Exact Editions Blog

In looking to the promising digital future for magazines it is essential that publishers separate out two questions:

1. What is the best consumer format for digital magazines?
2. What is the appropriate economic model for the digital magazine business?

These are very different questions. But the answers that we come up with are going to have a bearing, the one on the other. And vice versa. The magazine publisher has to get both right!

Over-simplifying wildly, there are currently three views … Keep Reading

We have a new app in the iTunes app store with some cool bonus media. I have also been experimenting with Google+ and Webdoc (first impressions: very useful and cloud-based) to see how we can give a few glimpses of the magazine apps that are coming through from us in increasing profusion…..

Some screenshots from the Jazzwise app. There is some music in the magazine app, but I have used the Webdoc tool to grab a fragment of Archie … Keep Reading

There is a fascinating confusion now reigning in the higher reaches of the Microsoft empire.

Steve Balmer and his team are convinced that tablets should be viewed as PCs, and that there is no need to put a mobile operating system on Windows tablets (“iPads and tablets are just a different form factor of PC”). They appear to have completely misread the reasons for the success of Apple’s iOS and its iPhone and iPad devices. As Horace Dediu notes:

Summed

At its World Wide Developer Conference at the beginning of the month, Apple introduced iOS5, a close integration with Twitter and its plans for a Newsstand within iTunes. There was a brief overview of the Newsstand service in the presentation and this mention in the Press Release:

Newsstand is a beautiful, easy-to-organize bookshelf displaying the covers of all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in one place. A new section of the App Store™ features just subscription titles, and allows users

When the iPad was launched, there was a widespread view (and I shared it) that soon, and not more than a year or two later, there would be some highly competitive and lower-priced tablet alternatives for customers to choose from. The iPad had opened a new hardware category, but competitors would quickly crowd into this new opening… there would be lots of choice and most of it would not be for Apple hardware.

Whilst dissecting a review of one of … Keep Reading