookshops and at Amazon -- a film is coming out later in the year, new printings must be in hand. There were ebook and audio book editions available but not many print copies in the warehouse.

At any rate Picador (PanMacmillan) who publish the book in the UK realised the advantages of having a digital edition of the book available to the wossy book club. They also saw that the streaming solution that Exact Editions provides is an excellent way of amplifying the immediate impact of the Tweeting that is going on as we speak, the streaming solution can be opened up for a publicity phase, much more feasibly than a download ebook solution. So they asked us to put up a sample, and to offer subscritpions to the digital edition when the full sampling spree comes to an end. The sample is here.

There is the added bonus that bloggers can use the ExactEditions clipper tool (works much better with FireFox) to post small tweet relevant quotations (limited to at most 10% of page). Which is why the crop marks matter, its on the basis of crop marks, or preferably with trim boxes set, that Exact Editions know the boundaries of a page in the PDF files that publishers send us. Unless the publisher requests greater openness the clipping is restricted to 10% of the page which is close to a traditional understanding of reasonable copying for purposes of quotation, appreciation etc (ie 'fair dealing').

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Page 1

When it came to putting up the book in a test account, I noticed that there was quite a bit of discussion in the office about whether the PDF file had crop marks or not. Somehow this struck me as very funny as I had this image of the goat nibbling its own crop marks. So I was delighted to find that there really are goat crop marks in the page layout of the title, at least at the bottom of the page: there are ornamental goats at the corners. On the recto page the goat has keeled over and on the verso page the goat is the right way up. Here is an ex-goat, or what Monty Python would call a no-longer-goat:

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Page 7

The Twitter Book Club

At the weekend we were startled to find that Jonathan Ross had a stunningly good idea. An idea that should have occurred to us sooner. Wossy, who twitters a lot, thought about starting a book club and one of the books he mentioned for his wheeze was the Bloomsbury book, Kate Summerscale's, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. This mention alerted us because that is one of the titles in the Bloomsbury Library offering that uses the Exact Editions platform. One of my colleagues either follows wossy, or has a Google Alert out for Mr Whicher: not completely sure which, er....

If you do not live in the UK, you may not know too much about Jonathan Ross. But you can tell he has quite a hold on his audience when you see that his crowd of Twitter followers exceeds 250K. How then should a Twitter book club work? Well it could simply be a stream of tweets about a particular book and wossy has pushed off with one already. The Men Who Start at Goats. Follow the conversation here.

A good idea which could be even better. Here are our suggestions for how this could evolve into a commercial proposition for someone:

1. A celebrity chooses the book and each book gets a week of attention. Wossy has done this bit
2. Wossy needs to persuade the publisher (and the author or agent, if they need persuading) that this is a good idea and put the book on Open Access for a week whilst the Twitter stream goes to full volume. While this happens the book will get a lot of attention. In the shops. The Open Access platform might be a streaming solution such as Exact Editions runs, so the taps can be switched on at the start of the week and off at the end. (If any agent thinks that putting a book on open access for a week is going to exhaust the market for his book, he needs to find another profession, or another author).
   
3. Not to beat about the bush (pulling the light from out of the bushel), there is another big advantage of using the Exact Editions platform in a promotional event such as this: every page in the books can be the subject of a direct link. Tweets can cite the books as they appear in the discussion. This type of public conversation really needs a method of targetting specific pages. Especially since Twitter is not going to have the space to allow real hand-crafted, cut and pasted, quotations. (Light goes back behind bushel, muttering that any distribution system for this idea, also has to handle the e-commerce).
   
4. After the week of tweeting and general discussion, the Open Access finishes but the printed book can of course be acquired through the bookshops, or a digital subscription to it taken out through the digital platform.
5. At this point some costs have been incurred and a slice of revenue would be earmarked by the distribution and e-commerce platform (bushel smiles). For the sake of argument a Scribd type of percentage might be enough.
   
6. That still leaves the majority of the revenue from this exercise which clearly goes to the publisher and the author.

Why are we broadcasting this idea in public, rather than gently sidling up to Wossy, or Stephen Fry or Oprah or whoever, with an NDA in our fists, and persuading them to do it? Mostly because NDA's seem such an untwitterish way to think about it!

Perhaps someone has a better idea. At any rate there is no copyright in ideas, and not much of a copyright in twitter streams: so if there is a better idea about the twitter book club it has our blessing. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to bounce the idea back at us, we look forward to hatching plans with publishers, agents, Oprah, Stephen Fry, the Real Shaq, or whoever. Let's see it working.... Twitter is good for books.

Why the iPhone is a Better Reading Environment II

The touchscreen interface to the iTouch and the iPhone was a crucial innovative step. So far as I know, Apple got this right from the beginning. No false steps. Just a really good system that is steadily getting better (OK -- I grant you that the touch screen keyboard is not yet the best part of the iPhone system).

There are two key ways in which the touch interface helps the iPhone to become the best digital reading device, in spite of its very small size.

First, the touch screen allows the user to shrink or enlarge the page with simple 'pinch' or 'spread' moves of paired fingers. Because we use our fingers to stretch or compress the page, and the image responds immediately, it is very easy to achieve a high level of control of image resolution. It would be much harder to do this work with the conventional touchpad or mouse of a desktop PC. The facility with which the page can be resized (web page, or digital facsimile, eg JPEG in the case of Exact Editions) means that on the iPhone platform, at least, there is much less pressure for the 'reflowable' text beloved of eBook enthusiasts. There is really no need to reflow text to achieve a different point size, when the whole page can be resized with finger pinching. In fact, the digital edition on the iPhone wins this contest hands down because, of course, images and complex layouts are also easily and straightforwardly resized on the iPhone. This is notoriously difficult to achieve on specialised ebook devices -- they tend to be defeated by highly illustrated format, or books with lots of tables and code. The touchable screen with its rescaleable pages solves these problems at a stroke (or at worst with a pinch). Just use the image in the book or magazine as the designer laid it out.

But the second, equally important, advantage of the touch screen interface to the text on an iPhone is that it has forged a very direct relationship between the text as presented on screen and the functionality available to users with the text. We only need to touch the text to act through it. To use it to launch our actions. The links, the urls, the email addresses (and with Exact Editions the telephone numbers) within the text become tangible, immediately indexical resources.

A page of Time Out London with live links in green

The text contains the link (it was there explicitly in the book), markup ensures that the system (the iPhone) knows that a link is a link, or a postcode is a postcode, and the user knows (or after a little trial and error discovers) that by tapping a link she will jump to a web page, a post code will jump to a Google map, and a live phone number will initiate a phone call, from the iPhone.

Necessity is the mother of invention, in the case of the iPhone, as elsewhere. There is not enough room on the device to support a mouse-device or a touchpad, other than the screen. So the screen had to be touchable. But there is no doubt that the Apple engineers have crafted an extraordinarily effective solution. As more books are piled into the iPhone's eco-system, I think we will see that there is a growing realisation that the digital text of a book or a magazine should be seen as the starting point for network based interaction with it. The text itself is the starting point, within it are located the points, the referrers, codes and symbols which engender user interaction. The digital version of a text, having many explicit or implicit resources for linkage and reference becomes a hypertext in its own right and one which engages the reader in more than mere reading. Much of this interaction will be initiated by finger gestures. For sure, reading is part of the point of a digital edition, but equally, it has to be said that, pointing is fully a part of the reading of a book on the iPhone.

There is another key feature in the iPhone device which makes it such a good reading medium. Orientation. But we will discuss that on another occasion....

Putting up Shelves in Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Library Online went live last week. It had been announced at the London Book Fair a few weeks ago. This is a library proposition in two senses: it is a plan for selling subscriptions to groups of books through public libraries, and it is a set of themed shelves of books from the overall Bloomsbury list. A proposition for libraries and a plan for offering a customisable and curated library from Bloomsbury. They explain the concept as follows:

.......... using existing technology in libraries across the country, Bloomsbury is rolling out a groundbreaking e-lending strategy which will allow readers to read collections of bestselling books at local library terminals or with the use of a library card on home computers and internet enabled devices.

The Bloomsbury Library Online will consist of a number of themed shelves: children’s books, sports titles, international fiction, Shakespeare plays, reference books and more. They will launch with a shelf of Book Group titles including Galaxy Book of the Year, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, Orange Prize longlisted Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie, word-of-mouth phenomenon The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer, and international bestseller The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri. Embracing the advantages of the online format, users will be able to read the book, search the text, access author interviews, reviews, press features, and links to specially commissioned reading group guide. Bloomsbury web site

Bloomsbury's project required us to develop our platform in ways that we had not previously considered necessary. They wanted to be able to sell books as groups, and although this was not part of the formal requirement, we suspected that the next publisher to adopt this strategy would wish to be able to sell books in groups (ie 'shelves') but also to sell the same books as individual titles, both to individuals and to institutional subscribers. And the next publisher would want to include the same book in multiple shelves, and then remove them from some shelves.....There were also knock on effects on the way that the site would be navigated, the marketing pages within the site would unfold, and the way in which promotions to titles or groups of titles would work. Finally, we needed to understand what happens with renewals, when books are coming into and perhaps falling out of shelves in midstream? In short, what had looked like a fairly simple additional requirement led us to take another look at our ontology. Until this point about shelves came up, I dont think I had grasped that we already had an ontology. In January we did not have an ontology for shelves of books, but now we do. Since Bloomsbury appear to be capable of producing a lot more shelves, this is a good thing.

The Exact Editions platform can now manage sets of books aggregated by a publisher (Bloomsbury's Teen Fiction Shelf, or their Book Group Shelf), as well as individual books and collections of books that might be selected by an account holder. We are not yet managing sets of sets of books, but I understand that it would be possible to do this, should the need arise. And it surely will arise: eg within a large fiction collection, where you might want to be able to group all the titles by a particular author as a sub-shelf, within the overall shelf of detective fiction. We will not however be working with shelves of books that are not members of shelves... this conundrum can be left for the digital remainder merchants.

Why the iPhone is a better Reading Environment I

People have noticed that the iPhone is becoming a great environment in which to do some serious reading. But I am not sure that we have yet fully recognised why it has changed our expectations of the optimum digital reading environment. One point was recently well made by Hugh McGuire the Canadian blogger, publisher, philosopher. (He also leads Librivox).

My experience of reading news on iphone is totally different than reading on the web: on the web I flit from place to place, on the iPhone I read much like I would a newspaper ... going through the whole thing, reading multiple articles. And as mentioned I might possibly pay for it on the iPhone.

I think this is a fascinating shift in my content consumption ... back to an older, more focused kind of reading. (Quoting Hugh McGuire from an email).

This is a subtle point. The iPhone is a better reading environment because it is NOT completely of the web. I think its really a point about the way Apps work on the iPhone, rather than the way that the web, or Safari, works on the iPhone. In my experience, browsing the web on my iPhone is just about as mercurial and unsticky as browsing from the laptop, but the apparatus of the App (only one App at a time, they take a moment or two to fire up) tends to give them some valuable friction. A retaining wall, which if it is not a 'walled garden' is something like a 'reader's carrel'. There is a threshold with each App, which keeps you within the App in which you are browsing; whereas when one is reading a news site on the wild web it is just too easy to be distracted. Every link is a link out. Its too easy to flip over to something else, there are no boundaries to a web newspaper or a web magazine. But there are some subtle boundaries to an App which is branded for a newspaper or a magazine.

It could be that the 'Appy' quality of serious reading on the iPhone is the key to developing an effecitve publishing culture in that environment. There is a lesson here for book, magazine and newspaper publishers. Get your Apps in order!

There is another reason that the iPhone reading experience is subtly different. Touching. There is something special about touching what you read, more about this on another occasion....