There was a time when everybody and anybody who knew anything about publishing was hyping the tablet magazine. You simply had to be on the tablet and in Apple’s newsstand. Anything else was “old school,” print-centric thinking. Backwards. If you thought that way you probably dragged your knuckles while eating your Woolly Mammoth sandwich.
The problem is that reality is a stubborn thing and sooner or later catches up with any fad. Tablet magazine sales have been absolutely dreadful and people are finally starting to realize this.
See, for example, The tablet magazine ship is sinking. Fast.
The article almost gets it right. Yes, the tablet magazine — whether PDF replica or the fancier versions you can get out of Indesign — has been a bust. A complete, total bust. A colossal waste of time.
But the article forgets the old “fool me once” wisdom and urges us to chase the next will-o-wisp.
Publishers must break free of the Newsstand and InDesign/PDF trap and invest in their publications as stand-alone, real, honest-to-God apps …
This is another “spend money on consultants” fantasy. Nobody wants to have a different app for each of their magazines. And before someone says “large publishers could put all their magazines in a single app,” please walk through a newsstand and see if you can identify the publisher of each of the titles. Only a magazine geek could get close.
The correct solution is a generalized reading platform into which magazines, books, articles and so on can be fed. Something like Evernote. I would say “or the Kindle app” except that Amazon (along with Apple) is the enemy of subscription publishers.
Evernote should be adapted so that publishers can feed their content to Evernote and subscribers can log in to their subscriptions. That is, the subscription they maintain with the publisher.
Unfortunately, Apple has Evernote by the short hairs and they’re afraid to do something like that. This might be an opportunity for Nook, which desperately needs a way to distinguish itself.
Anyway, that is what has to happen. Somebody with some courage has to create a reader app that responds to the needs of the reader and the publisher. That is, all the user’s reading material is in one, easy to use app, and the publisher continues to have a direct relationship with the subscriber.
Amazon and Apple have been trying to make every customer their customer. Publishers were complete chumps to play along, and the funniest thing about it is that they didn’t even get any revenue out of the deal because it never worked — partly because Amazon and Apple don’t understand publishing.