{"id":353,"date":"2013-12-17T10:05:03","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T14:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/?p=353"},"modified":"2014-01-24T11:07:57","modified_gmt":"2014-01-24T15:07:57","slug":"the-end-of-a-publishing-delusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/2013\/12\/17\/the-end-of-a-publishing-delusion\/","title":{"rendered":"The end of a publishing delusion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s newsstand. Anything else was &#8220;old school,&#8221; print-centric thinking. Backwards. If you thought that way you probably dragged your knuckles while eating your Woolly Mammoth sandwich. <\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>See, for example, <a href=\"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/2013\/12\/15\/the-tablet-magazine-ship-is-sinking-fast\/\">The tablet magazine ship is sinking. Fast.<\/a> <\/p>\n<p>The article <i>almost<\/i> gets it right. Yes, the tablet magazine &#8212; whether PDF replica or the fancier versions you can get out of Indesign &#8212; has been a bust. A complete, total bust. A colossal waste of time. <\/p>\n<p>But the article forgets the old &#8220;fool me once&#8221; wisdom and urges us to chase the next will-o-wisp. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Publishers must break free of the Newsstand and InDesign\/PDF trap and invest in their publications as stand-alone, real, honest-to-God apps &#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is another &#8220;spend money on consultants&#8221; fantasy. Nobody wants to have a different app for each of their magazines. And before someone says &#8220;large publishers could put all their magazines in a single app,&#8221; 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. <\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;or the Kindle app&#8221; except that Amazon (along with Apple) is the enemy of subscription publishers. <\/p>\n<p>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 <i>with the publisher<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, Apple has Evernote by the short hairs and they&#8217;re afraid to do something like that. This might be an opportunity for Nook, which desperately needs a way to distinguish itself. <\/p>\n<p>Anyway, <i>that<\/i> 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&#8217;s reading material is in one, easy to use app, and the publisher continues to have a direct relationship with the subscriber. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t even get any revenue out of the deal <b>because it never worked<\/b> &#8212; partly because Amazon and Apple <i>don&#8217;t understand publishing<\/i>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s newsstand. Anything else was &#8220;old school,&#8221; print-centric thinking. Backwards. If you thought that way you probably dragged your knuckles while eating your Woolly Mammoth sandwich. The &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/2013\/12\/17\/the-end-of-a-publishing-delusion\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading &lsquo;The end of a publishing delusion?&rsquo; &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354,"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions\/354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregkrehbiel.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}