Who's Demanding Your Supply?

The article is an interesting read, but of note is the pricing models publishers charge--or would like to charge--for e-pubs.

Many publishers take issue with Amazon's relatively low ($10) pricing. Not to contest that an e-pub is manufactured one time and can be distributed endlessly, and doesn't have to consume materials in printing, be transported anywhere, or stored, they say it reduces the value--in the eyes of the consumer--of their printed works. Many publishers are tickled by Apple's pricing structure, which at least comes close to what you'd find in Borders.

Assuming Borders still existed.

Piracy debate aside (and yes, there is debate), everyone's falling all over themselves to create electronic versions of their publications, believing they're adding value. But are they adding viewers? Are people any more likely to pick up the iPad version of Esquire than they would at the checkout aisle?

Oh, sure, it's more convenient--with a (paid) 3G connection you can have the latest issue almost instantly from almost anywhere. And it'll have more stuff in it--embedded videos and interactive ads, so you can spin that dress around and see it from the back, mix and match accessories on the screen, see alternate colors, etc.--but at what price? Cheaper than the paper, static version, that consumes paper and ink, needs teams of QA people in all stages of production, needs to get shipped, stored, placed on shelves in multiple market places and, ultimately, discarded (hopefully for recycling)?

If you can get more content, cheaper, why would anyone buy the paper version of anything any more?

Arguably, an interactive digital version is more work: ad agencies need skilled people to create all these interactive ads, someone needs to shoot the video, and you need a new era of production people to incorporate all this content into the finished product.

Why are publishers devoting so many resources to the race to digital? Don't they already produce much of their content for the web?

While, as Crawford asserts, e-pubs are currently only around 3 percent of the market, everyone's anticipating the iPad will make e-pubs as ubiquitous as the iPod made the MP3 (which was in use years before). I've been reading electronic versions of books for years now, on my computer and my old Palm Pilot, both of which are able to get other info from other sources. The iPad (and potentially other e-readers) comes with a web browser. What's my choice, pay and download a couple hundred megabytes of content, much of it advertising, or go to the publisher's web site, which contains much of the same info and, more importantly, gets me right to where I want?

Hearst is currently saturating the app market with literally thousands of apps that do nothing but aggregate info that is freely available from other sources, hoping people will want to pay them for collecting it. Perhaps they're hoping to tap into a market or people who don't know how to set up a Google alert or an RSS feed, and don't mind shelling out a buck or two to keep tabs on whatever Rhianna or Lady Gaga or the Seattle Seahawks are up to. That is, after all, what lead to the prevalence of the iPod--ease of use, for what was previously something in the domain of serious propeller heads.

But back to piracy for a moment. If you print anything that people will pay to see, rest assured someone's gone and scanned it and is offering it for free online. Producing your content in digital form just removes a step.

All of the DRM embedded in all of this material can be (in some cases very easily) circumvented. All of that "rights management" only puts limits on your paying customers--the bootleggers will still produce it for free--as they have to worry that the version they bought to read on their Kindle might not be viewable on any other device. If you try to watch an episode of NBC's Heroes online, you have to have a computer that's compatible with Microsoft's latest DRM. Otherwise, with a little bit of tech savvy, you're downloading the entire season to your computer from sites that are quasi-legal, at best.

Easy beats free every time. That's why the iTunes store has been so successful--not because people want to pay, but because $1 is trivial to the ease of use of the distribution channel.

But many people feel Apple missed the mark with the iPad. If the iPod was about ease of use, the iPhone (and iPod Touch) was about convergence--a PDA, mini browser, media player and phone, that all fits in your pocket. Read Tad Nguyen's "5 Reasons Tablets suck and You won't buy one." Apple's Newton didn't miss the mark, it was just ahead of its time, sociologically and technologically. We're not not ready for the iPad, we just want more.

I can't get all these new, whizz-bang apps for my phone--I have an Android phone. Do you, as a publisher, want me to be able to read your digital pub? Better make it available to me. Right now, only Men's Health has Android versions of some of their mobile apps--a whole 2 of them. (disclosure, I formerly worked for Rodale.)

But make it in freely accessible formats viewable on multiple devices and we're right back to watching your paid content distributed freely over the intarwebs.

As BoingBoing.net contributor Cory Doctorow said about his book, Little Brother--electronic versions of which, in multiple formats, are available online for free--"I'm more concerned with getting more people into the tent, than I am that everyone inside the tent has paid."

Maybe publishers should be less concerned with how much they're going to charge for their digital versions of magazines--or if they're collecting--and see e-pubs as another mode of brand promotion.

Further reading:

1. "Publishing in the Age of Digital Piracy," Tad Crawford, AIGA.org [http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/publishing-in-the-age-of-digital-pi...]
2. "The future of reading," Josh Quittner, Fortune Magazine via CNN Money [http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/09/technology/tablet_ebooks_media.fort...]
3. "Print Vets Looking to Go Digital Find Switch Difficult," Nat Ives, Advertising Age [http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=142896]
4. "5 Reasons Tablets Suck And You Won't Buy One," Tuan Nguyen, Tom's Hardware US [http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tablet-islate-ipad-netbook-noteboo...]
5. Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) Magazine App Directory [http://www.magazine.org/digital/magazine-mobile-apps.aspx?fb=1]