Exact Editions Blog

John Naughton has a terrific column Amazon’s new Cloud Drive Rains on everyone’s parade in yesterday’s Observer:

“Impetuosity and audacity,” wrote Machiavelli, “often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve.” If you doubt that, may I propose a visit to the upper echelons of Apple, Google and Sony, where steam might be observed venting from every orifice of senior executives? If you do undertake such a visit, do not under any circumstances mention the word “Amazon”.

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Behind the scenes

The major consumer magazine publishers are backing themselves into an extraordinary corner with their reluctance to engage in subscription transactions on iTunes. Conde Nast for example will be selling magazine issues as apps, one issue at a time through iTunes, requiring existing subscribers who want to read their magazine on an iPad to repurchase an issue to which they may already have access through a print subscription. That the customer already has a print subscription counts for nothing. In fact, … Keep Reading

There are strongish rumours that Apple is preparing to launch a magazine-oriented, specialist Newsstand solution, similar to iBooks. The rumours gained some credibility when Mike McCue, Flipboard’s founder, made the suggestion at SXSW in an interview with Kara Swisher. I havent seen the interview but the Guardian had a report:

I have no inside information but wouldn’t be surprised if Apple did their own newstand similar to iBooks……

We are assured that McCue has no inside information, but McCue … Keep Reading

We yesterday introduced a straightforward way for our publishing partners to access Google Analytics reports for any of the individual titles that we host for them. Data is available in the amazingly atomic detail supported by Google Analytics, for each title, issue, and page. Also, Google makes it very practical to select specific date ranges, whereas the data we had previously collected from our own logs was lumped together in coarse monthly buckets. The traffic data is aggregated for each … Keep Reading