Justin Williams who blogs at Carpeaqua has some fairly trenchant views on the current state of magazine apps for iPad:
… Keep ReadingReading magazines on the iPad is an exercise in frustration. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. As great a device and, more importantly, platform as Apple has created, magazine publishers have done nothing short of fumble the snap in their own end zone.
I read a lot of magazines. They are great for people with short attention spans like myself,
Reuters reports some trenchant and surprising views from David Carey, President of Hearst
Magazines.
… Keep ReadingHearst’s digital strategy differs from its competitors in that it charges for digital subscriptions whether or not a person is a print subscriber to one of its magazines…………
Carey argued that the cost to subscribe to a monthly magazine, which ranges from $12 to $15 on average, is low enough to charge more for other products.
“We feel if people want the content in multiple formats
Steve Colbert has a splendid take on the new biography of Steve Jobs: he pulls the book up on to his desk and then starts playing with it as though it were an iPad. He can’t swipe the pages, so he turns it upside down and then the portrait of Steve Jobs on the front cover “doesn’t even reorient”. There is nowhere to put the jack for his headset etc…
In fact, this is pretty much the same joke as … Keep Reading
There seems to be a good chance that the Kindle Fire will be an effective, low end, competitor for the iPad as a platform for digital magazines. How effective do we think it will be?
We might start by looking at some numbers. The problem is that while Apple gives us precise totals for iPad device sales, on a quarter by quarter basis. Amazon has historically given very little information about Kindle sales, either about the device or about the … Keep Reading
Journalism.co.uk this week has a podcast interview with Daryl Rayner, Exact Editions founder and MD. Also on the podcast with Daryl are representatives of two UK publishers, Future (Mike Goldsmith) and Factory Media (Chris Talintyre). It is striking that all three parties report striking and impressive success from the launch of Newsstand in rather similar terms.
One slightly surprising fact about the interviewed group, is that between them these three companies were responsible for about 1/3 of the titles available … Keep Reading
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