Monday, June 27, 2011

iPad publishing: time to switch to v2.0

iPad publishing: time to switch to v2.0, article.

The first generation of iPad magazines are not making any money. At all.

As I see it, then we can either: 1) work harder at making it work in the brand new medium. or 2) go down with the ship.

I think that the first guys who succeed with iPad magazines will succeed wildly. Because unlike with paper and trucks, there's no enertia to expansion.

4 comments:

Stephen A said...

Content first, last and always.

Deliver the text quickly and readably in a common format and 95% of the job is done.

As for special content, always ask "Is this trip really necessary?". A well placed graph or map beats a table of figures anytime. An animation or video can explain things better than any static figure. But put them in when needed.

We are currently in the GeoCities era of tablet content. In 10 years all of the content will look painfully busy with "special content" for content's sake. The best strategy is Occam's razor.

The big question is why do we need magazines as such on tablets? I read articles on my tablet. Ripping pages out of magazines and newspapers and placing them in a binder was messy and cumbersome with paper. It is trivial with electronic content.

In the morning I plow through my RSS feeds reading short posts and dumping the long articles through dotEpub or Readability and syncing them to my tablet in a seamless one click maneuver. I then read the text articles during my commute, breaks and lunch. It works perfectly. A magazine app would only get in the way. Just as the MP3 made the single king, tablets and eReaders make the article king.

ipad magazines said...

Magazines on iPad look stunning. I love reading digital magazines on iPads and iPhones. I use Other edition's newsstand for reading digital magazines.

Stephen A said...

A good link on the question of why magazines at all in the tablet era?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

It's a good question.

I wish *I* could find those good bloggers though.