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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.
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.
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!
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
Reading books in digital is great because it is a linear process. But how many people read magazines in a start to finish fashion?
*Raises hand* Scientific American, Wired, The Economist, and MAKE.
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
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.
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?"
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)
I hope the DRM will always be trivial to remove.
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 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.
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.
No, the Kindle is a purpose-built book substitute, while the iPad is a tablet-format computer. If I want to read a book, I'm much more likely to reach for my Kindle than my iPad - it's lighter (you didn't mention this, but if you've got both, you know how true it is), its battery life is better, the screen is much easier to read in variable light situations, and the 3G is free. If I could only take one device, it would be the iPad, because it can do much more. Then again, I'm a lot better off than the average Joe, and if you only had $700 to spend I'm not sure that iPad is a better thing than a netbook + a Kindle.