Slashdot Mirror
Is Wired's App Really the Future of Magazines?
MBCook writes "Interfacelab has put up a review of Wired's new iPad app, and declared, 'The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a [1990s] multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism.' While providing little interactivity other than a fancy page-flip, the application is made of XML and images, including two for the text of each page in portrait and landscape mode. This seems to be why the application is 500MB. The article suggests this was done to get the app out quickly after Flash was officially vetoed by Steve Jobs."
Wired made something like $115,000 in four hours of sales.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Next!
The answer is no. Also, anyone using the iPad as ereader is mentally insane and hates his/her eyes.
re:"The article suggests this was done to get the app out quick after Flash was officially vetoed by Steve Jobs"
Why quick? Wasn't all the years flash was excluded for the iPhone at all a hint? OOOOOh I get it - controversy = hitcounts! Linkbait me baby - linkbait me!
I think the interface still needs a little work - but at least it wasn't nearly as painful as PopSci's efforts. NYT still rules the interface roost. I know where to go - it stays out of the way - and no tutorial on "how to read this magazine" (Time, I'm looking at you).
Might also be nice to have the video play in the page as an option like the NYT too. Or stream it to save on space. I can live without video when I'm on a plane.
Haven't they heard of PDF? I mean, it's not as if the iPad doesn't have PDF written into its DNA from top to bottom, and that the format was pretty much invented for the very purpose to which they are not putting it here.
Jobs may have declared war on Adobe's Flash format but Adobe's PDF format is a whole other story.
Well not for the ridiculously low price you can get it for in the USA anyways.... Maybe this is finally the solution for Canadians, because I like reading that magazine, good bathroom fodder. Unless they decide to cripple the app based on geo-location. Now can we get an Andriod app for this?
Insane!
Each full page is a giant image...
Ah ok... Don't want any copying and pasting...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
For such a critical piece, it sure was a poor online reading experience; No graphics, fully justified blocks of text, as soon as I clicked the link my shoulders drooped a little.
What, do they have a full-page glossy photograph on every page of the print magazine? Or are they being incredibly stupid?
Or maybe they lay out the original pages in MS Paint rather than as real text?
HAHAHAHAHA, I wouldn't be bragging about my 500MB app using XML the same week I claim I can prove how awesome I am by writing in binary.
I mean, really, is it *so hard* to create an online magazine? I never got the point of people downloading apps just to browse magazine articles and images. The web is pretty much designed for just that, so why not use it? PDF would work to, but I don't really see the point of not having it online? Maybe to allow you to download it and read it even if you don't have an Internet connection at the time you want to read (like, maybe, in-flight for example)? I suppose that might be a valid reason to want a pdf.
Is this a review of the iPad as a magazine-reader ("Is This Really the Future of Magazines"), or a review of the Wired magazine App on the iPad? Judging from the title, it sounds like the former. I'd recommend looking at some other magazines or newspapers on the iPad if you're going to judge it as an eReader. For example, here's the USA Today App for the iPad (jump to 0:50) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5nJVtLygOM
I had to cancel my subscription to WiReD because they have never, ever learned anything about readability and my eyesight has gotten to the point where I need a very bright light and a magnifying glass to read WiReD. I have no problem with books (paperback or hardcover) or most other magazines or newspapers, because for all of them, content is more important than style -- something that has NEVER been true at WiReD.
I mention this because it is a perfect case for providing the magazine content in a format who's style the user may customize -- if they can understand that some people are actually trying to read their stuff and not just saying, "Wow! That's looks really cool. I wonder what it says?" It sounds like they did everything they could to avoid giving the user the ability to manipulate the presentation of their content, which seems to be almost the exact opposite of XML's purpose. I seriously hope that WiReD (and similar content providers) can get back to providing interesting/meaningful/useful content and restraining their style tinkering to the margins, where it belongs.
I hope that the iPad version of the magazine at least allowed the reader to zoom and pan around the page, but knowing WiReD, they probably even disabled that because their strange sense of style demands that we suffer, um, I mean, view the entire page as a whole only.
I get dead-tree Wired for $10 a year; less than a buck an issue. So for the price of more than 5 such issues, I should buy a single issue with a glorified shovel-ware interface?
Hmmm, let me think about that for a second. OK, no.
Bad enough Wired never grew up out of its hipster typeface fetish, rendering many of the paper pages barely legible; I shudder to imagine what it looks like on an iPad.
Is the iPad (and similar devices) the future of magazines? Short Answer: No
Long Answer: Just do the numbers. Time Magazine has a circulation of 3.3million. Which is 1% of the US population roughly. Now if the same ratio holds true that Time would get a 1% market share of ipad users, that would make for currently... 10,000+/- ipad subscriptions. Even if the ratio is skewed totally out of proportion... Its simply not interesting from a business perspective to shift your content strategy to targeting ipads anytime soon. It will take a lot more than a few million ipads and ipad type devices sold for magazines to shift focus.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
Does that means the iPad is MPC Level 8?
Doesn't the iphone have a web browser?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
That is the proprietary magazine app that Apple was bundling with Macs for some years. It has the same animated page turning and a few other little touches. I think the sample issue that came with it was MacWorld.
I can buy Wired at probably 15 places within a 10 minute bike ride of my house. In other words, nearly every magazine rack. The cover price? $5.99. Same as the US. A few cents better, actually, considering the exchange rate.
Oh, unless you're talking about the awesome subscription deals. But I haven't subscribed to a magazine since I was 14. I prefer to pick them up when there's something compelling I want to read.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
people wont pay for HTML. They can already get the HTML for free. the Mactards will however, pay for an app because "ohhhh its an app ohhhh!"
The advertising types are getting all excited over using a proprietary app for each media outlet because people won't have a simple way to skip the ads. You'll be a hostage to however *they* want you to experience it. Then again, this is an Apple product, so users have already given up their choice of what software they can use...
Because hiding behind a paywall that can only be passed by an ipad app is just too damn hard right?
If I was witty I'd put something funny here but, as it stands, I am not and have just wasted seconds of your life
It was always pretty rare for a magazine to be worth reading from cover to cover. Arguably, editors try to avoid that, since a magazine all of whose contents are interesting to its readers is going to have a very small and specialized subscriber base. Instead, editors try to appeal to a wider group, with the end result being that any given reader is only going to care about a fraction of the content. And this model worked pretty well as long as publication was capital-intensive. The web pretty much put an end to that.
Obviously, it depends on what you're interested in, but nowadays you can find some or all of the kind of content that interests you for free, so unless you're after something highly specialized, you don't have to purchase access at all, much less buy a bunch of content that you aren't interested in to get to the small fraction that does interest you. The old magazine model no longer has much relevance. If so many people hadn't been exposed to magazines before the rise of the web, it would probably never occur to anyone to create online "magazines".
In the long run, someone is going to figure out how to aggregate related content, probably with a high degree of personalization, in such a way that both the aggregator and the content creator get to expose readers to ads and thereby make money. This is basically already Google's approach, and they're making money hand over fist, but they're the ultimate generalists. The more specialized territory is still up for grabs, though it appears likely that specialized aggregators are more likely to evolve from blogs and wikis than search engines.
But the magazine? It existed only because of a resource scarcity that no longer exists. Trying to make the magazine work in the age of the Internet is like trying to keep a ferry business alive after the bridge has been built.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I think this is some of the potential of what a magazine should/could do on the iPad.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/03/18/fascinating_motion_magazine_demo_highlights_ipads_potential.html
Magazines don't have a future. Magazines suck. Just about every other information delivery mechanism has huge advantages over magazines.
Agreed.
You won't be sitting in a dentist's waiting room where they have provided a pile of iPads to browse while you wait.
Physical editions will be around for some time yet.
So, I'm a long time prepress guy converted into a web designer and ultimately an online application developer. I make my living at a printing company that makes money putting ink on paper, and am always caught up in discussions and planning sessions where we prognosticate about what new electronic development is going to put a dent in the magazine business.
Lots -- and I mean lots -- of industry experts have been predicting that the Apple tablet would be the beginning of the end of print. Of course, this has been predicted many times before: CD-ROMs were going to do it, then the web, then web-based digital editions, and now the iPad. But this time, the talk was at a fever pitch. Bosacks alerts were coming out months before the mainstream media picked up on the initial iPad hype. Lots of people thought this would be the one.
And, it's not really, is it? And I didn't really think it would be either. When I try to imagine the electronic invention that replaces the utility of ink on paper (especially for magazines or other non-time-sensitive publishing), I can't really come up with an idea of what that might be. The online digital editions and iPad apps are cute -- even cool -- but they wouldn't stop me from throwing 128 pages of bound paper into a briefcase on a travel day. Besides, portable electronics are expensive and precarious. They need cases and screen protectors. They don't roll up. They aren't disposable if you spill your coffee on them.
So, what's it going to be? What will the technology look like that actually makes publishers stop printing on paper altogether? I really don't know.
People still read magazines? The "future" of magazines?
Your numbers assume that every person is the same as any other from an advertiser's point of view and that simply isn't true. This is just a guess, but I bet the iPad owning demographic is very desirable for advertisers. These are people who have disposable income and they aren't afraid to dispose of it.
Those 10,000 iPad readers may be worth much, much more than the same number of print readers.
What really matters in this game is where advertisers are willing to buy ads.
For large volumes you are correct; there would be a trend in targeted advertising towards more valuable demographics.
However, a little bit more info about the print and publication industry. They've profiled their readership exceedingly well over the past decades and while the ipad offers some unique opportunities like interactive or individually targeted advertising, true value to most large advertisers comes from reaching a significant volume of people.
The type of advertisers that would be interested in major publications, also have ad runs far larger that the number of potential ipad customers out there regardless of the ipad user's individual value. This would lead the large advertisers to create ad campaigns that spread across many different digital publications and thus losing much of the targeted value that comes from a 'Time-reader-with-ipad' demographic.
Even if we take those 10,000 and say they're worth 10x the typical Time reader, that's still only 100,000 subscribers worth of value to advertisers which is negligible to an advertiser who's targeting the 3.3million circulation of a major publication.
All in all you have a great point for smaller print run publications where the proportion of ipad-subscription to tradition subscriptions is much higher, but the only real value for the big guys is in finding a new way to create more awareness amongst the general public for their traditional print business.
Give it a few more years so that 1 in 5 Americans have a device like this and the trends will start reflecting your insights.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
Let me get this straight, your analysis on why "the iPad (and similar devices) are not the *future* of magazines?" is based on numbers, market share, and content strategies today?
No, part of my point is that for large advertisers and large publishers the type of content (mostly written), your demographics (your typical readership), and actual content (subject matter) isn't going to change much. Essentially you're migrating distribution channels but you're not actually changing your business model very much. The ipad does nothing to really change the long term growth perspectives of any individual publication. The US market is saturated in this regard.
Also we can take the ipad and compare it to something people thought similarly about when they were new: smartphones. These still only have something like a 20% market penetration even now (and should be 35% by 2013). Were ipads to replace magazines at that scale, it would still not "change the game" for the industry.
To draw a beloved slashdot car analogy: the development of hybrids and electric cars has done nothing really to the overall demand of cars or drivers' behavior. As such, the ipad is not revolutionizing anything in the industry nor is it really providing a more attractive future over current distribution models.
In a practical sense, the ipad is no more the future of magazines than an implant that instantly and automatically allows you to download content into your brain. The dominance of these devices is so far off that it can't be accurately predicted nor assumed.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
Google has shown off something far more impressive: http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100519/video-sports-illustrated-shows-off-a-google-ready-magazine/
experience while using Cocoa and Objective-C, don't blame Apple. Blame the limited talents of Adobe and Wired who developed the application.
I'm not sure an app is superior to a printed magazine as a user interface, but it does have one immense advantage: Distribution.
No matter where I am: on the bus, at the cottage or on the wrong side of the globe an electronic distribution system can deliver the content as soon as it is available if I have a connection. Granted there are other limits too, but this is the main advantage as I see it. This is a general observation, and has nothing to do with the iPad btw... ;)
.: Max Romantschuk
Could have used an eBook with DRM then.
Actualy ePUB is better for smaller screens. But apart from that you are right.
What you just described is called ePUB - a format for ebooks. Basicly XHTML in a zip file ad some optional DRM.
What idiots. They're shipping an "application" that consists of over 4,000 image files and some XML. You have to download 500MB of stuff to read the magazine. How long is that going to take?
Then there's the content problem. Wired, at this point, is basically a product catalog. Yet they didn't put a shopping cart system in the online version. That's just dumb. The demographic that buys both iPads and Wired would definitely click on "buy now" buttons.
Those 10,000 have already demonstrated that they'll buy any old shit, provided it's shiny, though. Very desirable marketing demographic.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Or perhaps because, as portable as HTML is, and as neat as the Mobile Safari is, it's still quicker, more convenient and friender to navigate a UI designed for a small screen multi-touch interface than a web browser.
Apparently slashtards don't realise this.
If I'm in a waiting room, the first thing I do is whip out my cell phone, not go looking for a magazine. While you are right that dentists will not be providing iPads for their patients any time soon, people are already carrying these devices with them.
Yes, if the magazine in question is like this one, this one or this one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When I got the ipod touch, I was thrilled with it -- the engineering and human factors are awesome.
I assumed the inability to play divx/avi files was a limitation of the hardware, as was the flash support.
Now the ipad comes out, and again does not support divx/avi (something I was able to do with fedora in 2004 on an old PII/400Mhz machine with 256MB RAM) and does not support flash. I was thinking that I would get a 3G plan, but then I see that I cannot use it to create a hotspot, even though I have been able to share internet connections since 2000 using NAT1000.
So there is something seriously damaged about Apple's corporate culture. Excellent engineering hobbled by pig-headedness.
This has also made me wonder about buying a Mac -- surely this iphone madness of digitally signing things and telling people what they can and cannot do with their hardware, will infect the MacOS ecosystem as well.
I will have to wait for a tablet that runs an open operating system that is not under the control of a billionaire surrounded by yes-men.
Yes, I expect that a 500MB PDF would download really quickly.
Also the way that it is packaged as an image per page rather than as text means that I can't select, copy or search the text...which is really convenient. Being able to fit only 32 issues on a 16GB iPad (assuming you have nothing else on there) is also very convenient.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
I was wondering why you needed an app to look at a web site, when phones already have HTML. Duh! So Wired can make money!
Now the question is, why would anybody pay for it?
Free Martian Whores!
Let me get this straight, your analysis on why "the iPad (and similar devices) are not the *future* of magazines?" is based on numbers, market share, and content strategies today?
No, on numbers, market share, (and content strategies) from a month ago.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I don't know how they did it, but somehow Apple gathered up all the people willing to pay per click for content and sold them all a device and a distribution system which caters to this willingness.
Despite what people say, this does indeed change everything about the publishing world.
Will it kill all paper? No, of course not. Just like TV didn't kill movies, or how movies didn't kill the stage. It's just another medium to add to the collection. It'll certainly change the share of attention/profit between the various mediums, and some people will certainly lose their jobs while other job sectors expand, but in the end, that's not the big deal here.
That's the first thing.
The second is that it was already starting to happen on its own. I know a few people who sell content for fairly respectable dollar values to companies who use it to gain click-exposure in Google's search ranking system. (That is, if for instance you have a website selling lawn care products and you want to increase search relevance, then you hire a writer to research and write articles on lawn-mowing. If you pay the writer $250 for an article and it nets you a week of search exposure which turns into $2000 worth of sales, then suddenly web content becomes a real value worth paying well for; Being a writer is a real job again.)
The problem was that News doesn't sell directly any product, which means that knowledge of current events in the world and how we collect that knowledge is changing. I actually think that this isn't a bad thing at all. Network news programs and magazines like TIME generally suck. Sure, they're slick and well-educated and all that, but honestly, they are glorified authority figures selling lies and propaganda with a thin, (like watery milk with too much growth hormone), stream of truth to keep us hooked. Basically, useless other than a means of population control and manipulation. As such, it will always exist, I know that, but it was nice to see it panicking a little bit with the death of newspapers and all that. (Another medium which will never go away entirely, but which will and has indeed shurnk more than most!)
This iPad caters to people who are so well-programmed that they are willing to pay for a device so they can pay for their daily reality update; their daily bullshit required to stay programmed. The "News" will remain alive and well. Yay.
But it does make things interesting for other content providers. If the world had many more years left, I'd say that we were about to enter another golden age of writers, animators, programmers, actors, etc. I mean. . , small-scale private creative efforts being legitimate source of income? That's pretty cool. It's indy comics all over again, but starring Felicia Day, (as one example).
As such, I can also see one version of reality where magazines hire on a wider variety of creative people, from programmers and animators all the way to actors and musicians to make their pay-wall worth climbing.
As much as I can't stand the iPad, that is pretty cool. Thanks Steve; I'm now conflicted. Ugh.
Just some thoughts.
-FL
"..they are essentially reinventing HTML with no added benefit." Gisted.
This is just a guess, but I bet the iPad owning demographic is very desirable for advertisers. These are people who have disposable income and they aren't afraid to dispose of it.
I think you're exactly wrong. Time's non-iPad owning demographic is people who have disposable income (at least an extra $500 worth), aren't high-tech enough to have migrated to the Internet, probably care more than average about ecology issues (as opposed to readers of, say, the Washington Times), and are clueless enough to think that reading Time makes them well-informed.
Dude, you're getting a Prius.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I bought the GQ app for my iPod a few months ago for the novelty of it. I didn't necessarily like it more than I would have the print version, but they had the foresight to include links to videos and extra photographs of the cover model that didn't make it to print. The UI left a lot to be desired, but at least the designers seemed to have the basic idea right.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
After installing Adobe CS5, somehow I ended up on this page that supposedly shows the Wired app in action.
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/xd-inspire/introducing-wired-on-ipad/
Although I'm not an iPad developer and don't plan on purchasing an iPad, after seeing the Adobe video - I thought the app looked pretty "Flashy". However, after reading all of the mixed coverage about this app, I wonder if the app Adobe is showing off is the actual shipping app, or one that was built without the recent source code/compiler restrictions.
Any iPad + Wired app owners care to comment?
I like your approach, however the ratio of the population reading Time on the iPad should be adjusted upwards because we can probably exclude some segments of the US population who are not likely to be either Time Magazine readers nor iPad owners (e.g. people without much disposable income). So, given that someone is an iPad owner, my intuition is that they are also more likely to read Time (when compared to the general U.S. population which was used to create the 1% ratio) because they probably share more social and demographic characteristics.
But nevertheless you're right, even if the percentage of iPad owners reading time was 2% or 5% or heck even 10% (and even if those iPad readers are more valuable from advertiser's perspective, which is not necessarily true because it depends on the advertiser), it doesn't look like an iPad is going to replace a paper copy of a magazine anytime soon. It would be cool to make some bets about this though.
Lose 20 pounds, instantly! Just send £20 to... - Bizarro