Old World Publishers Confirm Digital Store
It looks as if the rumors of major publishers getting together to agree upon a set of open standards for a new digital storefront are indeed true. Today Apple Insider is reporting that Condé Nast, Hearst, News Corporation, Time Inc., and Meredith all have officially announced this collaboration.
“For the consumer, this digital initiative will provide access to an extraordinary selection of engaging content products, all customized for easy download on the device of their choice, including smartphones, e-readers and laptops,” said Squires, the interim managing director. “Once purchased, this content will be ‘unlocked’ for consumers to enjoy anywhere, anytime, on any platform.”
At first the store will solely be for newspapers and magazines with the possibility of books, comic books, blogs and more in the future. The publishers are now working on a reading application that will allow the reader to get that experience of the specific publications. Hopefully they come up with something that wows us.
How many of you would buy into this digital subscription idea?
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I would prefer a set of standards defined by Apple and iTunes since it would likely be more user-friendly. It’s hard for me to imagine that these old-world media publishers all of a sudden got together and came up with something that is very user-friendly. Imagine if they had come up with a set of smartphone standards and then pushed it out to iPhones, WebOS, and Android simultaneously? What would that look like?
I saw their press release. No technology yet. Just copying Hulu’s model right now. They’re going to need more than that. Their customers are more like music customers than TV/Video customers. They’ll want their content on mobile devices so that they can read the articles anywhere and are probably not going to want to buy an entire issue just to get the information that they want. They’re going to want some sort of preview mechanism so they know they’re getting the information they need and not something badly titled. Finally, they’ll need to store/archive/backup their library somewhere.
IMHO, if they think that this aggregation model will allow them to do what they’re doing so they can go back to writing articles and publishing pictures they are wrong. They’re going to need more types of content for pushing breaking news of interest to a user, audio, video, written analysis with possibly audio and video interlaced than just articles and pictures alone. In essence, they need something that validates their existence instead of just a different delivery model. This doesn’t sound like a winner to me.
And one more thing. They’re going to need to do things for their advertisers too. They’re going to need to pair the user with the advertiser. Way different than the current model where an advertiser buys an ad in a magazine that deals with a specific interest. That person buying the article may have a far different profile than the typical reader and the ad that goes along may not be a good fit.
And speaking of advertisers, where do they play in the model. Do we get free ad supported content, pay for no ads, can we mix and match?
Finally, how much do they reduce their price if we go digital, leave the trees standing and cut the snail mail out of the equation?
i rarely, if ever, read magazines anyway. i read from the free newsbytes i have rss’d into my iGoogle page and if that points to something that says i have to pay, then it gets closed. i occaisionally check out the ‘free’ CNN app on my JB iPhone =], but that’s about it. as for the masses and how they will see this, i defer to “The Reptile”. i think he hit all the bulletins that needed to be hit. it wont be enuf to create a “magazine itunes”. written articles don’t fit as easily into that scheme as music/movies do. they (the companies doing this) have barely even begun to understand how their world has turned upside down. eventually it’s gonna be a world where people say “ur reading a paper magazine?” who does that still? the digital alternative that takes the place of all this wasted paper will take guts + brains + someone with a true finger on the pulse of this generation’s need for access anywhere, convenience, & instant access to single articles/single songs instead of whole magazines or whole albums! only time will tell…
@UntidyGuy:
NO, GAWD NO!
Apple has their dictatorial mits on too many things now, we don’t need them to get another lock-in position on the print media.
Let the print media come up with a publishing standard and mechanism and sell it to all the resellers.
Amazon, Barnes and Nobel and Apple and Sony all have platforms, sales engines, and at least three of them have delivery engines as well. The publishers don’t, so they will have to come up with something the others can support on a multitude of devices.
If you leave it to Apple we will have another Itunes Lockout. Apple is VERY bad as open standards, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to open source. We don’t need to put them in charge of our print media too.
If Apple tries to dictate this standard its an instant Anti-Trust issue, because they would be using a near monopoly position in one industry to leverage another industry. (60 to 75% of one line music sales is a defacto monopoly regardless of how much Rene likes to insist it isn’t).
The delivery of print media through a digital device should become dramatically cheaper for the customer. I think there should be consideration for a sliding scale of price per subscription versus quantity of advertisments, where you could select a cheap or free subscription with a lot of ads or a premium priced subscription with little or no ads. While I don’t read many magazines, I would consider a device like this if major comic/manga publishers were on board.
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