While some publishers eye the Apple iPad hopefully as way of migrating the print experience into a rich, multimedia domain as never before, others are already leaping over paper entirely to reach new readers with original digital publications.
In one of the latest direct-to-iPad initiatives, Richard Branson's Virgin empire announced plans to launch its first consumer magazine on the Apple tablet without a companion print edition. Virgin claims Maverick magazine will be consistent with Virgin's overall brand, says AdAge, but will include actual articles rather than promotions other Virgin properties.
Branson's daughter Holly Branson is reportedly leading Virgin's charge into iPad territory. If she succeeds in signing on premium advertisers and "exploit[ing] the creative potential of the medium without the costs of an existing print title to maintain," Maverick will launch in the beginning of October, as an iPhone app only -- no Kindle, web or paper version.
The Amazon Kindle, released in '07, lacks the multimedia capabilities of the iPad with its HTML5 video, color photos and ability to run complex interactive apps. One of the the Amazon device's advantages when it comes to text -- that its screen doesn't act like a glowing computer screen, but like a faithful electronic reproduction of a physical book -- becomes a disadvantage with next-generation formats. These formats attempt not only to port the reading experience onto an electronic device, but to take fuller advantage of the capabilities of modern phones and especially tablets, with their larger screens.
Apple's iPad continues to loom large, as the market waits for the Google Android and other tablets it thought would be released by now.
AdAge's insiders (via Columbia Journalism Review) said Richard Branson thinks his iPad-only Maverick magazine will have a big advantage over traditional publications when it launches in the fall because it lacks a paper version. By Branson's logic, the publishers of print magazines cannot price their digital versions low enough, because they don't want to compete with their higher-priced print editions.
That's not necessarily always the case. Wired magazine, for instance, makes content from every issue available for free on the web in addition to selling it in paper form at newsstands and by subscription, and on the iPad through the iTunes store. The magazine recently said, however, that it would cut back on some of the content it publishes online as part of its iPad-focused digital strategy.
Regardless, Branson says he hopes to undercut the price of other publications (the company has yet to name a price for its magazine). Distributing content digitally in any form offers a big savings over print. If Branson can sell the magazine to his customers -- especially the somewhat captive audience on his airplanes, so many of whom brandish already iPads -- he already has a retail channel in place. Heck, we recommended that someone buy ailing Newsweek and do the same thing.
A possible sign of things to come in the industry: The popular Japanese author Ryu Murakami plans to release his next book, A Singing Whale, through Apple's iBooks store as a "digital package" developed in partnership with a software company, which will include video and music in addition to text according to Japanese news site Nikkei -- both traits not exhibited by paper or Kindle books. Murakami's publisher is talking to the author about publishing a hard copy too, but so far, his plans are digital-only, which should strike fear into the hearts of publishers. Apple, Amazon and Google app developers could replace them in the book distribution chain.
Other authors including Stephen King have published exclusively to digital -- in his case for the Kindle -- but the iPad's extended range of possibilities, apparent even in such early efforts as Nick Cave's Death of Bunny Munro, offers far greater possibilities, such as switching between the text and audiobook version on the fly, or even watching the author narrate the text if the mood should strike.
In addition to opening up distribution and creative options for digital print, the iPad is democratizing magazine publishing. HP's MagCloud service, originally launched in 2008 as an on-demand paper printing service, expanded its services this week to offer direct-to-iPad publishing that allows anyone with magazine ambitions of their own to sell copies of their magazines to iPad users who have HP's free app installed.
Like HP, Adobe itself -- which helped Wired create its popular iPad app -- announced plans on Monday to allow any publisher to use the same tool Wired did to create their own app-based iPad publication. In both cases, given the monetization options of the app ecosystem, including ads, one-time payments, and subscriptions, it's easy to charge for content that lives in an app, giving the format a business advantage over other forms of digital publishing, too.
Amazon's strategy to deliver textbooks by Kindle is paying off, and the company recently started selling more Kindle eBooks than hardcovers. But the most exciting ideas in next-generation publishing -- as opposed to next-generation distribution, as pioneered by Amazon -- will happen through the iPad and possibly Google Android tablets, whenever they arrive.
At that point, the iPad's lack of Flash support could become a limiting factor, unless iPad retains a healthy market share lead over Android tablets and bends publishers to its own format. Take this well-designed multimedia article, The Washington Post's "Top Secret America," published on Sunday.
It kicks off with a 107-second video followed by bullet points and paragraphs of text in a left-to-right, page-turning-style interface in a web browser. This mix of video, photos, sideways-scrolling chunks of text, and hooks into Twitter and Facebook would look great on a tablet, but runs on Flash, leaving iPad users out in the cold until The Post switches to HTML5. Likewise, the video at the top of this article requires Flash.
Even without Flash support, the iPad has opened possibilities for publishers that extend beyond what the Kindle can currently offer. Virgin's Maverick, multimedia books like those by Ryu Murakami and Nick Cave, and the democratizing effects of HP's MagCloud and Adobe's Digital Publishing Solution are likely only the beginning of tablets' collectively disruptive effect on the written word.
Photo: p_c_w/Flickr
See Also:
- Adobe Unveils Apple-Compliant 'Digital Publishing Platform' for iPad
- Can Apple's iPad Save the Media After All?
- Apple Invites Authors to Self-Publish on iPad Bookstore
- Wired Magazine's iPad Edition Goes Live
- Is Apple Actually Pushing for the $10 iPad E-Book, After All
- New iTunes Rules Complicate iPad Magazine Opportunities
