Reinventing Magazines for Digital Distribution

As the Atlantic's Derek Thompson rightly notes, however, these companies will have a hard time charging for content that they are already giving away for free online. To make this venture work, these publishers would either have to offer unique content in their digital magazines or they would have to erect a paywall around all of their sites.

Most importantly, these companies will also have to reinvent their magazines for the digital age along the lines of Wired's app for the rumored Apple Tablet or Condé Nast's iPhone version of GQ (iTunes link). One of the reasons these publications are suffering is the long lead time that makes most of the content outdated by the time it arrives at the printer. While this still works for magazines like the Atlantic, which mostly publishes in-depth long form articles that aren't time-sensitive, gossip magazines can't really compete with TMZ or Perez Hilton. Just putting a digital copy of their magazines online simply won't cut it.

The digital PC Magazine magazine, which you can download a free sample of at Zinio, employs Flash technology and opens in a web browser window. We perused the June edition, but didn't see a lot of interactivity. Also many of the hyperlinks simply opened up pages in PC Magazine's website. A letter from a reader in the feedback section of this issue noted how he likes to print out parts of the digital PC Magazine. That implies to us that PC Magazine hasn't fully escaped the shackles of print. In fact it seems very much like the print magazine simply transplanted into an eBook. The magazine has plenty of fans, and is known for its reviews, however, it still has a few tricks to learn about digital magazines by the look of it.

Back in December 2006 we reviewed a new online magazine that impressed us with its flashy design: Avantoure. It's still going strong 2.5 years later. With the tagline "life is a game," Avantoure features rich media such as animations, interactive content, music, audio interviews, movie clips and TV commercials. The May-June 09 issue is as visually stunning as ever, using Flash as its format. It's presented online, within the browser, but is also available as an offline Flash file. The magazine costs £25 for 6 issues, or £4.50 for one issue. Generally speaking Avantoure is what PC Magazine should be aspiring to be.

So to answer the question that headlines this post: has the time of digital magazines arrived? Most people would agree that reading a magazine should be a relaxing, pleasurable experience. However if you're reading a digital magazine on your computer, chances are that you aren't especially relaxed. The savior of digital magazines though will be the increasing market penetration of eBook Readers, such as Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader device. With those devices, you will be able to read magazines in a relaxing manner on the plane and on your sofa.

R.U. Sirius, who edits a new digital magazine called h + Magazine, recently blogged that he didn't take to the digital format immediately. He wrote that he first tried the flash digital magazine format out "when I was in a hurried and impatient mood... and it confounded and irritated me." Later the same night, he returned to it "in a relaxed mood" and he found it "very very very quite readable." Of course he would say that, but it does reinforce that digital magazines need to be a relaxing read for people to truly enjoy them.

Let us know in the comments which online magazines you're reading at the moment, we'd love to find out some new ones.

PC Magazine has been publishing a digital edition since 2002, but at least in its current version, this digital edition only imitates the print version in its layout, which is definitely not the easiest and most convenient way to read text. Also, the problem for print magazines is not the fact that they are physical objects, but simply the fact that a publication which only appears once a month will always lag behind its online competition, especially in a fast moving business like technology news.

A number of publishers have been experimenting with digital editions similar to PC Magazine's. The New York Times, for example, has its Times Reader application, which allows offline access to the paper. However, in a world where online access is becoming ubiquitous, these products are at best bridges to a pure online experience.

PC Magazine, of course, already has a strong online presence and a number of very interesting blogs and online video shows. The value of PC Magazine often wasn't in its news content anyway, but in its reviews - all of which are available online, without the need to subscribe to a digital edition of the magazine.

Would You Subscribe to a Digital Edition?

While we are glad to see that a quality publication like PC Magazine is taking steps to secure its future, it is not clear to us why PC Magazine would put time and effort into producing a digital edition of its magazine instead of just focusing on the online experience.

To keep up with the changing times, the new National Geographic Games division (NGG), will attempt to connect with people once again on the platforms of our modern age, including the Wii, Playstation 3, Nintendo DS, PC and Mac, the PS3 Network, and the iPhone. There will also be free Flash games online at nationalgeographic.com/channel. As always, the company's goal is to encourage people to explore their world, this time though, it's through play.

Lest you think these games will be wimpy attempts at educational experiences, it's worth nothing that Chris Mate, a former executive at Take2 Interactive, the company behind "Grand Theft Auto," will serve as VP and GM of the games venture. Hopefully, his history, which also includes Bethesda Softworks, will bring some spunk to the usually dry "learning is fun!" gaming experience.

The first game to launch will be "Herod's Lost Tomb," an online game which blends in content from both the December 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine as well as the National Geographic Channel feature broadcast on the biblical figure King Herod, architect of the ancient world.

Time Inc. launched its much anticipated magazine meta-subscription service Maghound today. The idea is that for a small fee, starting at three titles for $4.95 a month, you can swap out magazine subscriptions every month. It's like Netflix for magazine subscriptions, but unlike Netflix the selection is awful. We like the idea a lot though and we hope it will improve.

At launch, it has 240 titles, about 40 less that what Time Inc said at a trade show in June, Folio notes. In addition to all Time inc titles, of course, it has titles from Conde Nast (not all), Rodale, and others. Notably missing is any magazine from the Hearst stable, including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and others. Some of the other notables I checked on which are missing are The Atlantic, Business Week, Wired, The Economist, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic .

There's a whole world of independent magazines beyond the big titles as well, see directory sites like NewPages.com and Mygazines. We'd love to see Maghound include titles from those directories. Is it in Time's interest to do so? Probably not.

We had high hopes for another magazine experiment called Brijit, but that innovative service went belly up in May and is no longer even online.

We hope print periodicals aren't dead, because we really like reading them. If this is the best the industry can do, though, then there's probably not much hope.

We like what Maghound is trying to do, and Time's distribution largess might help it work, but the service at launch isn't interesting enough to leave us anything but dissapointed.

Features

OpenZine tries to differentiate itself from blogging sites through a number of features. One of the main ideas behind OpenZine is that you don't have to create all the content yourself. Instead, you can mix-and-match content from other zines to create your own page. Every time you see something interesting on another page that you would like to add to yours, you can clip that content and then add it to your site. Attribution is handled automatically by OpenZine.

At this point, however, there is not a lot of content available on the site. Also, integration with Flickr, which allows users to post under the Creative Commons license, would seem like a natural fit if you are looking for images to showcase on your site. As of now, however, you are pretty much restricted to either bringing your own images or clipping them from the limited pool of other zines.

Besides clipping content, you can, of course, add your own text and images to every page and add YouTube videos. Sadly, no other video services are directly supported at this time, but you can use the embed code from other video sites in any text field.

OpenZine also includes a number of social networking features, including a private messaging service and commenting functions.

One major limitation of OpenZine, however, is that you can only choose from eight different layouts, which wouldn't be so bad, if these templates didn't exactly define and restrict where text, images, and videos can go on a page.

Highlight: Image Editor

One feature we really liked was the image editor, which has a series of relatively sophisticated functions, including the ability to blend images together and to add shadows and various geometric figures. This image editor is invoked for creating cover pages for your zines, as well as for editing pictures to be featured on your pages. In our experience, the image editor for OpenZine goes far beyond what we have seen in any blogging platforms so far.

Lots of Ads

Overall, though, even your best planned layout on OpenZine might be crushed by the Google AdSense advertising OpenZine displays on your site. Even the text and image editors feature advertising, which takes away from the experience, especially because few of these ads are actually relevant to the content and all of them are image ads. We understand that OpenZine needs to pay bills as well, but it would be nice if users could maybe choose the placement of ads or if they at least didn't appear in the editing modes.

Verdict

OpenZine could be a far more worthwhile exercise if you could personalize your templates a bit more. Right now, the look and feel of most zines on the site is similar to a MySpace page, where the pages are crowded with numerous YouTube videos, images, and short snippets of text.

The real question, though, is if OpenZine offers enough flexibility over a regular blog. After all, when publishing a blog, you don't have to have lots of content available at the same time. You just add more content every day and you layout can easily resemble that of a magazine if you choose to do so.

We can see a niche for OpenZine among users who want to publish a travel diary or artists who want to showcase their work. In most cases, though, other publishing mechanisms would offer more flexibility and control than OpenZine does.

If you would like to hear more about OpenZine, here is a short video describing the service:

MagCloud is another project to emerge from HP Labs. Earlier this year, HP Labs launched BookPrep, a print-on-demand service for out-of-print books. Now, they're delivering MagCloud, a project devoted to providing small independent publishers the ability to publish digitized magazines as well as economically print on demand. Using HP's Indigo technology, the magazines are printed when ordered in full color on 80 lb paper with saddle-stitched covers.

How To Use MagCloud

To get started with creating a custom magazine, you must first create a PDF of your content using a tool that outputs high-resolution PDFs, like Adobe InDesign. You'll also need to have a PayPal account in order to sell the magazines with the markup you choose. Since the service is in beta at the moment, orders must be sent to a U.S. shipping address. Publishers can request an invitation here.

Browsing the MagCloud Selections

For those just interested in reading the MagCloud produced zines, you can create an account and then browse the selections of magazines available or subscribe to receive email notifications from the publisher as to when new issues are available. You can also choose to subscribe via RSS, but the feed does not contain the magazine's content as posts, only notifications when new issues are released.

There are already tons of magazines to browse through in diverse categories ranging from Art to Food to Literature to Finance and so much more. For example, RWW readers might be interested in the soon-to-launch magazine "The Rubyist" (for Rubyists, by Rubyists), which will focus on technical content and happenings in the world of Ruby, Rails, and Merb. Or for the more business-minded, the magazine "Professionally Speaking" may appeal, which gives tips on public speaking, giving presentations, etc.

Another great thing about a self-published magazine is that you can just purchase the issues you're interested in - the same as buying from the newsstand. You don't have to commit to a full subscription.

Previewing a MagCloud Magazine

A Great Addition To The POD World

As we noted earlier this year, the print-on-demand industry has really been heating up. Amazon launched CreateSpace and another Lulu-esque service called Wordclay began offering paperback publishing. Even casual publishing outfits like CafePress and Blurb have continued to offer options for less serious writers. Now, MagCloud seems to be a perfect addition to join the POD space. If you want to join MagCloud yourself, the signup page is here.

Here's Sean's full comment:

"My 'gut feeling' thoughts exactly...good to hear them supported with data!

I'm a great example of the digital native (though I haven't been a teen for some time, I was an early net adopter in the early 90's when I actually was a teen). Like you mentioned, I hardly ever read books. Probably only about one or two a year, and even then they're typically non-fiction as opposed to 'literature'. Magazines? Only during flights.

Despite that, I scored a perfect 6/6 GMAT writing score, and my while I forget the specific verbal vs. quantitative, my overall was in the 97th percentile.

Granted, one could argue I'm missing out on the cultural value associated with great literary works, however because I tend to lean toward heavier reading (quality news, science, etc) I don't think I'm missing out too much with regards to developing or maintaining my reading ability. And because of blogs, forums, and email, I probably write several dozen pages worth of text each week, which is probably more than many members of previous generations can claim!"

However, in general terms, Jobs was speaking towards a growing trend in the print industry. It's not that people don't read anymore - of course, many still do - it's just that today's young generation of consumers, and Jobs' future customers, aren't bothering to read "offline media" - that is books, magazines, or newspapers.

Newspapers

A recent comScore Plan Metrix study backs this up, finding that young news readers are less likely to read printed newspapers. In fact, those that are between 18 and 24 are 38 percent more likely than average to NOT read a newspaper during a typical week. However, non-newspaper readers are heavy news consumers - in fact, they read a lot, they just prefer to get their news online, and not just from online newspaper web sites, like WSJ.com, but also from TV News brands (like CNN and FoxNews) and Internet News brands (like Digg and Topix).

“Non-newspaper readers are a particularly important segment to reach because they are heavier than average news consumers – they just prefer to consume it in a digital format,” says Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore.

Magazines

Again, overall, the magazine industry is doing OK, except when it comes to young readers. On March 6th, members of the magazine publishing industry held a MediaTel seminar where the challenges of their industry were discussed. The problem is not in readership decline, it seems, but in teen readership decline.

Duncan Edwards, chief executive of National Magazine Company, said that, despite a slight down-turn in actively purchased magazines by 1.1 per cent, the print magazine industry still generates huge profits.

However, MediaTel managing director Derek Jones said the industry must find new ways of engaging with the teen market which has suffered a steady decline in sales. The problem, according to ShortList chief executive Mike Soutar, is that the younger generation like to consume media for free and they have come to expect free content through online extensions.

Books

In 2004 the U.S. Department of Education asked 17-year-olds "How often do you ... read for fun on your own time?" With no limitation specified on where or how this reading was done, 19% replied "Never or hardly ever", more than double the 1984 rate of 9%. Since online reading wasn't specified, the kids probably took this to mean, "how often do you read books?" Still, the figure should not be dismissed as it highlights the decline of offline reading activities.

The study found also that as kids enter high school and adolescence they tend to read less often, and their reading skills stagnate or worsen compared with teens of previous years. In 2003, only 4% of American high-school graduates who did not earn college degrees could be called "proficient" readers.

Yikes.

The Flip Side

Some, like Steve Johnson of the Guardian, says that reports of reading decline doesn't take into consideration the amount of reading we doing on our computers every day. He counters a recent NEA report "To Read or Not to Read," which details the decline of literacy in the U.S.

Johnson writes, that it "raises an interesting question: if people are reading less, why haven't [standarized test] scores dropped more dramatically?" He goes on to point out that a recent British Library study of onscreen research activities found that "new forms" or reading are emerging...like "power browsing," a habit of the new "digital natives."

He concludes that "the only reason the intellectual benefits are not measurable is that they haven't been measured yet. There have been almost no studies that have looked at the potential positive impact of electronic media."

Meanwhile, Sunil Iyengar of the NEA and Mark Bauerlin, formerly of the NEA, say that Johnson ignores some of the study's findings, like the fact that "non-required" reading (picking up a book for the fun of it) is down 7% since 1992 for all adults, and 12% for 18-24 year olds. They claims that Johnson chooses to look only at other findings that support his opinion.

They point out that, sure, "new forms of reading" may exist, but it's not a good thing: the study claims that "from undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, 'flicking' behavior in digital libraries. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all ... Society is dumbing down."

Iyengar and Bauerlin even cite that there is evidence of damage linked with excessive viewing and surfing - enough sufficient data, in fact, which led the American Academy of Pediatrics to advise parents to keep children's rooms free of electronic media.

Conclusion

So is a diet of only digital media bad? With today's youngest generations being some of the first to be raised in a world where the internet and computers are as common as TVs and microwaves ovens, it will take more time to thoroughly examine the side effects, if any, of an all-digital lifestyle. However, successes like those of the Harry Potter books, show that even now, kids will read print media if it's good enough and captures their interest. And in the meantime, whether they read online or off, isn't it just good enough that they are, in fact, reading?

Abstracts are written by paid freelancers who get $5 per accepted abstract. In other words, prolific readers and writers will write up these review/abstracts for fun and Brijit will pick up the tab at a nice dinner every once in awhile. I think that's a pretty viable value proposition for many chronic magazine readers. Does it scale economically to be paying for the abstracts? This angel funded company is no doubt aiming at high-end advertisers targeting upscale magazine readers, so I think it might work out quite well.

The abstracts come with a rating, from zero dots (reading this article is not a priority) to three dots (exceptional, a must-read, not to be missed.) The reviews/abstracts I've seen are helpful and interesting; I now know which articles I'm going to make sure to read in the newest Wired, for example.

There's a comments field, ratings, affiliate links to subscribe to the publications and links to read articles online where possible. There are RSS feeds all over the site, which will make the difference between visiting Brijit once and keeping an eye on the highlights over time. The site has an austere but usable design. I'm really impressed.

I've probably said too much though, already, as this has been far more than 100 words. Check it out for yourself and subscribe to some feeds; you'll likely feel better informed after just a handful of months and you could feel more justified in still getting those wonderful, old fashioned print periodicals delivered to your house.