Musings on the future of print media
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how I might be able to somehow cash in on the whole iPhone/iPod/iPad phenomenon. Hell, I’d be happy to make $50 a month off of it. It’s a huge ecosystem. 80 MILLION devices so far, 3 BILLION apps downloaded. People who have never used the Objective C programming language before spend six weeks creating a game and get 4 MILLION downloads - at $2.99 each. Do the math. Time to quit the day job.
Unfortunately, suffering as I do from a touch of the ADHD, my mind tends to wander. It makes it difficult to focus on a plan or a strategy. It helps me do big-picture thinking though. And I’ve come up with some observations.
I have long envisioned a way for books, magazines and newspapers to go digital. The first time I saw e-ink technology in a flexible format I knew what I wanted. One sheet of plastic with e-ink tech in it. On the left-hand side would be a rigid plastic spine. In this spine would be a memory card, a few buttons and a USB port. You plug this device in to a PC and synchronize it. Voila. Read all you want on the subway or the back porch. No wifi or 3g needed. Subscribe online. This sort of setup fits perfectly with an iTunes-like subscribe-and-download model. I’m sure I’m not the only one to envision things in this way, but you wouldn’t know it to look at how long it has taken for such a product to hit the market.
Most of the work in this realm seems to have targeted books. The devices have been small, heavy and expensive. DAMNED expensive. The Kindle was the first one to get to a lower price-point. The Kindle reader app for the iPhone is free. The phone and it’s data plan is not. And yet none of these matched my vision for what I thought was the future of print media, and almost completely ignored newspapers and magazines.
And now, fi
nally, after all these years the device I imagined so many years ago has come to the marketplace! Well, ok, it’s not for sale yet, but it debuted at this year’s CES show in Las Vegas and they have a web site. It’s 9x11, a quarter of an inch thick and weighs a pound. It has 3G and WiFi plus a USB slot. Very high-res, SD memory card slot, 4GB internal memory, speaker, earplug jack. Full touchscreen!
It’s called the Skiff.
Sounds awesome! But there is no price or release date yet. And I can’t help but wonder what the Skiff executives thought as they watched Steve Jobs’ iPad presentation. I’m pretty sure there was a sinking feeling when they heard the $499 price. I really like the way this device looks, and yet it may be a case of too little, too late.
The iPad has a few advantages here. It is about the same size, 1/4 inch thicker, a half pound heavier. But I don’t think that’s enough of a difference to give the Skiff much help. The iPad has color. And a web browser. And an app store with over 140,000 apps. And a book store. Oh, and one more thing…
Interactivity
One thing that happened while people were trying to figure out how to digitize print media is that the average reader is no longer satisfied with static content. The web browser has trained us all to expect hyperlinks that allow us to immediately *see* and read details about footnotes and references. To make matters worse, they also expect animation and color and video and audio. And that is exactly what print media has provided the average reader on their web pages and apps. I can see photo galleries and watch video clips from the NY Times web site. So why should anyone think that I would want to go back to reading static non-interactive content in 32 shades of grey?
So for print media to take their writers and reporters and survive this transition to mobile digital consumption they are going to need to provide the reader with an experience that is at least as interactive as their own web sites. And that requires more than e-ink. The iPad might be the answer. The App Store allows publishers to create an app that will deliver their content and also allow readers to push a button to subscribe and make purchases. They don’t want to be an ebook on an iBooks shelf. They need to be separate apps. The larger publishing houses should seriously consider one big app which readers can use to subscribe to all of their magazines and newspapers. The Fox app anyone? Times app? This will require some thinking because there will be a transition period. And certainly the iPad will never take over the entire mobile space for digital reading, but the trend is definitely moving toward slim, lightweight interactive devices for consumption. Publishers need to figure out how to monetize that, pronto!