MagBlog

I have reproduced here an interesting piece by Steve Smith, published by Mobile Insider. This long extract omits the aged-parent-pushing-GPS-toys intro and gets to the heart of competing technological solutions to what may be non-existent problems.

Key question: "Am I really getting added value from these things, or are the newspaper and magazine publishers fantasizing that I will embrace a gadget whose main purpose is to make their business models survive? "

It is gadget lust all over again. There seems to be that sentiment abroad again that consumers will embrace a new range of tech gadgets aimed at particular aspects of life. Obviously, GPS is a hit because it does integrate so nicely with existing auto technology. But pie-in-the-sky projections around new set top boxes and Internet-connected TVs are crowding the trades this season, for instance.

And now we get a wave of enthusiasm over eReaders. Amazon, in their usual coy fashion, is alluding to record sales of the Kindle  -- even though they still won't tell us how many actually are being sold. Two Forrester analysts predicted an explosion of reader gadgets in 2010, with Barnes & Noble carving out some market share from Amazon and Sony. Another analyst claims that by 2012 color tablet readers will be in the market and the technology will get down to $50-$60 price points by 2020. We understand that several print companies like Time Inc. and Hearst are developing both software and hardware strategies that will vault over the current hobbled e-ink technologies with something that better serves newspaper and magazine presentation. And yesterday Sports Illustrated editors were giving many of us in the press demos of a digital version of SI designed for touch-enabled tablet devices that aren't even in the market yet.

All of this eReader self-love is going on in the midst of the worst recession in half a century. Who is going to buy this stuff, and when? My guess is that we will get a 2010 with a ton of R&D, press releases out the wazoo, and even more attempts by the key players to convince us how popular the gadgets are without actually enumerating how many they are selling. Watching Jeff Bezos on stage playing with ebook sales percentages to reflect Kindle popularity is now more comical than a fine Cirque de Soleil contortion routine.  

My main skepticism over the eReader is that it is trying to be an in-between device -- a tough sell when user habits seem to have coalesced around cell phones and laptops. The eReaders I have seen, and the larger ones print publishers are gushing over, lack the portability and voice connectivity of a smart phone and lack the broad functionality of a laptop. Arguably, the netbook was able to slip into the picture in the last year because it does indeed have the functionality of a laptop in a smaller size. But in most cases an eReader now is poised to add to the clutter, even as it sells itself with efficiency.

I am less concerned about the abstract rationale of these gadgets than the practical matter of how they fit into established habits and the practicality of everyday life. Yes a Kindle can carry thousands of books and newspapers and magazines, but the reality is that most of us usually only carry one of those things at a time. And then once we get to the pricier, larger screen tablets Apple and others may launch next year, the question is even bigger. Am I really getting added value from these things, or are the newspaper and magazine publishers fantasizing that I will embrace a gadget whose main purpose is to make their business models survive? 

The people in the industry I have grilled with this problem seem to think that convergence will solve it. Almost everyone agrees that people are not likely to cart around three devices, so an in-between device will have to successfully cannibalize the functionality of a laptop or a phone or both. Despite the revival of touch screens on smart phones, the dismal failure of the Tablet PC demonstrated just how important a hard keyboard is to anyone trying to do a range of tasks on a computer.

As for embedding voice communications into a tablet-sized device - that may be fine for the midtown Manhattan publishing execs who live out of their leather portfolios and day books. But there is no way in hell that even a sliver of America at large is going to allow voice functionality to move from something that fits in their pocket to something that has to fit in a pocketbook.

Which is not to say there won't be a place for some of these devices. I already see Kindles out in the wild, and most of the people I ask tell me they absolutely love the device and take it everywhere. But they also agree they are carrying three devices now, and I am not sure that situation can stand with most of us.

And as these devices get larger and more colorful -- more to accommodate publishers than us -- the challenge of adding another device climbs. And many more people I know are getting more accustomed to absorbing media via their smart phones than any of us expected. EBooks seem to be doing surprisingly well on the iPhone, and the recent mobile-ready app version of GQ magazine was pretty compelling. As eReaders try to find their in-between niche, the laptop market is intruding from above with more portable and functional Netbooks while the smart phones are pressing from below with better content experiences.

I don't know where this heads, but I do know that eReaders face some fundamental challenges that should make hardware makers and publishing cheerleaders ask themselves some hard questions first. Are they developing these platforms for consumers or for themselves?

But who is to say yet what gadgets ultimately catch on. Tech love is in the air.

 You can read it complete with mom-based top and tail here.

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• Time pops tablets to take magazines electronic (theregister.co.uk)
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• Time Inc's "Manhattan Project" Is A Tablet Magazine (techcrunch.com)

Labels: amazon, Apple, Condé Nast Publications, digital magazines, electronic magazines, iTunes iPhone

Consider the following, taken from a feature about online shopping by David Teather in yesterday's Guardian:

The likes of Amazon and Asos are facing increasing competition from the high-street brands, many of which are beginning to take online retailing more seriously. When John Lewis launched its website in 2001, the aim was to eventually generate the sales of a medium-sized store – about £100m. Last year they reached £327m, outstripping its most successful department store and accounting for about 13% of the John Lewis division of the group. Online sales continue to grow at about 30% a year.

Robin Terrell, managing director of John Lewis Direct, says the site has become increasingly important as around half of all shopping visits start with the website, as customers research prices and range. "The website now represents the brand. People are researching more and more online before visiting the shop and we have really been working to join up the customer experience."

When I read it a little bell went off and I thought, "What if you could forge a hypothesis for magazines based on that?"

So here it is.

Print magazines represent the bricks-and-mortar retailer, the keeper of the brand name. The online sites of those magazines represent the retail website, where people visit to do their research. If they like what they find they may then visit the material artefact (the print magazine).

Hmm, doesn't look quite so good out of my head and into type but there's something there. It's not a Murdochian (senior or junior) re-education programme, quite.

If it is true that people will visit a retail website before they make the further, and far more complicated and time-consuming, effort to visit the physical shop, then why should it not be possible, given the appropriate incentives and enticements, to do the same with a magazine in online and print forms?

The biggest question is why – if it is true – people do this? Why not just buy online if you can? Does John Lewis keep some things back for the shop only? Maybe they like visiting the shop? Maybe it becomes part of a larger "emotional" experience?

If we can find some answers to that (and I bet someone has them) perhaps we can forge some new hypotheses. We should certainly remember that print-on-paper has some advantages and pleasures to offer that online will never replicate, and play those up (yes, haptics again, but also lovely big pictures rich in detail, intricate graphics, ultimate put-down-ability).

Or perhaps I'm just suggesting the freemium business model, with online as the free product and print as the premium product.

But it's important to think about that relationship, and worth trying to find models elsewhere that can be adapted to the particular circumstances of magazines.

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• "Microsoft Offers To Pay News Publishers To Pull Content From Google" and related posts (paidcontent.org)

Labels: amazon, Chris Anderson, digital magazines, Free, haptics, political economy, print magazines

I've got a twittersearch on the word "magazines" on one of my Netvibes pages and it's constantly updating with a varied stream of tweets; people comment freely on titles, individual features or general stuff about how they use magazines (both education and relaxation are popular).

This just popped up about Amazon (USA) offering discounted mags

http://www.nicolesnickels.net/2009/07/cheap-magazines-at-amazon.html

So ... distribution = WH Smith, supermarkets and now the mighty 'Zon.

Image via Wikipedia

UPDATE: Here's another fab link from the same feed. Power to publish to the people, to misquote Wolfie Smith: http://ow.ly/hdER

Labels: amazon, digital magazines, distribution, magazines, print magazines, Twitter, web 2.0

Perhaps the iTunes/Amazon marketplace (posts passim) isn't such a straightforward idea after all. A gatekeeper is a gatekeeper.

So the game is the same today as it was in the old days. The only question is where the money will end up. In the analog world the lion's share of the money ended up in the hands of big, bad media barons. This time around, the geeks in Silicon Valley are pocketing all the dough. Ironically enough, they present themselves as a bunch of pious, sweet-natured nerds who aren't doing this for the money—they're all about making the world a better place. The truth is that when it comes to exploitation, the new guys make those old media barons look like a bunch of amateurs.

Labels: amazon, digital magazines, digital revenue, distribution, electronic magazines, iTunes

A little snippet from a bigger piece by Steve Outing on the American Editor & Publisher site. He's discussing ways to get people to pay for digital content:

Yet another model is to sell a custom news phone app rather than give it away. USA Today, for instance, offers a free downloadable news app for the iPhone, which offers a superior reading interface than USA Today's mobile Web site, and access to content is free using the app. Meanwhile, People Magazine has its own iPhone app called "People Celebrity News Tracker," but charges $1.99 for you to download it. Content is updated regularly with "instant" celebrity news and alerts from People.com, including lots of photos. There's no monthly fee for the content on the People app, which is supported by advertising, but the one-time extra $1.99 purchase price can create another nice revenue stream, especially for a publisher with a large audience.

As you can tell from the first three words, he looks at various scenarios, including using Amazon and Paypal. Worth reading.

Labels: amazon, digital magazines, digital revenue, electronic magazines, iTunes iPhone, subscriptions

The iTunes for newspaper publishing idea is taken up by David Carr in the New York Times.

The only trouble is, the examples he cites as successful examples of getting readers to pay for content involve either magazines or a highly specialised newspaper:

Other print publications have looked directly to the reader to help bear that cost. Cook’s Illustrated is a delightfully retro magazine that takes a modern approach to food. And its approach to publishing? Cook’s Illustrated takes no ads and charges for access to the databank of recipes. Apart from its 900,000 print subscribers, in addition to 100,000 or so newsstand buyers, the company has 260,000 digital subscribers at a cost of $35 a year, and that group grew by 30 percent in 2008.

I get Cook’s Illustrated at the office and don’t have access to the deep digital archive of recipes, but I’ve thought about how handy online access would be in the kitchen. Similarly, I subscribe to Consumer Reports because it has valuable content that I can’t get anywhere else. Both Cook’s and Consumer Reports have set a trend in part because they had no ads to begin with, so turning toward their readers to pay for operations and future growth made sense.

But I also subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, one of the few pay newspaper sites. I could cobble together a free version — you can get behind the firewall at The Journal if you go through Google News and know exactly what you are looking for — but I chose to pay the freight. To me, paying for content I want online is not all that different from paying for a DropSend account, which allows me to send and receive large files: the paid option outweighs the hassle and time of the free ones.

David Lazarus follows a similar line of thought in his LA Times article.

Luckily we in the UK have Martin Belam's Currybetdotnet to put a sensible gloss on their arguments.

Yes, an iTunes/Amazon Marketplace idea is worth pursuing - but newspapers, on the whole, are not differentiated enough to take advantage of an open marketplace. Somehow, that idea is almost as ironically funny as Max Hastings (former editor of the Daily Torygraph) writing about the effects of unregulated financial markets on the value of his pension.

I especially love this sentence: "Even back in the 1980s, this notion rang alarm bells with some of us." Well, Max, you didn't do much about it, did you?

Labels: aggregation, amazon, digital revenue, iTunes, magazines, newspapers

If screen size is the key to creating a satisfactory "magazine" experience on a handheld digital device (hdd), something the size of a Kindle should be better than an iPhone – and something more like a sheet of A4 better again. This is what Hearst, the American publisher of magazines and newspapers, seems to be hoping, according to various reports (well summarised on this post from CNet).

Implementing a tied-in device could also give Hearst the opportunity to try an iTunes like subscription service, and such a service could be extended to include other publishers, thus creating the Amazon-style service proposed in previous posts.

Fortune magazine's first report of the Hearst hdd
The Wall Street Journal on Hearst's plans to charge for content

Labels: amazon, digital magazines, digital revenue, electronic magazines, haptics, Hearst, iTunes, magazines, print magazines, subscriptions

Ideas for new business models for the media are springing up all over (perhaps the current general economic climate is encouraging creative thought). I have suggested in earlier posts that Amazon might provide some ideas; here are a couple of pieces that consider the iTunes model for news operations:

David Carr in the New York Times

Paul Bradshaw's response to the above

Labels: amazon, David Carr, iTunes, New York Times, Paul Bradshaw

Once upon a time Johannes Gutenberg invented (or re-invented, or perfected) the printing press with moveable type. For a long, long time the press he designed and made was THE printing technology.
Then other people modified and improved the press and the type, used new materials that made it all more durable or easier to use or more efficient, and their presses and type expanded the market.
Then a clever person (or people) devised a way to separate type and press, so that the text could be set up separately and combined with the press in a different way that was more efficient again. As Adam Smith would have predicted, this increased output further. It also allowed presses to become faster, driven first by steam and then by electricity.
Then the mechanical typesetting systems were replaced by electronic ones, and then the electronic versions were made simpler and easier and this process collided with the miniaturisation of computers, leading to desktop publishing that put the compositors and proof-readers out of business.
And now, as Marshall McLuhan would have predicted, the press has become a fully electric artefact, incorporated invisibly into the code that drives a computer and its screen.
At each stage there was upheaval and realignment; people who did old things had to learn to do new things or be pushed aside by the inevitability of technological progress.
And at each stage, as old business opportunities and models died away, new ones took their place.
The people who made the real money were those who owned the means of production, as Karl Marx would have predicted, by which they could introduce those with something to sell to those who had the money to buy – and charge both sides. The bait was "journalism" (ie stories) and they needed to employ other people to do the actual production (printers, compositors, journalists), so the money got spread around a bit, and they continued to grow partly by taking over or driving out smaller, less capitalised businesses.
We can see that something major is happening now, and even though we can't see the outcome, the process follows a similar pattern.
A clever man (or men, or people) invents the electronic press (internet protocol), someone invents a way to both locate and distribute the products of that press (search: AltaVista, Dogpile), then someone else invents a better, more efficient, way (Google). So far, the people who have made a bit of money out of this are the equipment suppliers (routers, servers, personal computers) and the businesses that have managed to combine search and advertising (basically Google to date).
At the same time, because the means of production have become much more widely available, capital and the accumulation of income have also become more widely (and thinly) distributed.
The question for journalists then becomes either "Who will pay me to produce?" or "How can I tap into the current streams of revenue?"
(This leaves aside questions about the role of the press as the Fourth Estate, and editorial workers as Gate Keepers and all that – perhaps those roles are relativistic.)
If the previous patterns show us anything useful, it is that someone will invent a new way of harvesting the potential – but also that many new ways of harvesting will be discovered. And if the shitstream (Copyright: Dr Daniel Meadows) of the internet tells us anything it is that people still love stories, telling their own and consuming other people's.
So here's one thing for all journalists to cling on to: Find the best stories.

Labels: amazon, audience, Cardiff Journalism School, community, development, digital revenue, media jobs, online, print journalism, readertorial, web 2.0

After publishing the previous post I came across a piece by Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0 which seems relevant - although some of the comments go into unrelated areas.

Labels: amazon, development, digital revenue

Reading a Guardian Money article about the online retailer triggered a question: what would be the media equivalent of Amazon?
This was the specific paragraph that got me thinking:

It suggests that shopping around the net in the traditional way - searching out the cheapest price for each individual purchase at price comparison websites and then ordering from a raft of different retailers - may now be redundant. Many online competitors have decided that if you can't beat them, join them. Amazon invites other retailers into its "marketplace", allowing it to offer prices that, even if they are not sourced by Amazon itself, are some of the cheapest on the net. Rival Pixmania.com now sells through Amazon, while Marks & Spencer and Mothercare have subcontracted Amazon to power their own websites.

So far I have not developed the thought at all but I can say that the equivalent would not be like a "portal", even though the principle could be interpreted that way. It's probably closer to Sky or Freeview, a service that offers many other services; a one-stop point of choice.

Perhaps it's yet another of Jeff Jarvis's "we'll know what to call it when we see it" phenomena.

(Uh oh - when finding the link to Jarvis's piece I also found this about a new aggregator-portal: Jarvis seems to be involved with the project in some way too.)

Labels: aggregation, aggregator, amazon, development, digital revenue, Guardian Money, jeff jarvis, mashup, online