Remember when the first iPad came out? I remember the excitement by Rupert Murdoch who thought it was going to be the future of publishing make him rich... well, richer. Now he's disappeared his Sun and Times papers behind a paywall.. and his relevance to political life has diminished and I wonder how his 'Daily' the iPad news magazine is doing... I don't think they ever even bothered to launch an UK version, I've not heard anything since the launch - so I'm guessing it can't be doing very well..
Then I happened across this piece:
Why Publishers Don't Like Apps
Written by someone who likewise started out being excited by the idea of an iPad magazine - only to find it really frustrating and abandoned it in favour of an online HTML 5 version.
I know I wrote a comment on the Guardian website about just this sort of thing - comparing the new electronic iPad/tablet e-magazines to CD-ROMs which were all the range for about 5 minutes before the internet took off...
oh, here it is:
16 March 2011 6:50AM
CD-ROMs where great weren't they?
You'd get a shiny disk
(usually inside a massive cardboard box) and put in into the slot on the
'puter and you had writing and pictures and sometimes sound and little
tiny movies. They were going to be this whole new publishing medium that
was going to revolutionise everything...
Then the internet happened. It revolutionised everything.
People barely remember CD-ROMS any more.
And
when I saw 'the Daily' app thing - I thought 'oh. It's like a news
magazine on a cd-rom - only without the shiny disc part' and oh - you
can turn it and swipe and... er, ok bored now. It's all a bit (whispers)
naff. Good content doesn't need all that whizz-bangery, not really - a
normal web page will do just fine. Thank you.
Plus one of the
things I've long hated about buying a physical paper -especially the
Sundays - is the sheer bulk - having endless section after section of
stuff that ends up unread in the recycling bin. Reading the paper on the
web is much better - getting to read only the bits I'm interested in...
but an app? a subscription? having to download hefty chunks of data I'm
probably not going to ever read? with advertising too? This is going to
save the newspaper/magazine publishing industry?
I think they could be running up a blind alley there.
You'd get a shiny disk (usually inside a massive cardboard box) and put in into the slot on the 'puter and you had writing and pictures and sometimes sound and little tiny movies. They were going to be this whole new publishing medium that was going to revolutionise everything...
Then the internet happened. It revolutionised everything.
People barely remember CD-ROMS any more.
And when I saw 'the Daily' app thing - I thought 'oh. It's like a news magazine on a cd-rom - only without the shiny disc part' and oh - you can turn it and swipe and... er, ok bored now. It's all a bit (whispers) naff. Good content doesn't need all that whizz-bangery, not really - a normal web page will do just fine. Thank you.
Plus one of the things I've long hated about buying a physical paper -especially the Sundays - is the sheer bulk - having endless section after section of stuff that ends up unread in the recycling bin. Reading the paper on the web is much better - getting to read only the bits I'm interested in... but an app? a subscription? having to download hefty chunks of data I'm probably not going to ever read? with advertising too? This is going to save the newspaper/magazine publishing industry?
I think they could be running up a blind alley there.