Slashdot Mirror
Why Digital Newsstands Stink
An anonymous reader writes "As Google prepares to compete with Apple in the digital newsstand business, both companies seem to be glossing over the fact that consumer demand for digital magazines is dropping. 'Wired's collapse from 100,000 iPad copies in June to 23,000 in November was most dramatic, but the story is not much different at Glamour, Vanity Fair, GQ or Men's Health.' Meanwhile, issues of subscriber privacy continue to crop up — Google has reportedly told publishers it will supply certain information about subscribers, and it's not clear whether users will have the ability to opt-out. And according to the Wall Street Journal, 'Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher's app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes.'"
Brent Spiner could not be contacted for comments.
People continue to prefer not paying for things. Also, most people like having privacy in their lives.
Hey, I've seen all those movies where they just throw a big bundle of the latest issues off the back of a truck as they pass by the newsstand.
Even with a protective case that's gotta be harsh on the iPad.
That is why I am greater than everybody else because I am 85 and buy everything in paper form and think everybody should buy everything in paper form.
Just mocking those old farts before they have a chance to get all ego crazy on us.
Just like nobody wants to buy a whole album anymore, nobody wants to buy a whole magazine or newspaper. You just want to read the one article you are interested in and go back to playing Angry Birds.
Good god! When has anyone on the internet ever cared about privacy? We're talking *500 million* people who don't mind giving their data to a company whose entire business model is about selling it to advertisers and tracking every move they make.
We're talking hundreds of millions of people that still run tracking scripts from google analytics.
If there's one thing the internet has taught us, it's that people don't give a shit about their privacy. If some business fails, it isn't because people objected to the privacy violations. People LOVE privacy violations.
The privacy issue has to be framed against the fact that they have this same information on you when you subscribe annually in print form. That's why they want it so much - they are used to it! That said, Apple to date has been very adamant about not sharing this information with app developers upon download time, it's actually been a bone of contention, and a major hindrance to magazines with annual subscription offerings. Zinio and Amazon (Kindle) have sidestepped it by forcing you to purchase through their web fronts. PressDisplay does subscriptions through their web sites, and single issues for newspapers through the App Store in-app purchasing, so they get your information when you subscribe, but not when you buy one issue.
After using e-book readers and various tablet computers for reading. Basically, overall it stinks. Sure, it's nice to do keyword searches or have an entire library in one small (but heavy) package. However, those are trivial compared to the ability, with paper, to rapidly flip around, not crash, not have the company decide you're not authorized all of a sudden for no reason, etc...
Half the "fun" of a physical magazine is the ability to skim through it and flip the pages. Using "digital" magazines has none of that ability. Reading books in digital is great because it is a linear process. But how many people read magazines in a start to finish fashion?
But we don't want to watch advertisements while we do it.
Expecting people to pay for online content and ALSO see any advertisement (I mean ANYTHING, even simple words), is kind of like saying HBO wants to continue to charge their premium price for premium services but it is now going to show advertisements.
NO. You can't have it both ways,
You want ads? You can't charge. Period.
You want to charge? You can't have ads. Also, NO tracking. No ads means you don't have to tracks us (You can still track how many people read which article, but not which article any individual reads.)
As long as the greedy morons try to charge HBO prices for TBS content, surprise surprise, no one will pay.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Even if I wanted to pay for news and magazine articles (which I don't) why would I want to go through the extra complication of a separate app for every newspaper, and downloading each magazine? The web already covers this. Am I missing something?
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Magazines are very, very random access. When I read a magazine, I rarely start at the ToC. I'll flip through the magazine, stopping at a picture that interests me, a title that interests me, or something else. Heck, I tend to look at the advertisements before I look at the ToC!
So, while I love my iPad, it definitely doesn't suit the way I like to read magazines.
Go look at the comments for some of the "top sellers" of periodicals on the Kindle. Things like New Yorker, or Economist. You find that there are a ton of people that want to pay for this stuff on their device, but right now the deal is no good. Here are a few examples of what people justly complain about:
- When you buy a digital subscription, you don't get website access that you do get with a print subscription.
- Missing editorial cartoons, and even articles (reported from the Kindle version of the New Yorker)
- They delete access to anything more than 2 months old. Meaning if your device crashes or you have to replace it, you lose those articles.
- Pagination and sections are done in an inconvenient way.
- The cost is no cheaper than a print subscription.
I'm sure there are others. But as a person who recently found himself with an e-book reader and would love to have magazines and newspapers on there, much of this stuff is just a showstopper. Too bad, really.
Put issues in the iBookstore for $0.99.
Add a subscribe option.
Profit.
Nobody is going to pay full retail for an electronic version, it ain't happening. Alternatively come up with a global pass system ala hulu that allows you to read lots of magazines for a flat fee.
Otherwise, $6.99 buys a lot of 3G time to look at your website. For free.
..don't panic
So, why should I buy the digital version when the print version is not just better, but cheaper? And I dont need a specialized tool to read it.
Meanwhile, issues of subscriber privacy continue to crop up — Google has reportedly told publishers it will supply certain information about subscribers, and it's not clear whether users will have the ability to opt-out.
There's a good idea. Take a business that's having trouble catching on and give people another excuse not to subscribe.
Did anyone try pricing the digital version at $2.00? Give people a compelling reason to switch from the print version. Instead the digital version is expensive and crippled.
It all reminds of when music was struggling with the same issues. Now most of it is DRM free, it will play on almost any music player, and priced at $1. Do the same thing with the digital version of magazines.
Or die. Your choice.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Indian government tried to enforce family planning once in seventies and the people had such strong aversions that even now the government is having tough time convincing people that family planning is a good idea. (1.2 billion and counting rather fast).
Now why am I talking about population of India in a post about digital newsstands?
Because it explains my theory for what is happening.
See, the print media was freaking out about going out of business thanks to digital media. So what did they do? They brainwashed the bigshots at print media companies (remember, they still were major players then) to go all India on people about why digital media was better.
So the bosses start something like "show me your tits!" campaign on reader data. They couldn't do anything else because to successfully install a suicide button in their companies they had to pick an idea that could be explained as well-meaning. With "show me your tits!" campaign they could say, "We wanted to check for breast cancer!"
But what it actually does is freak out the people (user data being the proverbial tits) and they think that digital media is some sort of information pervert.
Explanation to share-holders: "We just wanted a better advertisement targeting."
Check.
Installation of suicide button.
Check.
And that, my friends, is what it is - a conspiracy that will ensure that digital media will always be a weak sibling to print media. And even slashdot was suckered into just propagating the suicide button.
You can't trust anything out there!
I mean here.. the internet, actually.
I can buy my PAPER magazine or newspaper with cash. I stopped buying abo long ago. 1) it ain't worth it mostly, as you might be interrested in an issue but not others 2) by varrying your magazine source you vary the bias and get a better picture, 3) too much paper spam gotten due to abo. 4) newstand is paid by cash and thus virtually untraceable for the most paranoid and certainly nothing marketing like can be won from you.
I think they need to introduce two types of digital magazines. The free kind which sells basic information about you to get relevant advertisements. If you want to value your privacy even though this kind of privacy doesn't really matter and people tend to just scale things up anyhow, you can pay full-price for the digital magazine which wouldn't have any ads. Of course there could be a Type-C which would be for those who don't want to share their private info and pay less, which would be the default advert assumed in your region for half the cost of the mag. These possibilities were thought up on the spot and I'm sure someone can come up with a better plan easily. Privacy concerns are overrated when it comes to most stuff online. It becomes a concern when they start telling the feds what you've been up to or tell your friends what you've been searching ;)
Another reason that digital newsstands stink is censorship.
I am amazed that people are so accepting of the idea that this platform being touted as the future of publishing includes arbitrary censorship.
Apple has a well documented history of preventing their users from accessing apps that conflict with Apple's interests. This is not just about apps that add technical capabilities, like Google Voice, but also apps with editorial content. Apps that mention Android or make fun of politicians have been blocked. Cartoons by a Pulitzer prize winner author were blocked until he won the prize (great for him, not so great for those of us without a pulitzer). And now we have the same with magazine: Esquire had to remove racy content from a magazine to get past the censors, a magazine about Android was blocked, etc.
Am I missing something here? Is Apple planning to create a new system for magazine and books without the arbitrary censorship? If not, where did our concern for freedom of expression go?
To clarify, what Apple is doing is completely different then the standard, law based censorship (e.g. no child porno) that publishers are already subject to.
I'm less concerned about Google's digital newsstand - it will probably be like their app marketplace: subject only to a fairly simple, published, set of rules that restricts Google from the sort of abuse that Apple practices.
In addition to the random access and ease or fun of flipping through, most magazines are bigger than the iPad.
Sure with some you can zoom in with the pinch, but it's not the same as simply having a bigger magazine.
I haven't tried any of the magazine apps, but if I compare with the comic book ones, it's a lot easier reading a comic book or graphic novel on paper than dealing with the app.
To be honest perhaps it's just that so far the digital offerings suck. I love the -idea- of a digital magazine. Wired seemed like a perfect candidate as well. Except instead of being a nice native, responsive, and fluid iPad app with spiffy digital only features to justify the high cost per issue vs. the print version, it was instead (afaict) a super slow PDF scan of the articles with a few little crappy low res videos tossed in. Virgin's "Project" is getting closer. But again, whoever decided on how navigation would be handled failed miserably in my opinion. The only thing I can come up with is that whoever they have in charge of the design of the digital versions at all these companies has never actually used an iPad themselves and is simply dictating off how things should be done, without ever picking up a device.
I prefer print magazines to digital. Simply because I only read magazines in the bathroom, when I'm on the toilet. (The older you get, the thicker the magazine you need to have handy.)
The magazines balance pretty well on the laundry hamper. And if they do slide off and fall on the floor, no harm done. I don't think an iPad would balance well on the hamper. And I certainly wouldn't want it to slide off and land on the floor.
Also, if you happen to run out of toilet paper... well, I've heard some of the iPad apps are really crap, but I think the print magazine would be better for that situation, too.
I read for many hours at a time; generally I read (fiction) from start to finish in one event. I have experienced absolutely no eyestrain with the iPad. I have control over the font size, the brightness, and I can force the reader to my preferred orientation. This is the Kindle app in particular I'm talking about, I haven't bought anything for the other readers yet. I've had the kindle app since they released it and my iPad has hundreds of books on it (all of which I've read.) I have no problem with the iPad's reading capabilities except, perhaps, in the very brightest sun -- which is a situation I would *never* try to read in anyway, because I value my eye health. However, inside the car on a bright, sunny day - no problem, again, can read for hours, no eyestrain.
Our actual Kindle, on the other hand, can't be read in the dark, changes pages too slowly, and doesn't allow me to keep an eye on my email and other stuff, not to mention my chess and scrabble games or provide access to the zillion and one useful apps I carry with me in my iPad. The iPad costs a lot more, but you get a lot more, and the only legitimate downside, if you really want to push the point, is the battery life as a reader can "only" be stretched to about 12 hours.
The Kindle is a low-budget, low-performance e-reader. The iPad is a high-budget, high-performance e-reader with a ton of extra capability. As in, it's a tablet computer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's not "digital newstands" that stink, it's "news" itself. It always has stunk, but it's not until we've had the Internet and free distribution channels for any alternatives that it's started to be seen for what it is.
Most, if not all of the content you find in any given "quality newspaper" is baloney. It's either political public opinion testing ("Obama MAY ban [something controversial]"), worthless human-interest crap and celebrity gossip, sport, re-heated press-releases, or pompous "this writer thinks..." editorials reading only slightly less well than most stand-up comedy routines ("Single mothers!?! What's up with them???!!").
In terms of content, I think newspapers and most magazines have hit the buffers now. They used to fulfil a middle-class need for mental masturbation, making people feel they had to "keep up" with the "news" or they would mysteriously fall victim to being "uninformed" about whether some politician wanted them to know about some policy or other (pretty much consumption of propaganda from government and industry). But with the web, blogs, Twitter, RSS whatever, it's now much easier to get what you need about news that matters to you in more concentrated form than newspapers or magazines are offering.
So the decline in news consumption has less to do with platforms or channels, and much more to do with the fact that the Internet has simply unmasked publications like Newsweek and Wired as being pretty poor-quality against the general free flow of information from non-mainstream sources. In short, content is RALLY king this time. Heck, on any given subject, I would get more out of /. than I would from reading Time's coverage of it.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Only when I can sit outside, reading my magazine, with a beer (martini, glass of wine, cup of coffee) in my hand, not having to move the screen around the page to view it, will I be happy. Then, I will really want one of these devices and replace my National Geographic and New Scientist subscriptions with digital ones.
But the battery has to last for days. This display has to be full color, readable outside. None of this flickering stuff that we have now. It has to be Letter sized (A4 for the Europeans).
I subscribe to Wired. I also read Wired's website when I don't have access to my subscription (I travel a lot). I'd prefer a Wired app to their website, but not for an extra $5 per month for duplicate content. Oh, wait, you say: but it has enhanced content! I don't give a crap about enhanced content, or I'd not subscribe to the magazine in the first place.
I also subscribe to Cook's Illustrated, both the physical magazine and their online site. (The online site gives me access to everything before I subscribed.) The iOS app is free, but also lets me log in for full content. Since Apple doesn't (yet) support subscriptions, I'd say that something like that would be a happy medium for Wired.
--Jim (me)
Wired's collapse from 100,000 iPad copies in June to 23,000 in November was most dramatic,
If they are like me, they decided more than 1/2 of Wired is crap they are not interested in and gave up. While I find there are usually one or two really interesting feature articles and several shorter pieces in a print copy of Wired, most of the other stuff is uninteresting to me or printed in a font that is so small that I refuse to get up to get a magnifying lens.
I'm just going to jump in here and rain -- tropically -- on your parade: Most people don't use the library. For anything. Speaking as a devoted library user who doesn't mind in the least paying for music, magazines and books. Of the subset of the population that actually reads, most still don't use the library on any regular basis, if at all. If they did, we'd need a lot more of them, I can tell you that. Our library is quiet as a tomb, and not just because people are behaving well. I can walk several aisles before I even *see* another person. The reading tables are mostly empty. The sound booths are empty. The librarian, with access to darned near anything you can think of via the inter-library loan system, sits there and just... reads. The library cat leaps into my arms when I show up. That's how pitiful library utilization is. I don't even know why we *have* a library, based on utilization.
The reason I don't buy canned magazines for my iPad is they take up lots of space that I'd much rather stuff with apps, music, and data like I/Q HF spectrum recordings (see the iSDR app... now we're [where "we" is a subset consisting of hams and SWLs] *really* having fun.) Well, that, and most magazines suck really bad, but they do that in paper form as well.
I *do* buy books for my iPad, and in pretty fair quantities -- don't buy printed books any longer at all. But I don't try to get them, or music, or games, or apps, or films, for free. Neither does my sweetheart or our kids. We understand the relationship between the elbow room required to create, the income required to obtain that elbow room, and our role in providing said income. The lack of that understanding, IMHO, is the basis for most of this copyright infringement: a clueless, egocentric and ethically bankrupt feeling of entitlement. Usually justified by uber-crapola like "information wants to be free" and "but by copying, I didn't take anything." That kind of childish thinking is absolutely appalling.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I bought the first iPad ep of Wired for $5 just because, and then never bought another. It was 600 MB for something that was less convenient to read than the print version because of their stupid flow tricks (and had different content in landscape and portrait modes, so if you wanted to see everything you had to keep flipping it - how asinine can you get?). And it ate up an app icon back before app folders.
On the other hand, I love Zinio, and subscribe to NatGeo, The Economist, New Scientist among others on it. Wish they had more. When Kindle gets mag subscriptions I'll check that out as well. It's far more convenient on the iPad, there's no waste, it's the same price or cheaper as the discount print subs, and you get your issues up to a week before the physical issues reach mailboxes. As long as it's all in a single app.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm disinclined to spend $5 for every issue of things that I pay $12/year for in paper. I have continued to buy most issues of Wired for the iPad because I really like the layout, but I haven't bought all of them because the cost is kind of ridiculous, and I've bought only a handful of issues of any magazines other than Wired. I'm hoping they (and others) offer subscriptions soon. It's crazy that it hasn't happened yet.
I don't know what it's like on Android devices, but this high cost does not carry over to the Kindle -- I get The Atlantic and The New Yorker on the Kindle at very reasonable prices. From magazine-specific apps to Zinio, though, iPad magazines are overpriced. I am really looking forward to photography magazines on the iPad once they realize that one of the big benefits can be to provide high-resolution images for everything they publish; it's irritating when space constraints force small images, and right now that irritation is carried straight to the electronic form ... but if they continue with obscene prices I guess it's just going to have to be paper.
Another big irritation e.g. with Wired for the iPad is sheer size. A third of a gig? That's a big hunk of the total storage of the machine, and while I can shuffle them on and off it is really irritating to have to wait for that to download to the device (and wait some more while it "installs"). The result is gorgeous, make no mistake, but I have to believe that there is a better way than providing images of every page.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Is this a surprise?
Access to the web and a countless number of apps all offer countless distractions competing for the attention of a user. And, more importantly, why pay for something that can be had for free online? There are certain types of content and a level of assured quality a reader might miss out on by not going with one of these publications, but even those things aren't guaranteed.
And admittedly consumers can be unreasonable at times about what they expect something should cost. I've read complaints that the cost of digital issues isn't low enough compared to the printed version. The problem is that most of the expense of producing that magazine isn't going into printing. The bulk of the expense goes into generating and laying out that content, something that has to be done for both print and digital.
I think we're far from seeing a solution. Perhaps publications need to move to more focused content. Maybe authors with a following will start selling their work directly to consumers.
I wouldn't say the problem, however, is that consumers don't want the content so much as the internet has instilled this attitude in people that content should be free.
Uh, of course not, dear.
All of this was predicated on "Single Sales" reported to Audit Bureau of Circulations... It seems like that might be an incomplete picture though. It doesn't seem to include sales through bodies like "Zinio" which offer electronic subscriptions, rather than through the iTunes market which appears to only offer issues on a one-for-one basis. Given that I can grab a 12 issue subscription to Popular Science from Zinio for $19.99 instead of paying $36 to buy all twelve of those issues from the iTunes Store, and I get the automatic convenience of delivery rather than having to remember each month to go find the new issue, I don't find it surprising that the sales numbers for individual issues is down. After the initial rush of "Ooh, shiny" people are inevitably going to look for lower cost options to the app store ripoffs.
Additionally, I haven't used the iPad specifically, but having tried to read pdf magazines on my 1024x768 monitor back in the day, I would imagine that it's also annoying to try to read the formatting in the magazines on a screen with such low resolution. It seems like the options would be to either show only part of a page at a time (making it annoyingly difficult to read columnar text) or to re-format the text to fit on the screen. If they're re-formatting the text to fit on the screen, then what makes a magazine better than reading the magazine's website? Ease of Archival?
I don't know about digital magazines, but most websites have boring content, poor contrast between background and text, and the webpage is not sized correctly for todays widescreen monitors.
Also, many webpages have a small amount of content lost in a sea of unrelated links, ranging from poorly placed ads to intrusive social media bookmarking toolbars to lists of other columns/blogs
I would say the hunger for something interesting to read is as great as ever, the quality and
layout
are not very good
To take an example, the New York Times has crisp, readable type, in a layout that is easy for the user; this took only, say, 200 years to figure out, so give slate a break
Someone finally realized digital magazines suck as bad as paper ones ? SURPRISE!
We have the web, which has largely obsoleted print periodicals. Why pay ten bucks for a weekly rag filled with advertising and infotising, when you can get the same bullshit on the web for free ? Oh, perhaps more to the point, who the hell still reads Wired.com in the age of RSS aggregators ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I doubt they would lie on it, but just to know, if Apple wanted to pretend one thing on the sales of a newspaper, how could one prove otherwise ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
It has nothing to do with people wanting it for free. They have literally done nothing more than repackaged their news stand edition and digitized it. We have the same old dinosaurs... doing the same antiquated things and expecting people to flock. When some one finally innovates and takes the risk necessary to make a successful product then they will fly. At the heart will be privacy and interaction.
The problem I have with magazines (not so much e-books) is that I pay to subscribe to read an issue, but then have to continue to subscribe indefinitely to read that issue or a story in it again. But I already paid for it! Then there's the problem with family and friends, and fair use. If my wife buys a magazine (she in fact subscribes to Nature, Science, and about five others for work) I can read it, if for no other reason than CA is a community property state so it belongs to me as well. If she got it on the Kindle or iPad (she has both) I'd have to have her device on hand to read it, there's no way to manage community property between multiple devices. While I have her Kindle she couldn't access anything. And then, in the future, if she no longer needed a particular journal for work she'd lose all OLD ones she already paid for, and she might still need those (because she reported on something and needs to retain the original references). And on top of that, she can't just photocopy an article to show someone for reference - fair use, but blocked by DRM. She could print them and file, but now we're adding work and hassles AND still pay more for less. If, in fact, there is a way to print without running afoul of some obscure IP law.
If publishers could sort these things out I think digital would be vastly superior to paper; it certainly requires a whole lot less physical space to store it!
Digital newsstands suck because of the pricing schemes, not the content or the media used to deliver them.
The Web is all about Marketing today, it's worse than TV, which is very bad, a great research tool cannot be found anywhere. The article directories are pretty much spam these days too because people use them for poor SEO link buildng.