Nominalism, Realism and Digital Books

There is a quasi-philosophical disagreement underlying the steady digitisation of literature. A radical disagreement about what digital books really are. In a strange manner this dispute parallels the controversy between nominalists and realists in medieval scholastic philosophy about the status of universals (properties, numbers, virtues etc). Texts in the twenty-first century take the place of properties in the fourteenth. Are books more than texts, are texts more than digital file formats? Are these abstract concepts: "red", "thirteen", "chastity" real entities or are they simply instances and constructs based on our experience of coloured objects, groups of cakes and the people we meet? The nominalists denied the reality of these abstractions and the realists retaliated. Blood was shed. Now we find the digerati divided over the question whether a book is really more than a text; since the ebook nominalists, finding meaning in sentences and texts and not much else, would be be happy with books digitised as texts (preferably in the ePub standard) and the realists say that a book is much more than its text and that the pagination matters, the layout matters, the entirety of the book matters, the references and the citations to the book matter, and of course the illustrations matter; therefore in pursuit of realism, digital systems should virtualise the whole book, not just its text. While Project Gutenberg is at one end of the spectrum (nominalists carefully proof-reading and hunkered down in ASCII or XML), Google with its Book Search digitisation project is at the realist edge -- some would say 'hyper-realist' in its acceptance of blank endpapers and leather bindings, all part of the 'real book' as represented in a Google database. Google probably would, if it could, encode the sensory aura of historic books, the vinegar that comes from cholera-touched books.

But the modern predicament over books as texts, or books as virtual objects, is complicated by a dimension of uncertainty over the appropriateness of treating books as a collective whole as parts of a library and a literature, or of digitizing them one at a time as individual atoms; perhaps, in some cases, with unique and unusual bibliographic or structural properties. Digital nominalists are governed by a standard of simplicity and hold that a text is a text, is a text. But some nominalists are atomic, whilst others favour a more holistic and uniform approach, in the interests of creating a library or a reading platform, in which all books can be searched and individual books isolated as readable downloads. Correspondingly, on the 'realist' side sits Google with its holistic and scalable method, Google's whole strategy for digitizing books has been based on an assumption that all books should be accessed, searched and distributed through a single canonical library. Amazon, which has in most respects taken a 'nominalist' approach to the distribution of eBooks, it doesn't do ePub but its proprietary format 'AZW' is just another ASCII encoding standard, has also embraced a 'holistic' attitude. Amazon offers its customers global searching of the Amazon archive and encourages users to build up a collection, a mini-library of eBooks on their Kindle. Amazon, just as much as Google, would like to have a scalable and totalitarian solution to the whole of published literature. All Kindle titles are atoms in the same collective, distinguished by the fact that they can be sampled or acquired from Amazon, one book at a time as the consumer dictates and purchases.

Perhaps a diagram will aid the explanation of this digital predicament for computerized books:
















What approach to digital books heads to the top left quadrant of this matrix? Why, apps of course. If we think of books as apps, they do have a reality and concreteness which exceeds the flatness of the mere ASCII text, but the book as app is also highly individual. Perhaps a paradigm of this approach is the Atomic Antelope Alice App which has caused such a stir. The inventors of the Alice book found an intriguing way of applying 'physics', acceleration and gravity, to the Teniel illustrations in the Alice book. This is obviously a very special and un-generalisable treatment of a classic work, but as an app it is a brilliant proposition. Apps can afford to be sui generis since they stand on their own, and if this gives cataloguers and librarians a headache, too bad. The Exact Editions book and magazine apps are also in this segment of the diagram. It is, I would suggest, the potential inventiveness and the unpredictable future of the book as an application that has the most intriguing potential for the future of digital books (and libraries). If digital books do something completely novel and free-standing, something unprecedented in the world of print books, it will be because they are also software applications and can in that way assume a digital reality which exceeds our expectations of the traditional text.

Stone, scissors, paper: and the Digital Book Race

It sometimes seems that Google, Apple and Amazon are engaged in a three-way fight over the digital books space. They each have a very important area of strength: Google dominates search (and search-based advertising), Apple leads and designs the very best consumer devices, Amazon has amazing strength in consumer transactions (logistics). And the three fighters are subtly trying to manoeuvre the struggle into the terrain where their particular strengths dominate. So Google is building a massive library that will interact and benefit from Google's supremacy in search, and a lot of stuff should be free and any hardware device can access its service. Amazon is trying to build individual consumer accounts fed by their logistic strength and transactional breadth, obviously not limited to books, physical and digital, and Amazon care more about managing transactions in the consumer's account than they do about owning the device. Amazon only cares about consumers, so -- unlike Google -- they do not offer anything much to libraries. So Kindle books are readable on the iPad. Apple is trying to establish a superior hardware platform in which their range of interoperating devices cannot be matched: desktop, phone and tablet format working together. If Apple owns the superior hardware platform they will control vital pinch-points through their app store (so far limited to Apple hardware for apps and books). They are all fighting on several fronts at once. So Apple, is erecting a system of apps and phone-based demographics which will be immune to Google search. Google will be blocked in Apple's mobile domain, and Apple has built an e-commerce system that certainly rivals Amazon's, though it does not have anything like the breadth of the Amazon offering (yet). Amazon attempted to get into Apple's patch with a hardware device, the Kindle, which now appears to be completely outclassed by the iPad. Google does not want to be boxed-out by the Apple iOS, so it has launched its Android system which it hopes will attract the collective ingenuity of all the consumer electronics companies who are concerned that Apple might eat their lunch. With retaliatory ingenuity Apple is building an advertising system iAds which may seriously limit the Google advertising dominance. So the battle is three way and in deadly earnest.

Is it a game of stone, scissors and paper? Perhaps one being played in several dimensions. If so, Apple is the 'paper', they were always going to be on top of the rather dull 'Kindle' from Amazon: stone-coloured if not yet quite sunk. But Apple appears to be threatened by Google's incredible scissor-like sharpness in search. Perhaps the analogy breaks down with Amazon contra Google. Is there a way a battleground on which Amazon is beating Google? Amazon does appear to have the beating of Google in one area: third party, cloud-based, web services -- Amazon S3 etc. Perhaps this is the area in which Amazon might ultimately have the beating of Google's over-centralised approach to building a universal library. Amazon needs to build a digital book service which is more collaborative and de-centralised and which attracts libraries, authors and publishers as effectively as they have attracted book buyers.

Is there something that could change the dynamics of this three-way tussle? Lots of things. One development that would certainly change matters would be if Facebook entered the fray. Suppose that Facebook, live up to its name and did a deal with Amazon? We might then see an Amazon that really could outsmart Google in the relationships game. Cloud-based book networks.

Do you think that the Google Book Search judgement will come tomorrow? One of these days....

Optimising e-Commerce in the iOS App Store

It would seem to be potentially useful to report some experience as to what works in publishing books and magazines through the iTunes app store. Exact Editions has been offering iPhone app access for magazines with Exactly for over a year and we believe that there are some lessons that can be drawn and shared (without either revealing trade secrets or breaching the confidence of our publishers -- who own the sales data that we collect on their behalf). This picture tells a story:





















This diagram plots the Sales line for a magazine app (Blue) against the number of downloads of the Freemium app (Green) on a daily basis over a couple of months. A number of lessons can be drawn from this graph and the underlying data:

1. The 'freemium' approach works. A magazine/book publisher who makes freemium apps showcasing the content of the publication, and who uses the in-app subscription service supported by Apple, will have effective distribution of sample content and will make sales of that content.
   
2. Clearly, the sales lag the free downloads -- but not by much. One has to get potential users to sample the stuff before they buy, but the sales are likely to come in the next day or two. We haven't yet done detailed regression analysis on this, but the overall trend is clear (and our boffins are now closeted with powerful non-linear, non-parametric, least squared soonest mended black boxes).
   
3. The spikes in the data are strongly linked to the introduction of the iPad, first in the USA though this app didn't quite make it into the app store in time for the launch, and second at the end of May in Europe. Further the sales are more strongly linked to the second surge in free downloads, which tells us that this publication has a mostly European (rather than American) audience.
4. So far all the publications that we have introduced to the app store have had an acceptable uptake of samples. They are all clearly going to have at least several thousand trial installations. But there is a high degree of variability, and we do not know what makes the difference between a magazine app getting 10s of thousands of downloads in the first week or two and another magazine app getting a few thousand free installations. We suspect that prominent promotion by the publisher makes quite a difference, but it is certainly not the only factor.
5. Our statistical analysis has shown that iPad owners are much more likely to download magazine and book apps than iPhone users, and they are more likely to buy subscriptions to them. The extent to which uptake has been weighted to the iPad has really surprised us. Since the iPad was launched we have seen more sampling from iPad owners and more purchasing from them also. The majority of downloads and sales has been going to the 2 million iPad owners, not to the 70 million iPhone/iPod Touch owners. This disparity has really astonished us and several of our magazines have seen the sales ratio going in favour of the iPad in the ratio 80:20. Other sources have reported that the iPad is very strong for reading and very strong for selling books and magazines. The potential of the iPad for publishers and the reading public has been sensed, but it has still not been fully grasped. Many magazine publishers still do not have a clear idea of what an iPad/iPhone app is or how it can work to drive subscriptions.
6. Different books and magazines obviously have different 'conversion' rates. We will not speak about these in detail, but we have seen that magazines and books exhibit a fairly reliable consistency in their conversion rate. More installations of the freemium app will lead to more sales, and this allows the publisher to assess the value and effectiveness of their promotion activity. The conversion rates may appear to be somewhat low to the 'outsider', and we regard 1-2% as acceptable, 3-4% as good, but this is telling us that publishers should recognize that the app store is a great medium for having stuff sampled and evaluated, and there will be a lot of sipping and tasting without commitment or follow through. But you will be able to measure it.
7. Price makes a huge difference to uptake. If you publish an app with an in-app subscription price of £15/$20 you may get less than 3 in 1,000 samplers buying the app, however good the trial experience is!
8. We have not yet found an optimum ratio for free:closed in offering customers samples of the full content that will be available to them -- there are signs that a more open approach (over 20% a publication being open) maybe more effective than a 'tight' grasp of content. Perhaps this is related to the fact that there will generally be a lot of sampling going on, so having a slightly more convincing 'free' offer may in fact convince and convert.
9. Since Exact Editions, not Apple or the publisher, carries the 'cost' of sampling (Apple does not pay the server bills or handle the support) it is in Exact Editions interests for the conversion rate to be optimum and high!
10. The renewal rates on subscriptions are encouraging, but this is one area where the publishers and Exact Editions suffer from not having much, or any, access to customer information (Apple hold all this customer identity very tight). Since it is very much in Apple's interests for subscription renewal rates to be as high as possible (publishers and developers are aligned with Apple in this) it is more than likely that Apple will find it in its own interests to be more forthcoming with publishers and developers about this data.
11. Customers like these apps and we are getting very positive support messages from satisfied purchasers. Many customers also see the potential of this technology and are recommending that we further develop the apps in ways which will improve them. We agree with this assessment and often find that the specific recommendations are sound.

The most surprising outcome of our analysis has been the huge significance of the iPad. iPad owners are discovering the potential of this device much faster than publishers.

Why Beautiful Typography is Pixel-Indpendent.

Khoi Vinh a typographer/designer who works for the New York Times has recently delivered some fascinating comments on design for books and magazines and the iPad and the new iPhone. Here is a quote from yesterday's blog:

LESS-THAN-PERFECT VISION

Creating a beautiful display and patting yourself on the back for having good typography is disingenuous, I think. It’s a little like saying a high-definition television set makes for better television shows; an absurd claim at best.

That metaphor is imperfect, of course, because television manufacturers have nothing to do with the content that appears on their devices or with its production. But that, supposedly, is the unique value that Apple claims to offer: they build the whole widget. Not just the hardware and not just the software, but the divine unification of the two into transcendent commercial products.

Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple, repeated in yesterday’s keynote address, posits that the company operates at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. I think it’s reasonable to regard fine typography as falling within that mandate, but unfortunately, they are falling short of that promise. Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty. (Khoi Vinh at Subtraction)

There is a lot more in the post and much intelligent opinion in the comments.

While I can understand the typographers frustration at the way that Apple seems to have made some very funny (ie poor) decisions about typography and book design, and one sympathizes with Khoi in his shudder when Apple marketeers expostulate on screen about 'perfect' type, when what we see on screen is a 'typographic calamity'. Yes this is all very odd, and very odd indeed is Apple's decision to embrace the ePUB standard for iBooks and then implement it poorly (that calamitous page would be much better with a ragged right margin). This is odd because the iPad is showing that books really do not need to be as typographically simple and neutered as the ePUB standard encourages or presupposes them to be. But it is important to understand what is going on here. Apple really is just building a platform, they are not, contra Khoi, building the whole widget, or even the whole enchillada, and we notice that Apple are trying to encourage app designers and publishers to work with them. It may be that the most interesting things to do with books that Apple announced at WWDC was its decision to allow iBooks to incorporate PDF files directly (albeit in a different 'shelf'). With the new higher specification screens that Apple is producing the whole motivation for eBooks and the ePUB standard (reflowable text, translation of tables to ASCII, etc) is being undermined. Apple is belatedly recognizing this and acknowledging that many types of books (and most newspapers and magazines) will be very poorly translated to iOS if we need to rely on a file-text format such as ePUB, or even WebKit as a rendering engine. PDF is making a come-back.

The plain fact is that designers and typographers who work for digital media MUST NOT DESIGN their books, magazines, newspapers etc for display on the latest widget. They must design for 'resolution independent' display. Designers should surely notice that we now have 326 ppi Retina Display outputs, but they should then dismiss the fact, retinal displays are here today and gone tomorrow, and designers should be fixing books that will look as good as possible on any of the myriad displays that will be in the market next year, when Apple or one of its competitors will announce 'Leica Display' with 652 ppi. That means treating books and magazines as virtual editions which will be read on scores of different platforms, with many different screen resolutions. PDF files will not be the solution to this challenge, but the fact that they are being pushed back into the user's line of vision is an indication that the way the document looks and hangs together (in abstract, in the clouds, in the database) is still a key consideration. The form in which we virtualise books and documents must capture all the ways in which we might want to read, look at or use them. When we have that right we can deliver the document in as many different resolutions and platforms as we need. When books are virtualised appropriately they do not need to be rendered as typographic calamities.

Fred Wilson's Shopping List.

Fred Wilson, a vc at 'a vc', always has his finger on the pulse. But he may be missing something with his recent blog, I Prefer Safari to Content Apps On The iPad. Part of his message is that he would rather have free stuff through the web than pay for things through the app store, so you could say he has produced a non-shopping list. But we most of us do buy stuff from the app store and I think he has also craftily compiled a little public shopping list of a different kind. Mind you he certainly makes some reasonable points. Here are most of them:

1. Content apps treat pages as monolithic objects. No cut and paste.
2. There are no links to other content apps in mobile apps
   
3. No multi-tasking, so no multi-paging.
4. Every newspaper, or magazine, seems to have to invent a new interface
5. Sometimes the stuff I pay for in an app is free on the web
6. No connections with social media
7. You can't search content in apps (not with Google, sometimes not with anything)

Rather than get all defensive and point out that some of this is not true for Exact Editions apps (our apps do link to mobile apps, eg postcodes link straight to Google maps, and phone numbers are live to the iPhone. Take a look at the Congleton Chronicle app which has masses of live postcodes and phone numbers that do stuff on your iPhone/iPad. Our book and magazine apps do search their own archives, including issues not sync-ed to the iPad/iPhone). Moving gracefully from defensiveness to engagement, we can admit that he has a good list and Exact Editions already is one of the platforms that newspapers and magazines can use straight off the bat, no need to invent another UI if you pick up this one that magazines and people are already using. That scratches off point 4; we have a mini-platform that others can use!

But take another good look at the list. These are mostly solvable problems. Aren't these shortcomings obvious and tempting targets for app developers? Does anybody think that we are going to see a static picture of app development here? I have my doubts about Fred Wilson's blog, he really is a vc (venture capitalist). His blog helps his investing and distills wisdom from his experience of investing. He seems to be half out of love with his iPad and half in love with it. He uses his blog to change his mind. He uses it to think aloud. So he is not really complaining about the state of the app store, he has just produced a list of juicy targets that start-up companies in the mobile app space are going to have to address.

Take if from me, Fred has just given us the shopping list for the technologies and the companies that Union Square Ventures is going to invest in next. I would say that number 6, the interaction between apps and social media, is really a very ripe fruit. For two reasons. First, it is indeed a huge and gaping chasm in the apps universe, for the e-commerce system that Apple are building needs much more social interaction. Sure Twitter and Facebook have produced their first and very creditable apps, but getting beyond the app as 'account window' is the next step. Leveraging the plethora of apps out there is the challenge and entrepreneurs will crack it first. There is a lot of disruptive potential in getting hold of that space (software dilineating and inventing the appropriate mobile relationships between Facebook, Foursquare, content, location, music, app e-commerce and advertising). And, second, Apple will not be good at holding on to this territory for itself, much though it may wish to do so. Apple might hang on to mobile content search for its apps and to a good chunk of mobile advertising within apps but it can't/won't do the social graph for itself (far too crafted, planned and inflexible, though I would leave to see Steve, Mark and Ev in the same room).

If he hasn't already done so, I am sure that Fred will turn his list around and go looking for companies that are tackling these problems/opportunities on the iPhone and the Android platforms. But he is also missing the key change which the discovery of apps has thrown in the path of publishers. Once we start thinking of books or magazines as apps that can do, at their next iteration must do, some of this stuff (link social groups, facilitate and reciprocate Google searches, copy content, remind via citation, collect usage and reactions, or work with and through other book-apps and magazine-apps) publishing becomes a much more dynamic relationship between author and consumer. Apps are at the heart of this change and will encourage us to stop thinking of content as format-bound (boring old 'files'), but rather to view digital publications as media for engagement. Go for it Union Square Ventures. Show Fred how his apps should work!

The WIRED app -- Who is in Charge?

I recommend the WIRED Magazine app. If you have an iPad (it will not run on an iPhone) and have been a Wired reader do get the app ($4.99) to make up your own mind about it. These are some of the things I most like about it:

• Gorgeous graphics and 'interesting' design -- we will get on to that.
• Excellent and pithy articles on topics that any iPad owner will find interesting (lots of stuff: eg Steven Levy on why and how tablets will work)
• Helpful navigation through the 'layout' mode for viewing the whole magazine in article strips (icon at top right)
• I liked the interactivity in the Mars article (but its hard to read/navigate because a bit lacking in stability - patience!)
• Great ads and they are all there, sometimes with links
  

There is already quite a bit of controversy about the Wired app and it has had a painful birth. Originally, Conde Nast and Adobe were working together on a prototype that would have used Flash and the expectation was that Apple would support Flash directly on the iPhone OS, or that the Adobe cross-compiler solution would do the business. Steve Jobs shot down this idea. So they have clearly had to cobble together something pretty fast, abandoning a framework that must have cost them a lot of time and effort. The resulting app is massive (500 Mb) and has some obvious misses -- no search! But they will surely be able to improve the delivery when they move forward. Here are three important links if you want more insight into the reactions and the controversy:

1. Adobe's blog, welcoming the arrival of the app: 'The future of magazines is now - and it starts in a tangible way with the WIRED Reader.' (They must know that isn't right, they know that this version of the Wired app was a rescue mission and pretty much lashed together when they had to come up with something fast. Adobe do not come out of this whole affair at all well. They do not have a 'road map' for magazine publishers and had better come clean on that. See Bill McCoy's comments).
2. Interfacelab (Jon Gilkinson) has many astute comments and insights. Its also rude verging on insulting: "Sure, it’s a print designers wet dream – but it really should be a consumer’s wet dream. And it most certainly is not that." Gilkinson's answer is to put the business back in the hands of the web designers at Wired HQ and deliver the whole thing in HTML5. The circulation director or publisher is going to reject this proposal as there is some sign that users will buy apps, but not so much that they will buy 'urls'.
   
3. Print designers wet dream? Well try Oliver Reichenstein's blog at Information Architects to find out why it isn't that. This blog even brought in some thoughtful comments from one of the type designers consulted by Wired over the design of this issue of the magazine (Jonathan Hoefler)

Reichenstein's critique gets very detailed and very nerdy, but it is truly surprising that he focuses on the typography, not on the images, illustrations and navigation. His key point is foreshadowed in this objection:

But text is a different story. It needs a lot of rhetoric skill and typographic care to do what it should: to communicate. On the screen things become even more complicated. While WIRED journalists and graphic designers are still at the top of their game, the typography and the interaction design of the iPad app doesn’t come even close.

So Reichenstein presumably thinks that magazines should be root and branch re-designed for the iPad. "You can’t design iPad apps in InDesign and export them as flat files. That’s nothing short of amateurish. " But of course you can design magazines in InDesign and then export pages to an app, and this is a very strange comment unless you believe that magazines need to be re-designed in precise and granular detail for iPads. InDesign does not exist to design iPad apps, it exists to design magazines and other forms of document. But it is equally inevitable that most documents will now need to be read, used and presented on iPads (iPhones, Android devices etc). So a modern magazine, newspaper, book, catalogue etc better look good or 'reasonably OK' when it is rendered on some of these devices in widespread use. The transition has to be automatic. No text designers involved. Does anybody seriously think that text in magazines needs to be designed and then redesigned for each and every piece of consumer computing technology that comes along. Will magazines need to be 'redesigned' for next year's Android and then again for the 2012 super-iPad? So that they can support different screen resolutions or styles of 'text flow'? Magazines do not need to be redesigned for the iPad, their use and their usability as digital objects has to be understood before they are transformed to an app platform. This is not primarily a task for text designers, or even for magazine designers.

Wired has always had a deliberately various, bold, edgy, contrapuntal visual design. It has been a notable strength of the print magazine. The variety and confusion has worked so well in recent years partly because it apes in print the choice and chaos of the web; each Wired story carrying its own design conventions or layout, as though we were tipped into another web site as we turned the page. Each article node with its own style-sheet. I suspect that the post-modern jokiness and anarchy of Wired's visual design, which works so well when it is a print-only magazine, may be something of a weakness when it comes to its digital existence. Perhaps, as it heads to a new digital existence on the iPad and whatever comes next, Wired will need to forsake the promiscuous hurly-burly of the designer's chaise-longe for the sobriety and solidity of the app store.

Reflecting on this Wired app, which it has to be said is a bit of a 'curate's egg', I have been asking myself who has been driving this project forward? Adobe may have been at one stage, but they seem to have driven this proposition off the road (see Bill McCoy Wired is Tired). Conde Nast appears to have given the leadership role to Wired's distinguished designer Scott Dadich, but getting the digital strategy right is not merely a design decision, it is not just a technical decision. The project should now be driven by the publisher, even better it should be driven by the circulation director of the Conde Nast group. One can understand why Wired would be one of the first magazines from Conde Nast to have its own app, but whatever solution or platform is chosen for Conde Nast's magazines should really be one that can deliver across the group. Si Newhouse must have expected his premier publishing company to have chosen the best strategy for digital magazines by now. The solution is overdue and I think/hope they will get it right soon.

Exactly and Precisely

Exact Editions began with the goal of delivering magazines, issue by issue, as subscription services for web browsers. For various reasons, some of which I may have forgotten and some of which are deeply ideological, we took the view that the service had to be a pure web service. Every page of every magazine should be rendered as a web page, so that it could both link and be linked to. This is still the underlying, database-driven, system that underpins the apps that Exact Editions delivers for the iPhone O/S.

It is a year since Apple accepted our first app and it appeared in the app store (a year and four days), so it may be a good moment to take stock and review progress. One thing to say, loud and clear, is that we think Apple has built a great system. A system that is great for publishers, good for developers and very good for consumers. Apple gets stick, and its share of mockery, (and we occasionally mutter oaths under our breath when they inexplicably delay approval of a great revision to one of our/their apps) but they are doing a great job. Thank you Apple and thank you also for designing and building the iPad! The iPad is the crowning glory of the system that Apple has constructed and it is going to be very good for magazine publishers.

Exactly was our first app and it remains in some respects the lynch-pin of our offering. Through it anyone can read sample digital magazines on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and they can access their own Exact Editions account to read the current and archived issues of magazines that they subscribe to. We have been steadily adding functionality to Exactly in the course of the year. Six months ago we added content sync-ing so that the latest issue in an account could be stored on the iPhone/iPod Touch. This ability to sync has greatly improved the readability and speed of interaction with the apps on phones. Currently we have a further improved version of Exactly with the Apple approval process and this will allow double-page spread viewing and navigation on the iPad. Exactly will continue to improve as we move forward and as the Apple O/S develops -- multi-tasking is one of the features that Apple-followers are looking for in the imminent release of OS/4.

Exactly is a lynchpin in the Exact Editions product offering, but from our initial exploration of the iPhone platform we had taken the view that most magazines will benefit from having their own 'branded' apps in the iTunes app store. We have recently started viewing this complementary development of branded apps as a kind of co-relative of the Exactly proposition. Whereas Exactly allows the user and the subscriber to read and access her magazine subscriptions on the iPhone platform exactly as digital counterparts to the print subscription, the branded apps solution allows the publisher to project the title precisely branded for the iTunes market place. For the consumer a branded app works precisely as the Exactly app works, but with better branding for a particular magazine or title. But for the publisher the branded apps project the PRECISE brand associated with the magazine (or book).

Exactly is a 'white label' solution, it is neutral between the brands of the magazines that might be viewed through it, but the precisely 'branded apps' target and carry the design of the particular magazine. We are not going to make the 'precisely' label even a sub-brand for Exact Editions, because we think that the specific brands for the magazine itself is what matters to the integrity and brandedness of magazines. Precisely is an extension of the underlying Exact Editions app platform, a non-brand or place-holder for magazines that need their own brand in the iTunes economy. And that is the key point about the 'precisely' proposition, a magazine app which is branded for the magazine itself can be moved into the iTunes app store, with its own price, its own content offering, its own front cover etc....The magazine publisher who can place the magazine directly in the iTunes app store takes advantage of the existing brand recognition of the magazine itself and by selling subscriptions through the efficient Apple system the brand is of course further developed. Having the magazine directly in the iTunes app store, means that the magazine app can be sampled and bought by the 70 million people who already have iPhone O/S devices. The magazine sits directly in iTunes and there is no need for the subscriber to come to the content via the Exact Editions web service.

There are some additional immediate gains from this approach. First, the magazine app can be sampled (and in this way the App store becomes a very effective digital kiosk where some parts of the magazine can be browsed before the title is bought). Second, magazine subscriptions can be sold as 30-day subscriptions, which is a huge advantage because the iTunes market is still quite sticky about buying apps for $15 or $30 (typical prices for annual subscriptions) but much more accommodating about buying subscriptions (albeit only for 30 days) at the price of $1.99 or $2.99 that might seem appropriate to a publisher who sells print subs at $15/30. The Apple system of in-app purchasing works fine, and the low threshold for subs and renewals at modest prices are huge advantages of the iTunes e-commerce system. Apple is getting a lot of this stuff right!

A Summary of the Strengths of the Exactly/Precisely Platform

Exactly has:

1. Full digital fidelity for magazine issues and archives
2. Interactivity and in-page and in-issue navigation (live links for urls, phone numbers etc)
3. Search
4. Offline syncing
5. iPad and iPhone support

Precisely has all of that from Exactly and more:

1. Full digital fidelity for magazine issues and archives
2. Interactivity and in-page and in-issue navigation (live links for urls, phone numbers etc)
3. Search
4. Offline syncing
5. iPad and iPhone support
6. Branded app name
   
7. Branded icon
8. Branded splash screen
9. Branded app-store presence
   
10. Current issue preview
11. In-app purchase
12. 30-day subscriptions
13. Data on consumer up-take
    
14. Revenues from iTunes
    

That is all rather a big deal for magazines that want to have their own direct presence in the iTunes economy. The Exactly/Precisely platform can get a magazine up and running in the app store within two or three weeks (allow at least one week for the approval process), and most magazines which look for a strong consumer presence should be doing that now! However, we do emphasise to our partner publishers that we are offering them a branded solution from an underlying technology platform. We are not building customised app solutions. Sure there are plenty of choices and there are many issues where there can be some fine-tuning, but the platform is database driven and largely automated. It works the way it works.

Exactly and precisely that way.

What is Apple's Mission Statement?

We all know Google's mission statement: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (Google: Company Overview). Amazon has a vision statement that you may have encountered: "Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online." (Amazon: Corporate FAQ's). I bet you did not know that Apple has a 'sort of' mission statement on its investor relations pages:

"Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone."

That doesn't get me too far. It sounds more like an overly-potted history than a mission statement, it is also somewhat out of date, since it doesn't even mention the latest revolutionary step: the iPad. I subscribe to the view that Apple has incredibly ambitious goals which it probably does not even articulate to itself. It is determined to invent and own the high end of consumer computing, which is going to be the only safe place for a computer manufacturer to be in five years time (see Charlie Stross on "The Real Reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash", or as John Gruber has it 'The iPad really is The Big One: Apple's reconception of personal computing' from "This is how Apple rolls").

So Apple's mission may be so audacious that it would be unwise to articulate it fully. But it may also have crafted its trajectory in such a way that it does not become too obviously monopolistic. Apple wants to revolutionize the world of personal computing (that is what Jobs and Wozniack did first time around in the 1970s) and yet the company does not obviously want to monopolize the market. Carving out the high-end, deluxe end, of the consumer market should be enough. Is that the way that publishing will work in the future? There will be a high-end platform for those who like to buy into Apple standards, and a more chaotic, Android, world of confused standards where stuff is cheaper, where there is more stuff and wilder stuff (including Flash and porn) but perhaps also less reliability and consistency?

My own iPad

I have been watching my colleagues use an iPad at the other end of a Skype conversation since April 5th and earlier in the week had a chance to actually use one for the first time. It doesnt take any time at all to get quite used to it! Now I am back in Italy and my own 'Italian' iPad was awaiting me -- there is actually hardly anything at all Italian about it, except the Italian in the iTunes store. Apple's minimalist design means that they really dont have to do much at all to 'localize' their products. According to La Repubblica one hundred thousand iPads were pre-ordered in Italy alone. Since the device has had overwhelming demand in Japan and the UK, it must be clear that Apple will very soon have sold their second million iPads. Not bad for a device that is still only 2 months old.

The first apps downloaded to my system were of course the Exact Editions apps. My first purchase was of the Pages application from Apple, closely followed by the Wired app. I will look forward to browsing and reading the Wired app this weekend.

I was interested to see that the Wired app is only available for the iPad. We have taken the view that users will often want to read stuff on their iPhone and since this can be done pretty effectively with the Exact Editions system we obviously offer users both (they subscribe to a single app, a universal app, which can be used on either type of device). On the other hand it has to be said that magazines really do look MUCH better on the iPad, perhaps there is a perverse logic in requiring that the magazine app should only be readable on the less common, the more expensive, device. I am not sure what we would say if a publisher (say an Art publisher) specified that they ONLY wanted their book or magazine to be sold for an iPad audience. I guess we would go along with it.... It is certainly interesting to note that our universal apps have been mainly downloaded by iPad users. The figures are close, but since April 1 our apps have been going to the iPad:iPhone audience in roughly 51:49 ratio. Given the overwhelming superiority of the iPhone in terms of numbers of users that is a fact I find somewhat amazing.

Publishers Weekly as an iPad app

And of course as an iPhone app. Available here.

This week's issue is available in its entirety for free through the app, and for the next three days of BEA the Publisher's Weekly daily specials will also be freely viewable within the iPhone/iPad apps.

The decision to develop this app was taken at short notice (less than two weeks before it was needed) and we were perhaps fortunate that the Apple approval process came through just in time for the BEA show -- which is by far the biggest American book trade exhibition/conference.

Being able to read the daily specials, is clearly a boon for visitors and exhibitors who may not want to carry the printed version with them, but it is even more of a boon for those who might not be able to get to the show and would like to participate in the event from afar.

Here is a screenshot from the iPad version, the screenshot shows the 2 ways in which the user can navigate the magazine issue. First, the traditional contents page (with hotlinks from the page numbers to the listed articles) and second, the 'pageflow' navigation slider, which many users prefer as its so fast on the iPad.

Apple's Bite and Weisberg's Confusion

Jacob Weisberg, a distinguished journalist and Chairman of the Slate Group, has an article in this week's Newsweek which crystalises and epitomises some of the confused reactions of the magazine industry to Apple's iPad. Apple's Bite: publishers should beware the iPad is a clever but crass and logically inconsistent article and I recommend it in full for its cleverness and its instructive inconsistency. In a nutshell, Weisberg's position seems to be that the iPad is potentially a game-changing device but it is a poisoned chalice for publishers so they should avoid it:

The iPad is a gorgeous appliance and I wouldn't bet against it, or be without one, in the short term. But content creators ought not to delude themselves about Jobs's efforts to replace the chaos of the Web with his own velvet prison.

Weisberg's argument really boils down to three propositions:

1. The iPad is so good for web browsing that many of the first generation of iPad apps are feeble in comparison. Many magazine and newspaper apps are 'exorbitantly priced' steps backwards and away from the web.
   
2. Apple is trying to retain all (or almost all) the customer data and may share very little of it with publishers: "Such domination of the relationship with readers would be no less a disaster for publishers than it was for the music industry."
3. Apple is acting as a censor in deciding what content should be available within the app store. "And Cupertino is more puritanical about nudity than the Vatican itself."

But these points don't hang together, if the first is really true and the iPad is going to be much better for web browsing than for enjoying apps which represent and contain magazines and newspapers we can forget about magazine apps. If the iPad really is a step backwards -- "Don't go there!" -- the other points are simply irrelevant. The iPad will not be a good environment in which to deploy magazines and newspapers as apps and so can be safely ignored. Concentrate on making the web services work. The fact is many of the initial apps are crude and have been put together in a hurry without the opportunity for effective prototyping and testing, but these multifarious apps are getting better very fast and most of the features that Weisberg wants from newspaper and magazine apps will be coming.

Weisberg probably knows this, and he is at least in part seduced by the iPad (as have been most magazine publishers who see it) so he goes on to develop his critique of the Apple political economy. Apple gets to decide what development tools will be used on the iPhone O/S, Apple will invent and will develop a new advertising system which will be deployed within apps (iAds), and Apple will make decisions about what magazines to include or exclude and some publishers may prepare special sanitized content for the Apple system (eg the Playboy app which has no nudity!). But these complaints are pointless and otiose. Publishers may complain about the Apple system, but they should get on and use it, as many publishers are. Weisberg's complaints about the advertising system are particularly bizarre. The proposed iAds system will be especially attractive to magazines - the ads promise to be engaging, to be incremental to the performance of the apps which contain them, through their richness they will attract major brands and will be of especial relevance to the advertising budgets that like print magazines (the launch ads will cost in the region of $1 million per campaign, $10 million at launch). The Apple system has much more promise of effective 'trickle down' to magazine budgets than we have seen from Google search ads. Weisberg complains that the advertising system will siphon %40 off the top. But let us note that this still means that %60 of the advertising spend remains accessible to publishers. They should be there to catch it when it falls.

Weisberg is right that too many publishers are under the illusion that the Apple iPad may permit them to simply replicate their existing business model (irreparably holed under the water-line by the internet) on the iPad platform. It will not do that. But publishers who care about their magazine brands should ignore Weisberg's jeremiads. They will rush to develop their magazines and newspapers as apps and they will not be disappointed to have done so. The key point that Weisberg is missing is that the iPad really is a new market, and it will not be the last. It will help publishers to sell magazines and subscriptions to newspapers and it will introduce new types of sponsorship and advertising revenues for content owners. But no publisher will put all their eggs in the Apple basket. What Weisberg should have said, the warning that he should have posted is this: the Apple system will probably succeed and if it does so it will not be the last such technology driven new market, so publishers need a strategy for progressive digitization of their core assets. There will no longer be one circulation figure and the BPA and ABC solutions will not be helpful in these new domains. Publishers need to get used to the idea of modular distribution. They may well need to develop content solutions which are specific to the iPad/iPhone, different solutions for the web, for Android, for games platforms or for social networks (Facebook or Twitter). The challenge that publishers will have difficulty in meeting is this: how can they design and produce 'digital magazine' solutions which meet the needs of these very different audiences and technological environments. Publishers who respond to the iPad opportunity by building an iPad app (or better a 'universal' iPhone/iPad app) also need to think about how this new development impacts on the way they are using their existing web presence. They need to keep an eye on Android and Blackberry app environments. They certainly cannot ignore these choices. If Weisberg means by his 'beware' that publishers should ignore the iPad, his advice is lousy.

Book Pricing, the iPad, and the Bvlgari Book

Some months, shortly after the iPad was announced, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan published a much discussed and influential blog on the pricing of books and the 'agency model'. This was influential because it articulated the reason why Macmillan (and most of the other large publishers) were going to use the advent of the Apple iPad as an occasion for reasserting publisher control over the pricing of books. Digital books that would be sold through the iPad's iBook store, but also for reasserting control over the pricing of books that would be sold by Amazon through their Kindle. Publishers through the agency model would set the price of the book to be sold to end users and allocate a set percentage of that price to the distributor/retail channel, or technology partner (30% is becoming the norm for distribution share). Amazon by implication would no longer be allowed to set, and to lower, prices to $9.99. Amazon would have to put up with some loss of control and a higher but pre-determined margin.

The ructions caused by this blog posting are on-going, but the comment that most struck me in Sargent's blog was an aside and a promise:

I have not addressed illustrated books or books for young children. That will be a topic for the future as the technology advances beyond e-ink screens. John Sargent Macmillan Blog

We have not heard any more about the special case(s) of illustrated books or books for young children. But why should they be different? Why should the pricing and availability of books of different types be subject to quite different considerations? Well no doubt a part of the answer is that illustrated books (and many children's books are essentially illustrated) will not work well on e-ink screens. Mind you the iPad is not an e-ink screen, but I suppose one could say that the iBook store does appear to be catering for books that would otherwise be suitable for e-ink screens. Illustrated books and some other types of high-design books are evidently not suitable for the iBookstore or the e-Pub format used by most e-ink devices. So illustrated books do seem to be a bit of a special case and more suitable for deployment as free-standing apps directly in the iPad system.

It is surprising that we have not yet seen more high-design books implemented as free-standing apps in the iTunes system. The iPad is eminently suitable for rendering beautiful illustrated books. How will the pricing work when they arrive? Will beautiful virtual books on the iPad be priced higher or lower than other books?

There is an argument for saying that beautiful illustrated books will be much cheaper as digital books on the iPad (or on Android tablets etc) than they will be in print. Perhaps the clever strategy now for a publisher of beautiful books would be to move rapidly up-market, towards a luxury option for printed books, whilst simultaneously making digital versions of the books available at highly competitive prices. This strategy would chime in with a prediction from Alberto Vitale that printed book prices should rise as digital book prices inevitably fall:

"a book that sells today for $27, $28.95 may be selling within the next two to five years at anywhere between $37.95 and $45."

"Eventually, I believe the market will bear the higher price -- publishers will have to experiment with the price. The economics of book publishing are not very good now," Vitale said, adding he did not expect "appreciable resistance" from consumers to higher hardback prices.

Vitale further predicted that the cost of e-books will drop ........ "E-books will become the equivalent of the mass market. Mass market is not down market, it's just a market accessible to a larger number of people. That's why I believe e-book prices have to be lower than they are today. The consumer is not stupid, he knows the e-book is a lot more economical to produce than a regular paper book," (See full article from DailyFinance).

This is pretty cogent thinking. I think it is especially persuasive for highly illustrated beautiful books. For the following reasons:

(1) Whatever publishers say, the pricing of printed books has something to do with the costs of producing and manufacturing them (the official line is that pricing should be set by market expectations, but in practice all publishers pay attention to unit costs when setting print prices). The costs of printing and manufacturing the marginal, or run-on copies matter to the traditional publisher. Especially is this true for high quality illustrated books which have very good paper and complex printing. Good colour costs if the book is to be manufactured. Colour costs nothing in the digital case. In fact the marginal cost of another digital reader or licensee is essentially zero as it is with any digital book. The run on cost of all digital books is essentially zero. There is no reason that big and beautiful digital books should cost more than any other kind of book, mass market or otherwise. There is no cost penalty for being a big book, or having full colour throughout if the book is digital.

(2) Furthermore the perceived value of a print book will be increased if the standard of production and of reproduction is increased. From which it should follow that the price of the print product should be increased to the point that the 'exclusive' and 'exceptional' value of the physical object is enhanced. Physical books of high quality should increasingly be priced according to the rules of Bvlgari and Gucci, not according to the standards of Marks & Spencer or the Gap. Publishers of such books: Thames &Hudson, Phaidon, Yale, Rizzoli and so on will find it profitable to improve the quality and reduce the print runs for their best books, because

(3) Selling relatively cheap digital editions will not only increase the market reach of beautiful books, it will also help to sell the more expensive printed books. There are potentially large markets for beautiful digital books at prices in the region of $5-$10, merely for reading, even though the printed book may cost $50-$100. Very attractive physical books will be very attractive digital books, especially as the quality and fidelity of electronic devices surpass that of the iPad, which they will. Larger digital sales will in effect promote the desirability of exclusive and less affordable printed editions. Customers who might like to possess a very expensive book, and to handle it, to put it on their shelves, or to collect it, are more likely to do so if they have already seen and probably purchased a digital version of the book.

(4) For as Vitale so eloquently observes, the consumer is not stupid. The consumer knows that the marginal cost of a digital book is close to zero, just as she knows that the cost of beautifully produced printed volume may be close to the manufactured cost of a Gucci handbag (ie quite possibly less than 10% of the price that may be charged, but a lot more than zero).

Of course this argument does not completely follow if there is a significant degree of substitutability between beautiful printed books and the same book as a digital edition. But there surely is not? If a physical book is valued because it is expensive, because it can be handled, because it is potentially rare and collectible it will not be substituted by a digital edition which is none of these things. I suspect that we shall soon see some quality art publishers putting this thesis to the test and they will do so, because for many of the best illustrated books there is quite a large audience that merely wants to read or consult the beautifully produced virtual object. For the beautiful book that is merely going to be read there is no case for charging more than $5 or $9.99 or whatever becomes the 'normal' price for a digital book. I agree with Vitale that this 'normal' price will soon be coming down. Partly because consumers are not stupid, but also because competition is at work and lower prices will sell more books. Always has done. Always will. But there still should be a very nice market for the beautiful physical book. Why not? We also like beautiful handbags.

Why Magazine apps need to be Magazines

Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times takes A Peek at Vanity Fair’s iPad App

Magazines are actually pretty brilliant concepts the way they are,” said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter on Tuesday as he previewed his magazine’s new iPad app. “At the same time, we have a few bells and whistles that a magazine cannot provide.”

That is so true....

Its very important that there are a few extra 'bells and whistles' in the digital edition, but its also very important that the digital magazine should be the SAME MAGAZINE.

There are lots of reasons for this and here are two that underpin the Graydon Carter observation.....

Reason One: Publishers Cannot Afford to Produce Different Versions of the Same Issue

Magazine are brilliant concepts and they are also very complex products to produce. The digital magazine that is going to work on a week by week, month by month basis has to emerge from that complex and extensive process. For this reason we remain at least sceptical about the widespread practicality of the new narrative form developed for the digital app version of Popular Science magazine. If every magazine is going to be deconstructed and then put together in a different editorial context for its digital variant there will need to be a huge investment if magazines are to make the digital turn. It does not look as though the magazine industry, as a whole, has the appetite for huge digital investments. That is why at Exact Editions we have always seen it as our task to enhance the magazine but to respect its integrity. The kind of enhancements that we deliver automatically through our database are -- increased connectivity, lots of links to emails, urls, places and phone numbers mentioned in the magazine. Putting these links into the database and then through the browser onto the page the reader sees (metadata if you like) makes the magazine content more useful to the reader....

Reason Two: Readers Want to Experience the Same Magazine but they Want to do Digital Things with it

The key thing to respect in adding bells and whistles is to understand the context in which a digital magazine is going to be used. That is where useful bells and whistles come in. The user may want to search, the user may want to link, if the device on which she reads the magazine is a phone, then she may want to call the number that is in the magazine. The point about the digital magazine is that the context in which it will be used is digital, so it has to do the digital things well and simply. The same content, the same information but more useful because digital. So phone numbers in the magazine, or urls, should be clickable, and not just because making them clickable helps the advertiser (of course it does that). Phone numbers that you see on your iPhone absolutely clickable to call...it is strange the way that many apps do not respect this basic requirement. Those are the kinds of bells and whistles that users want and need.... but keep it simple. That is the first rule. And the second rule is to aim to automate the process as much as possible. These two rules are of course connected: if you keep it simple there is a chance that the process of enhancement can be automated.

Can a digital magazine be more than the print magazine? More useful, more mobile, more shareable, more engaging, more interactive? Sure it can, but publishers should never forget that the digital magazine has to do all that the print magazine can do for its users, first. The digital magazine should be able to do everything except there is no need for it to be re-cycled through a shredder for use as cat litter or fire lighters. That function can be left to the paper ancestor.

Is Apple Opening Up?

Apple has been accused of building a 'walled garden' in the iPad. That is not a metaphor that I trust too much; first, because Apple's garden seems to be rather subtler than that: it is more like a 'hedged' garden because the iPad has always and will always have a web browser, one that allows you to see any web page and you can't get much wilder and freer than that; second, because, unlike most publisher 'walled gardens', a large part of the Apple garden is 'free to access', and developers and publishers do not have to pay to offer stuff for free through apps running on the Apple systems. So using the 'walled garden' metaphor as a weapon to beat Apple with, seems to be both inaccurate and a touch unfair to Apple, which is really creating a hedged 'pay for access' inner garden with a large fringe of 'free' public park access. Good for Apple, Amazon and even more Sony, should have thought of this first: provide the space in which other ebook systems can be viewed and read, even the opposition. Apple does not get the credit it deserves for this third-party openness. We did not see Amazon creating the space for developers to produce third party apps to run on the Kindle until the on-rushing iPad chariot made this belated 'openness' a reactive move.

Furthermore it is at least arguable that Apple, in creating the e-commerce environment for the iPhone and the iPad (the app store) has the obligation to vet these products. Some of this is about making sure that malicious programs do not pollute the environment (there is so far no sign of viruses or malware on the iPhone platform), but also a matter of civic duty -- Apple no doubt sees itself in the role of a Walmart, or at least of the landlord of retail properties. So it may feel a need to regulate the type of services and products that can be offered through its pay-platform.

In a thoughtful piece at GigaOm Kevin Kelleher writes that Apple is already "losing control--and that's a good thing"

I’m willing to accept that Apple is trying doing the right thing for its customers. In one sense, Apple is like Walmart, or any retailer that excludes magazines and books with content it deems too sexual or politically controversial. But Apple is more than just a retailer — it’s the provider of a platform, and a wildly successful one. Apple can control its platform on a small scale, but as success expands that platform domain, the company’s control inevitably breaks down as it starts to create more problems than it solves.

The problems affect developers, content partners and consumers. To avoid having to explain its capricious approval system, Apple has retreated into an opaque cloud of inscrutability, making telepathy a vital skill for successful developers. As publishers large and small bring their content to the iPad, Apple’s murky morality may give them pause — or worse, lead to self-censorship. And curating controversial content in a way that leaves all parties unhappy is hardly a savvy way to market a hot new product to consumers.

So the company is likely to reassess its control-freak tendencies as well. It has three choices: One, hold to the status quo; two, curate its platform, but add a set of clear guidelines as to what’s allowed and what isn’t, or maybe a curtained-off section for controversial apps; or three, adopt an open environment where apps are rejected only on technical considerations. The first will only add to confusion. The second might work if the guidelines are explicit enough. The third is the simplest, but involves giving up a lot of control.

My guess is Apple will go for option No. 3. Not right away, but in increments.....

I am not sure that Apple yet sees things this way but I reckon that they will soon have to do so. The second option (issuing clear guidelines as to what is or is not allowed) is going to be much trickier than one might suppose. Let us take the Walmart analogy seriously. Walmart operates supermarkets in the USA and the UK and it naturally sells different magazines and newspapers in those different chains. There is no doubt that the magazines and newspapers that pass as normal in the UK (or in Sweden or in the Netherlands) would be quite unacceptable in the USA. Is Apple going to develop different product ranges for these different markets? Is Apple willing to make the Sun available in the UK (its the biggest selling news tabloid, but with more nudity than is acceptable to Apple, or the US popular newspaper market)? But to ban it in the US? Will Apple really wish to maintain different cultural offerings for each regional market in which it operates? What about expatriates, will the Sun be purchasable by the Cupertino resident who has a UK iTunes account and credit card? Will there be a Saudi option as well as a mid-Western option, perhaps a Californian level of permissibility a bit lower (higher) than that for Arkansas? Once Apple starts looking at the detail of the discriminations that would be needed to service cultural and religious sensitivities in different parts of the world, I suspect that they will hastily withdraw to the high-ground of technical neutrality. "We are only a platform provider. Not an arbiter of morality."

But there is an even trickier problem for Apple to think about if they maintain this detailed control and vetting of content. Apple to its credit supports Kindle and Kobo and other generic ebook reader apps for free. Apple is most unlikely to withdraw its support for these rival ebook systems (and it would attract a great deal of hostile attention, perhaps from regulators, were it now to do so). These apps are freely available from the Apple iTunes store (perhaps with an age-related warning) but they can of course be used any ebooks from Amazon or Kobo (was Shortcovers) that the user cares to purchase direct from those suppliers. If the best, but steamy, edition of the The Perfumed Garden is available as an ebook to the Amazon Kindle user, it can be read on the iPad and the iPhone. These Amazon-sponsored ebooks are not being sold through the iPad or the iTunes store, but they are being read on the device. Is it conceivable that Apple is going to prevent Signet from selling its edition of The Perfumed Garden through iTunes whilst the very same translation by Sir Richard Burton can be purchased from Amazon? If Apple were to be seen to be banning books from the iBooks store which are widely available from other ebook retailers it would be grievously undermining its position as a book retailer. Its not taking a commission from the Perfumed Garden, but it is close to encouraging its loyal customers to shop elsewhere. The more books that will not be stocked the more customers will think to shop elsewhere. This reluctance is also damaging the publisher who is, on all the other titles sold through iTunes, paying Apple a 30% royalty (or agency commission). So far from being a 'walled garden' the iPad/iTunes system that enables users to deploy banned ebooks purchased from other suppliers is on the way to becoming a tunnel to the rival plantation. I reckon that Kevin Kelleher hits the nail on the head when he says "Apple can control its platform on a small scale, but as success expands that platform domain, the company’s control inevitably breaks down as it starts to create more problems than it solves." (GigaOm) These are problems for Apple itself.

Index on Censorship and World Press Freedom Day

Two weeks ago Exact Editions working with Sage launched an iPhone/iPad app for Index on Censorship. The free app gives access to a good sample of the magazine to its subscribers. Yesterday, in support of World Press Freedom day, Sage announced a week long reduction in the price of the paid for app (which gives the user a 30 day subscription). Until Sunday it is available for 57p/99c. And subscribers to the paid for app not only get access to the current issue in full, they can also consult back issues and search the archive. The press release about the offer notes that the current issue has several articles with a strong technology component (Google, China, Blogging in Egypt):

The March 2010 issue, 'Brave New Words', focuses on the development of technologies, from CCTV to Twitter, and the implications these have for free speech. "Index on Censorship plays a major role in protecting and promoting free expression, as does World Press Freedom Day," said Clive Parry, Global Marketing Director, SAGE. "This discounted offer with Exact Editions makes it easy for individuals to subscribe to Index online."

Here is a short video (70 seconds) showing the app in use on an iPad.




The video shows how fast the iPad is to load pages and to whizz through them using the Exact Editions page-flow tool. But the table of contents is also important for finding your way through a magazine such as Index on Censorship (nearly 200 pages).

Pageflow is also very helpful as a way of navigating fast on the iPhone.

The Periodical Publishers Association Conference 2010

We were not able to go to this year's PPA Conference. We had better go next year. We have not gone in previous years, because it was two days and (to speak frankly) seemed to be over-full of over-complacent industry, grandees and non-experts. To judge by the tweets emerging from this year's shorter, one day conference, it was a more realistic and a more grounded get-together. I am also judging, perhaps unfairly from some short reports on the goings-on at Mediaweek. The reports suggest that timely and pressing issues were being addressed.

Here are some good signs: the industry grandees included Tim Brooks (Guardian ex-IPC), Stevie Spring (Future), and Evelyn Webster (IPC) and although these are all genuine magazine grandees, part of the good and the great of the sector, I would put them at the 'grounded' end of the 'waffle/'hands-on' spectrum. Their reported remarks show this: Stevie Spring "some things are much, much, much better done digitally than they are in print". Tim Brooks noted that the industry's ad share had slipped by17% since 2007. He predicts: "in future there will be fewer magazines" and the brands that survive will be multi-platform.

Three more good signs from the conference: (1) there was a good stream of active tweeting; (2) timely and important issues were being discussed in the technology streams, especially the iPad and User-Generated Content furthermore a senior Facebook executive had been invited to join a panel; (3) the overall tenor of the proceedings seems to have been that the industry knows that it faces plenty of challenges.

There was clearly some discussion of the iPad, but perhaps with insufficient enthusiasm. Juan Senor gave the opening introductory session on "Inspiration and Innovation", but the Mediaweek report makes him sound at best lukewarm:

He admitted the iPad was a "fascinating and revolutionary product" but warned the way it is approaching publishers in these embyronic days should sound alarm bells.

"Apple will keep pricing control and consumer data, which is the basis of marketing," he said.

He told publishers to negotiate strongly with Apple to make expanding onto the iPad platform viable. Mediaweek

Perhaps Mr Senor is being inaccurately reported by Mediaweek, but these do not seem to be particularly insightful comments (and the headline taken from his remarks is particularly inane 'Apple expect to make money off our backs' -- Apple's distribution arrangements are not unreasonable and of course Apple expects to make money from iTunes!). There is no doubt that Apple is doing a lot to maintain pricing control and to retain all consumer data, but keep it in mind that the Apple system allows publishers to distribute stuff for free to Apple customers, there is no charge for that. This is a service which costs Apple something. Also, remember that for all its 'control' Apple is not telling magazine publishers at what price they must sell their magazine apps (the app regime is less controlling than the music store in iTunes). The control extends to setting pricing levels and 'regions' in the global market. Not unreasonable matters for Apple to regulate. Furthermore publishers who care about getting customer data are much better advised to look for ways in which they can even so participate in the Apple eco-system to develop their own products and services than to spend time 'negotiating' with Apple to change course. Apple will change its course when publishers can demonstrate that there are better ways of serving the customers. Futhermore there is a lot that can be done with the Apple solutions which enables publishers to extend and develop their existing relationship with their customers and to retain and collect their own data. Publishers should not be encouraged to bleat but to experiment and offer solutions.

Another speaker (Gavin Dutch) is reported as being bearish on the prospects of publishers making significant revenues from paid for apps and in-app purchasing. To this I would respond, that very few (pitifully few) magazine publishers have yet developed or experimented with in-app purchasing. A few of the publishers who partner with Exact Editions have done so, and all the magazines that we have launched with in-app purchasing have had a promising start. Of course, the revenues collected in the first month or two are small, but they are highly encouraging. Users are trialling magazines with our freemium apps and a proportion are upgrading to the full subscription. Readers are finding the free apps. Consumers who have tried the samples provided are willing to purchase full magazine subscriptions with in-app purchasing. The system really works. It now needs to be grown with a lot more magazines. The iPad really is changing the digital landscape for magazine publishers and they need to get moving if they want to benefit from the shift in consumer attention.

There is a change afoot, the iPad and Facebook are at the cutting edge of the changes affecting the industry and it is very exciting.... Stevie Smith is quoted as noting: "all of the changes that are driven by technology are feeding back into changes in consumer behaviour at a speed that we've never seen before........The good news is that the next three years are going to be better than the last three."

New Models for Digital Advertising

In the last couple of weeks we have seen two new models for digital advertising proposed. First Steve Jobs announced iAds as part of the introduction for iPhone O/S 4.0. Second, Twitter announced their new concept of Promoted Tweets which have begun to be rolled out from major brands such as Starbucks, Red Bull and Virgin America. The Apple ads will be 'rich media' ads, using HTML5 (of course not Flash) but they will not be web-based, they will be app-based, and their announcement keyed in with the development that will allow apps to be nested within each other in the O/S 4.0. They also look as though they may be require quite complex and high-end design and animation skills. In his presentation Steve Jobs estimates that Apple could be generating 1 Billion iAd slots per day in six months time. That is a big opportunity.

What interests me about these new proposals for streams of digital advertising is that they promise to be quite distinct and different models for digital advertising. Sure they will be competing with Google in the advertising space but they will be competing by offering a completely different form of digital advertising. They are quintessentially forms of advertising which piggy-back on the environment of their hosts: Apple and Twitter. Apple have proposed an app-based form of advertising, and perhaps to no one's surprise Twitter have proposed a form of Tweet-based advertising. Whereas Google of course has its strongest suite in search-based advertising. Apple and Twitter are both, in their different ways, targeting the type of brand-based advertising which is where Google is least effective and dominant. They are targeting the big-budget, high impact advertising which has been the strong point of magazine and TV advertising for decades. Use of the Twitter and Apple eco-systems may be helpful to digital magazine publishers in the medium term. All publishers and advertisers will hope for more competition for Google in the distribution of digital ad-spending, but the print and TV publishers are losing control. There will be significant cuts for Apple and Twitter.

Notice also, that the Apple system is significantly less web-based than we have come to expect. The ads that are delivered are not web pages. Although the ads are built with HTML5 (big chuckle from the audience when Steve Jobs said that, sensing another jab at Flash) the advertisements are entirely based on inApp deployment. They are seen on the iPhone, the iPad etc within applications. Not on web pages. It would be no big deal to deliver these HTML5 also on the open web, but Apple have not yet said whether they will do that (nor have Apple said whether or not they will deliver iBooks on open web pages. My guess is that they will not). Apple is clearly building an Apple-only, Apple-closed system for advertising (see Frédéric Filoux and Peter Kafka). There is no point in blaming Apple for this closed approach. Google also is pretty closed when it comes to the workings of its advertising system. But the choice of 'digital advertising' as the topic headline for this blog is deliberate. Digital advertising systems are increasingly using the web and open web standards only to the extent that it really helps the technology platform to gain acceptance. We will see more proprietary advertising systems developed in the years to come (watch out for Facebook).

Could the same thing happen to books, magazines and newspapers that is now happening to advertising? Could we be moving towards a world in which there are multiple versions of mostly incompatible digital books, targeted or delivered at different types of digital distribution: ebooks for Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Sony, appbooks for Apple, slightly different Flash appbooks for Android, Google Books for Google Editions, Hulu-magazines for digital TV, Nintendo books and comics for game consols? Or will publishers, authors and readers be looking for a distribution model in which the same book, magazines and newspapers can be offered through all these platforms? Fragmentation and differentiation look to be the stronger tendency at the moment, but a move towards interoperability would be good. That should come if delivery via the web remains at the core of the service provided.

Magazine Apps on the iPad

Exact Editions had 11 iPad apps live when the launch arrived. There are some more titles working their way through the development and approval process. Our first office iPad arrived on Tuesday and it is an enthralling device. It has been passed around, much admired and caressed into action. Everyone who sees it, finds the speed and sharpness surprising and attractive. Here it is showcasing Athletics Weekly:



We have also been looking closely at other magazine apps. Brad Colbow produced an interesting overview of three of the front runners: Time, GQ and Popular Science.

iPad Magazine Art Direction from Brad Colbow on Vimeo.

Popular Science seems to have won most acclaim and is Brad's favourite. But we are struck by the way all three of the magazines in the Colbow selection use the convention of moving through the magazine horizontally and moving through the story (or the individual article) vertically. This meme, of the magazine issue as a matrix, has been kicking around for some months and I wonder why it has gained so much traction. I think the answer maybe concealed in the title to Colbow's video essay, too much input to these early apps has been coming from Art Directors. More should be coming from Circulation Directors.

Steve Smith at Mobile Insider makes the point succinctly:

The basic problem here is obvious. No one wants to learn a different interface with every magazine brand. As my stepfather said when he saw all of this, "I already know how to read a magazine. I just pick it up." I am not sure we want our periodicals to have to come with instructions.

Khoi Vinh, at Subtraction, makes a similar point in rather stronger fashion about the widely admired Popular Science app:

That repetitiveness does little to counter the general feeling of placelessness throughout the app; the navigation is well-meaning but fussy at best, but honestly much closer to incompetent. (As we get out of the gate with iPad publishing, can we just very quickly impose a moratorium on displaying instructions on how to use reading interfaces? If you need to explain it, we should all agree, then the design isn’t doing its job.) I got lost and frustrated repeatedly, and then I got bored.

Magazines need to remember (and the Circulation Director needs to remind the Art Director) that one of their great advantages in moving to a more exciting digital role is that everyone knows how to read a magazine. So anyone should immediately understand how to read a magazine app. That is the goal. Placelessness is a great term to describe the potential absence of direction that a user can experience on the iPad or the iPhone. Magazines can solve this problem by re-using and re-presenting their page based organisation which readers understand so well and so intuitively. We think our page flow element serves this prior understanding excellently on the iPad. The iPad is really fast so you can really skim through thumbnails at blinding speed, whilst still being anchored in the page that your reading has reached. Placelessness is defeated when can view the magazine in two distinct ways simultaneously. It really is better even than the iPhone:

Ada Lovelace day

Today is Ada Lovelace day, in which we are celebrating women in science and computing.

Daryl Rayner is the Exact Editions Managing Director and one of the three founders of the company (with Tim Bruce and me, Adam Hodgkin). Daryl has a wonderful record of persistently and courteously creating business on the web, at Exact Editions and in her previous career. In fact she was in the 1990's the first web marketing manager for Nature, the leading scientific research magazine. Ada would have approved of that. Because of her name, Daryl is in email correspondence quite often mistaken for a man. That doesn't faze her, in fact Daryl is not easily fazed. Here she is looking at her iPhone in the British Library (where as it happens much of Ada Lovelace's correspondence is to be found).
























Perhaps Daryl is checking out one of the Exact Editions apps. I think Ada Lovelace would have been delighted with apps......