Entries tagged with “magazines” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers
Mac Slocum
May 5, 2009
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The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle -- rumored to make its debut tomorrow -- will be partially targeted at the textbook market:
Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.
There's also considerable discussion about the impact a large-form Kindle could have on newspapers and magazines. Large-form e-readers from Plastic Logic (due in 2010) and iRex (currently avaialble) are aimed at the same business/media-consumer market.
We'll know full details after tomorrow's Amazon press conference.
Hearst Gets Into the E-Reader Game
Mac Slocum
February 27, 2009
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Hearst Corp. is developing its own wireless e-reader that may debut this year. From Fortune:
According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.
The larger screen size will put the Hearst reader in the same class as devices from Plastic Logic and iRex.
Fortune says Hearst isn't discussing product specs, but the company has a longtime association with E Ink. Last September, Esquire published the first E Ink magazine cover.
Magazines Now in Google Book Search
Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008
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Google is adding back issues of magazines to its Book Search index. From the Official Google Blog:
Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet.
Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see more and more magazines appear in Google Book Search results. Eventually, we'll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results, so you may begin finding magazines you didn't even know you were looking for. For now you can restrict your search to magazines we've scanned by trying an advanced search.
The Associated Press says Google will share advertising revenue generated by Google ads with magazine publishers. Embedded advertising from the original print editions remains intact as part of the overall archive. It'll be interesting to see how Google and magazine publishers coordinate on ads if/when publishers seed current editions into the service.
In recent months, Google also released a similar newspaper archive through Google News and a large collection of photos from LIFE magazine.
PC Magazine Goes Web Only
Peter Brantley
November 19, 2008
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PC Magazine's January 2009 edition will mark the end of its print run. A reduced staff will focus on the PCMag Digital Network. From paidContent.org:
The magazine, which was started in 1982, has a storied history, but its print base eroded over the years as its core brand of journalism -- news you can use while shopping for computers -- moved online. It cut back from bi-weekly to monthly earlier this year. PCMag, which literally invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews, at one time during the '80s averaged about 400 pages an issue, with some issues breaking the 500- and even the 600-page marks, according to this Wikipedia history.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball says this is likely an ever more frequent transition as the recession deepens. Both U.S. News & World Report and the Christian Science Monitor have announced plans in recent weeks to end/reduce print editions.
Edit - 11/20/08 - John Gruber's name was misspelled in the original post.
The Barack SlideShow
Peter Brantley
November 8, 2008
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President-elect Obama has been very vocal about embracing an open government policy, and so far the signs are promising. See, for example, this page linked off Obama's public transition Web site, which lists resources reserved for incoming presidential teams -- it is both interesting and amusing to read texts discussing these essential change-of-governance issues along the lines of "Helping make your transition into government as easy as possible." It's historically rare to get a glimpse of national government continuance aided, as it must inevitably be, by the institutional bureaucracy's production of documents akin to a special issue of Make on "How to be President of the United States."
Equally interesting is the set of images of Barack Obama and his family backstage on election night, and proceeding into his acceptance speech. What's notable is that the images are fairly informal -- and they are on Flickr. This kind of photostream -- not unique in itself -- would previously, a generation ago, have been highly curated, entitled "The new presidential family waits for news," and published the week following in Life or Look magazine. However, the Obama pictures appear less curated (or at least have that air), were published nearly instantly, and do not involve the mediation of traditional media. In fact, whether these are eventually printed or not as official administration photos is secondary, because they are available freely and publicly online.
Without benefit of any mainstream media publicity, the pictures were so popular that they brought down Flickr. Thus, this is an event worthy of notice: an expectation of democratic transparency in a federal government combined with a mere decade plus-old publishing infrastructure jointly craft a community around the globe. In a sense, the limited access of the photographer on that election night make this a callback to the effect of TV in the 1950s, when monolithic media broadcast a culture that was shared and discussed in the conversations of millions. Yet the means of this publication, and the premise of sharing, are profoundly different.
I think there's one other interesting point to note. Up until this presidency, documentation such as the photoshoot routinely went en masse into archives, where it later established the basis for the Presidential Library. However, existing Presidential Libraries such as LBJ's or JFK's are faced with the challenge of reaching back into their collections to digitize materials and make them widely accessible, and they face significant policy, logistical, and funding challenges in doing so. The Obama administration will be publishing a great deal of material outbound -- a digitally native presidency -- at a magnitude far beyond any of its predecessors.
When archives are built incrementally on top of access, instead of access being born of hard labor from accumulated storage, the nature of the archive is transformed. The possibilities for an Obama Presidential Library -- built from today and onwards -- are transformative.
U.S. News Shifts Focus to Digital
Mac Slocum
November 5, 2008
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U.S. News & World Report is pulling the plug on its regular print edition. From the Washington Post:
The financially struggling magazine, which cut back to biweekly publication earlier this year, now plans to reinvent itself on the Web. While it will publish one print edition each month, according to staffers briefed on the decision, these will be entirely devoted to consumer guides -- such as its annual rankings of colleges and hospitals -- and contain no other news.
Last week, the Christian Science Monitor announced that its daily print edition will be replaced by Web coverage in April 2009.
Newsweek Repackaging Candidate Coverage for Kindle Bios
Mac Slocum
October 14, 2008
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Newsweek will aggregate its coverage of John McCain, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden into four Kindle-only biographies. From Amazon's Kindle Blog:
The book-length biographies contain archived reporting and commentary from Newsweek's coverage of the candidates from the magazine's award-winning political correspondents. Each biography takes readers through the lives of the candidates, from their personal beginnings to their political breakthroughs.
The $9.99 books will be available for download tomorrow. Amazon previously released Kindle biographies of both prospective first ladies.
When it Comes to Search, How Low Can You Go?
Brian O'Leary
October 13, 2008
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I came back mid-week from the American Magazine Conference, where I heard Paul Saffo talk about the future of content, including what search tool might eventually trump Google. He introduced the term "quantum of search" - the lowest level or most granular search possible - and used it to say that the future of search will depend on your ability to return the precise results needed for each and every search.
While Saffo counseled editors and publishers in attendance to develop the lowest level "quantum of search" possible, he stopped short of saying something that is in my mind directly related: publishers have a tremendous advantage in defining what good search looks like.
Figuring out how to accurately respond to a narrow search requires intimate knowledge of both content and market. Search informs an increasingly niche-driven publishing model, a prediction that Mike Shatzkin and others have advanced, but good search is more than just an alogorithm. As we migrate to a more richly defined, "semantic" web, content that has been given meaning through well-designed editorial processes will not only be more easily sold and repurposed; it will be more easily found by the people who are most likely to benefit from finding it.
So, publishers worried about a content glut have at least two opportunities to define themselves and redefine their role. The first opportunity comes in organizing around audience-valued content niches. Generally, lawyers don't go to Google to find legal information, and in a more niche-driven world, vertical content plays will be increasingly preferred. Even if I try Google first, the trusted vertical niche with deep content should be high on the list of returned links. As publishers, we need to make sure we are there.
The second opportunity comes in using the tools we are examining here - structured content, appropriately tagged - to capture the editorial insight and rich meaning that is lost when we render content to print books and magazines. Investing now to keep that meaning and provide it in a form linked to the content will help publishers demonstrate primacy in defining Saffo's "quantum of search." The discipline of XML-driven workflows can capture that insight.
MyGazines Settles With Magazine Publishers
Mac Slocum
October 3, 2008
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Mygazines, a Napster-esque magazine service, has reached a settlement with a host of magazine publishers. From Folio:
... according to a source with knowledge of the terms, confirmed later by additional court documents, Mygazines has agreed to remove all of the publishers' copyrighted content, review and screen uploads for any content not authorized by the publishers and open a channel to allow Mygazines to be notified when copyrighted content appears.
The service is still open, but Folio says many of the titles present at the site's launch are no longer available. Mygazines is promoting a vague Publisher Program that offers demographics and revenue sharing.
News Roundup: Customizable Magazine Service Launches, French E-Reader Includes Subscriptions, Library Tags Online-Offline Recommendations
Mac Slocum
September 19, 2008
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Maghound Customizable Magazine Service Launches
Maghound, a customizable magazine service from Time Inc., is now available. From Folio:
The membership pricing is tiered-- three titles for $4.95 a month, five titles for $7.95, seven titles for $9.95, and $1 per title for eight titles or more. Memberships can be entirely managed online, as well as by email and phone, from changing magazine title selections to updating personal information and placing magazine delivery on hold for a temporary period. (Continue reading)
France Telecom E-Reader Includes Subscriptions
France Telecom's Read & Go trial service bundles e-reader hardware with a subscription to mobile content. From BusinessWeek:
The trial of the prototype will wrap up this month, and by 2009, France Telecom aims to start distributing the Read & Go in conjunction with a subscription-based news service of the same name. For a monthly charge similar to a mobile service plan, customers will receive an over-the-air stream of aggregated content from a wide assortment of information sources. Alongside the articles will be ads that help defray the cost of the service. (Continue reading)
Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations
LibraryTechNZ mentions an interesting engagement of a European library with its community, something that bookstores could also do:
The library at the Hague in the Netherlands has introduced a simple form of tagging in real life. They now have two returns drop-boxes. One is for all items, and the other is for amazing books. Staff take the 'amazing' books and put them in the 'amazing books' display for visitors to browse. But they also tag them 'amazing' in the Library's collection database.
Guccione: Print Downturn Traces Back to Pre-Internet Era
Mac Slocum
September 18, 2008
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Bob Guccione Jr. says the decline in print readership started long before the Internet arrived. From The Huffington Post:
I know the conventional wisdom: that readership is being lost to the speed and efficiency of the Web. But I think the decline of traditional publishing, especially magazines, is more deeply rooted in an arrogance and laziness that goes back 30-plus years. It was once so easy to make money from publishing -- paper, printing and distribution were so cheap and newsstand sales and subscriptions so profitable that advertising revenue was gravy. Then it got more difficult, imperceptibly at first, and gradually more complicated. But, for some reason, whatever other market realities they acknowledged, publishers refused to accept that the perfect magic formula had spoiled.
Maghound Customizable Magazine Service Launches
Mac Slocum
September 17, 2008
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Maghound, a customizable magazine service from Time Inc., is now available. From Folio:
The membership pricing is tiered-- three titles for $4.95 a month, five titles for $7.95, seven titles for $9.95, and $1 per title for eight titles or more. Memberships can be entirely managed online, as well as by email and phone, from changing magazine title selections to updating personal information and placing magazine delivery on hold for a temporary period.
Maghound allows customers to mix and match magazines, but it does not integrate with current subscriptions. From the Maghound FAQ:
Maghound is a completely independent magazine service. Ordering through us does not affect any current subscriptions you may already have. So, if you order a magazine through us that you already subscribe to, you will receive a duplicate copy.
What Does Esquire's E Ink Cover Mean for Print Publishing?
Mac Slocum
September 10, 2008
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I've been noodling on the implications of Esquire's E Ink cover (video available here), and for the life of me I can't see how this is anything more than a small change in a mature technology. It's on par with terrestrial radio's embrace of HD Radio and the music industry's attempts at super-high-fidelity discs (SACD and DVD-A).
Esquire deserves credit for experimenting with E Ink, and I certainly think E Ink itself has a variety of uses (Kindle and Sony Reader owners would agree). But the merging of E Ink displays and traditional print formats garners the same level of interest as National Geographic's hologram covers: neat idea ... nice execution ... but beyond the publicity and potential newsstand sales, what's the long-term point?
Future E Ink screens are projected to be ultra-light, interactive and updateable via Web connections (the Kindle offers a variation on this), but millions of consumers already own mobile devices with the same functionality. Even if these features come to pass, why would I purchase a print-digital hybrid or a separate digital-only device when I have easy access to content on a device I already own?
Bolting digital elements onto an analog medium may yield new ideas -- and there's value in that -- but there's something to be said for adaptation within a format. Radio has survived by adapting its content. Television, newspapers and magazines are in the midst of their own adaptations, and what these formats become will be influenced by the content they deliver, not the technological add-ons they incorporate. E Ink may someday emerge as a vital aspect of print material, but only when it furthers the essential elements of storytelling, information delivery and clear consumer value.
What's your take? Do you see opportunities in the merging of E Ink and print material? Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
August 21, 2008
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On Being Positive in August (Adam Hodgkin, Exact Editions)
Publishers need to consider the possibility that anything that can be published, will certainly be published digitally, and will, in principle, be available anywhere from many devices. That does not mean that it all will be free (why should it mean that?). But it does mean that it will either be available for free (sponsored by advertising) or because someone wants to buy, give, or rent it.
A New Model for News (pdf) (Associated Press Report)
A key question for news planning today is "How can this story be told?" Increasingly, the answer can be found outside traditional storytelling formats. In one popular example in the 2006 U.S. elections, an AP multimedia producer "mashed up" excerpts from political attack ads with a musical mix. The result garnered more than half a million hits after going viral and getting passed along from the customer sites that displayed the piece. (p.61)
Mygazines.com: The Magazine Industry's "Napster Moment"? (Joe Wikert, Publishing 2020)
This is a golden opportunity for the magazine industry to see how a Napster-like platform for periodicals could and should work effectively. Mygazines is essentially doing e-content R&D for the entire magazine industry; I just hope the industry takes the time to study and understand the results before they look to kill the service.
Sports Illustrated Offers Ad Space through Web Bids
Mac Slocum
August 18, 2008
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Sports Illustrated is using a Web-based bidding system to sell advertising across its online and offline properties. From Advertising Age
Executives at the Time Inc. title, the first one to try an online auction, said the move was partly to recruit those advertisers that aren't in close touch with the sales force anyway.
"There are many advertisers out there that would like the opportunity to understand what the Sports Illustrated brand is about, what those offerings are, that we just physically can't get to," said Mark Ford, president of the Sports Illustrated Group.
Ad auctions are already commonplace in Web-based advertising, most notably through Google's AdWords program.
Ad Downturn Forces Fashion Mags to Drop Pages
Mac Slocum
August 11, 2008
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The shaky economy is hitting the normally strong fashion magazine industry. From the Wall Street Journal:
As September issues begin hitting the newsstands, two-thirds of the 16 top fashion and beauty magazines by number of ad pages are smaller than a year ago. W magazine, also published by Condé Nast Publications, a unit of Advance Publications, has 18% fewer advertising pages. Vogue has 674 pages of ads this year, down 7%, while Hearst's Cosmopolitan is six pages, or 3.2%, lighter.
POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization
Mac Slocum
July 28, 2008
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MagCloud is a new print-on-demand (POD) service targeting the magazine industry. In the following Q&A, MagCloud consultant Derek Powazek -- co-founder of JPG Magazine and founder of Fray -- discusses the utility of POD and the evolving relationship between print and Web content.
How did you get involved with MagCloud?
I came into the project over a year ago -- it had been percolating in HP Labs for a long time before that, led by Andy Fitzhugh, Udi Chatow, and Andrew Bolwell. Andy is the one who brought me in. We had this meet and greet lunch to talk about the future of publishing and it turned out we had the same vision. He kept saying, "Right, now push that further."
When did you first encounter POD?
Years ago, when Heather [Champ] and I were exploring ways to make a photography magazine, Lulu was really the only game in town. We learned so much creating JPG there, and starting with a POD service allowed us to experiment, develop the voice and vision of the magazine, and build an audience. I think it's a very natural way to start a magazine.
How did you gravitate toward a POD model for magazines?
It's all about the Giant Pile. I've worked on a lot of newspaper and magazine projects, and they all had one thing in common: A huge print run, followed by the slow, terrible realization that you've gotta get rid of all that paper.
POD banishes the Giant Pile to the dustbin of history where it belongs. Because, with a POD system, you don't print it until somebody wants it. It avoids the pile. It avoids creating trash (70 percent of all magazines are never bought). It brings some of the elegance of the Internet to this very old industry.
But mostly it was just a financial decision. Heather and I weren't out to become publishing magnates. We just had an idea that we thought people would like. We wouldn't have been able to do it at all if not for POD.
What types of magazine publishers (large, small, individuals, etc.) are best suited for MagCloud?
I think that magazines are about nurturing a community. If you look at the most successful magazines (Rolling Stone in the '60s, Wired in the '90s, Make now), they've always been the ones that surfed the zeitgeist. They found a growing community of people and reflected it, and in that reflection, began to lead it for a time.
But if you tell people in the publishing industry that they're really in the community business, they'll say "shut up, hippy" and go back to monetizing their audience metrics.
So the trick is to find those niche audiences that need a voice. And there are a lot of them. And the truth is, they know who they are better than we do. So, with MagCloud, the idea is to open up the tools so that those communities can create their own magazines. We think they're going to make amazing things.
Do you see larger magazine publishers eventually moving to POD, or will this be a niche option?
Not only do I think that large magazine publishers will move to digital printing, but I think that the idea that we used to print millions of things that were exactly the same will someday be seen as a cute historical artifact. "You mean every copy of this magazine was the same for everyone, Grandpa? Weird!"
For the biggies, it's just a matter of economics. As soon as the price per page for printing on digital is cheaper than traditional offset printing, the biggies will move. The quality of POD is already the same or better than offset.
It'll start with smaller publications because they're the most agile, and they don't see the real price savings of scale anyway. Right now, if you're printing a few thousand copies, digital printing is the same cost as traditional offset. (I've been wrestling with this for Fray.com -- we're right at the cusp. Our first issue was printed via traditional offset, but issue two will be printed with MagCloud.)
And once magazines move to POD, they'll realize it opens up opportunities they never had before. When you can really tailor each issue for each subscriber, what will you do? Exciting, huh?
Book publishers often focus on the short-term elements of POD, most notably POD's higher cost per page. Some industry folks try to cite the long-range benefits, such as efficiency, higher retail prices via customization, etc., but the per-page discrepancy continues to be a sticking point. Have you encountered similar obstacles on the magazine side?
Magazines are a better fit for POD because, unlike books, they're usually all color and timeliness is much more of a factor. Plus, the price per page for digital print is falling fast, while the price per page of traditional offset has remained very steady. Still, the exciting part is all the opportunities digital printing enables. Ultimately, POD services like MagCloud will enable a degree of customization that is not only cheaper, but just plain impossible to do via traditional means.
Beyond strict numbers, what do you see as the upside to print editions? Does a print product carry a higher level of esteem for a writer or consumer?
I love the Web. I think it's still a publisher's dream come true. But, inconveniently, we humans are still real world creatures. And no matter how much connectivity blankets the planet, and how good our devices get, there will still be a role for print.
I don't say this because I'm some ancient technology fetishist. I don't own a tube amp. I sold all my CDs. It's just that print is a really good delivery mechanism for some kinds of experiences. Reading a physical magazine is a different experience than surfing hypertext online.
And, yes, I think the scarcity of print does give it a higher level of importance for its creators and consumers. On the Web, where every page is just a click away from any other, there's no relative importance communicated. But in a magazine, you know that a team of writers and editors picked this story to go here. That has a profound effect on how that media is consumed.
News Roundup: Sony Reader Now Supports EPUB, Esquire Using E Ink on September Cover, What Authors Can Learn from Silicon Valley
Mac Slocum
July 25, 2008
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Sony Reader Now Supports EPUB and Digital Editions
The new firmware for the Sony Reader (model PRS-505) supports EPUB and Adobe Digital Editions. From MobileRead:
I can now confirm that this particular speculation seems to have proved out: the new firmware (available sometime today, July 24th) will include support for both epub and Adobe's Digital Editions. It will also include support for PDF reflow, which is something we've long been looking for. As an extra added bonus, the new firmware will support DE's DRM system for both epub and PDF. However you may feel about DRM, this support for it, along with PDF reflow, means that all those PDF e-books available from many public libraries are now in play on the Reader for the first time, so dust off those library cards, folks!
First E Ink Magazine Cover Coming in September
Esquire will use E Ink technology to declare "the 21st Century Begins Now" on 100,000 flashing copies of its September issue. David Granger, Esquire's editor in chief, discusses the first E Ink-driven magazine cover with the New York Times:
... on its own, the magazine will run out of juice after 90 days. Mr.Granger knows some will see the cover as a gimmick -- but he says he thinks the technology behind it, which has been used for supermarket displays but never embedded in a magazine, speaks to the possibilities of print. (Continue reading)
What Authors Can Learn from Silicon Valley
Sramana Mitra of Forbes.com sees parallels between author Elle Newmark's grassroots audience development and Silicon Valley's software process:
In Silicon Valley, we do alpha and beta products -- small prototypes of our vision -- and recruit a small number of customers to gain early validation of the products' viability. These alpha and beta products, along with early customer validation, help us sell our ventures to investors and raise millions of dollars in venture money.
In Newmark's case, she spent less than $10,000 of her own money to "bootstrap" her self-publishing effort, she found customers online, and then she recruited William Morris agent Dorian Karchmar as her "investment banker," who then got her Simon & Schuster as a "venture investor." Newmark's deal with Simon & Schuster is widely rumored to include a seven-figure advance.
First E Ink Magazine Cover Coming in September
Mac Slocum
July 21, 2008
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Esquire will use E Ink technology to declare "the 21st Century Begins Now" on 100,000 flashing copies of its September issue. David Granger, Esquire's editor in chief, discusses the first E Ink-driven magazine cover with New York Times:
... on its own, the magazine will run out of juice after 90 days. Mr.Granger knows some will see the cover as a gimmick -- but he says he thinks the technology behind it, which has been used for supermarket displays but never embedded in a magazine, speaks to the possibilities of print.
Update 7/23: Folio says Esquire's E Ink edition sell for $5.99, two dollars more than the usual cover price.
Time Inc. Prepping Mix and Match Magazine Service
Mac Slocum
July 15, 2008
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Time Inc.'s Maghound service sounds like the physical manifestation of an RSS reader. Launching in September, Maghound will allow customers to pick and swap magazine titles for a base monthly fee. From USA Today:
Customers will pay a monthly fee for home delivery of the publications they want. But unlike with subscriptions, which typically run for fixed terms, users can go online and swap one title for another whenever they want.
According to USA Today, baseline pricing will be set by the number of titles: around $5 per month for three titles, $8 for five, and $10 for seven. Some titles may incur higher charges.
In June, Folio reported that Maghound hopes to launch with 300 magazine titles.
Companies in the magazine space are showing a willingness to experiment. Barnes & Noble launched a digital/print magazine subscription service through BN.com in May, and MagCloud recently unveiled a print-on-demand system for magazine titles.
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