EMAP has sold its consumer magazines to the German media company Bauer, but was not able to realise a satisfactory price for the B2B businesses. When the company was put on the block the commentators thought that it would be the consumer magazines that would be hard to sell. Perhaps Bauer know something that the industry pundits and the EMAP management did not understand. Consumer magazines could yet become a growth business. EMAPs consumer business has been rudderless in … Keep Reading
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A year ago there was a flurry of legal action between Google and European newspaper publishers. A group of publishers (newspapers, book publishers and others) have since supported the development of a new and more complicated protocol which is intended to supplement and, to an extent, to replace the ‘robots.txt‘ protocol that regulates the behaviour of spiders and search engines. ACAP (Autormated Content Access Protocol) is the result. This proposed standard has received sceptical notices from O’Reilly Radar… Keep Reading
You probably noticed that we recently inserted some tabs on the home page.
Its one of the great advantages of the way the web works, hierarchical (page oriented — but forking), that makes it possible for such a tabbed system to accommodate 100’s of magazines. We will need something else when we have 1,000s of titles. I guess the ‘kiosk’ will feel more like a library at that point.
Exact Editions now has a very straightforward process through which you can give a subscription to a digital magazine for Christmas (or as a present on any other occasion). I can think of two people who will be getting Opera from me this year and one who should receive Le Monde Diplomatique. We should give this present-giving feature more publicity, and two possible angles of interest spring to mind.
- We could emphasize the ecological benefits of giving a digital
The London-based Bookseller’s Association has just released a report, Embracing the Digital Age, on the coming tide of digital books. It is short, non-technical, pithy, well-researched and free. It is possibly too sanguine about the potential for traditional bookseller involvement in the developing digital market. But the text points towards challenging opportunities for booksellers who can re-invent and re-position their business. The main authors (Francis Bennett and Michael Holdsworth, both experienced publishers rather than booksellers) clearly believe that the … Keep Reading