Adobe has announced a collaboration with Apple to host digital magazines in a dedicated space "Newsstand" on the iTunes, so publications are not lost in the forest of apps and music titles there.
Why the sudden land grab by Adobe & Apple?
It is rumoured that Google is talking to publishers unhappy with the iTunes 30% revenue shave and refusal to share subscriber data.
More annoyance for consumers: the iPAD app is a single-title dump and loses subscribers the searchability of the web versions of magazines. They also have to pay US$4.99 per download when they can buy the print versions for substantially less as subscribers!
Zinio pioneered the digital newsstand for magazines nearly 10 years ago. Magazines just upload their PDFs and Zinio converts to their digital format and sells either single copies or term subscriptions which they split with publishers.
Admittedly Zinio too has been slow off the mark to leverage rich-media and to allow easy connect to social networks - something which the new Amazon FIRE will offer on the cloud with their superfast SILK browser.
Driving using the rear-view mirror?
Adobe has for long been the preferred creative software of choice for magazine designers. Macs and CS suites can be found at almost any magazine house around the globe. Not all legit software of course but still the preferred one.
Adobe was so successful in charging software by user, they completely missed the opportunity to gather the global magazine design community into a cloud-based service which would have given it undisputed leadership.
It would have vastly expanded the Adobe user base and locked them in with affordable pricing, storage and retrieval facility, a ready archiving service and upgrades.
Adobe's per-piece software sales model and past success sowed the seeds for its loss of vision. The same blindness that has disabled newspaper publishers the last two decades. Organizational focus is on holding on to the past business model and to continue to hit users with expensive software upgrades.
Google's Cloud & self-publishing functionalites
Google has been a cloud-based service forever and its Chrome has added considerable features to text, graphics, video and photo sharing, organizing, archiving, searching, storage and retrieval.
It dominates online contextual advertising and aggregates news content across the globe in multiple languages. It has a 'micro-penny' formula for ad revenue distribution to participating newspapers globally.
Bloggers are already leveraging these actively. The Google platform may see a proliferation of topic & subject experts enlarge the space for content creation, access and consumption.
What improvements for digital publications?
The big players piling in to platform digital publications for consumers can only improve the quality, pricing and choice for end-users.
The tablet platform allows a truly experiential approach to rich-content management. It does not make sense to take the linear print publishing logic and bolt videos or photo galleries to it.
One unsolved and annoying problem with downloading colour-intensive magazines is the file size - 150 to 250 Mb - which can take anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to download.
A Singapore company called Smarttpapers, www.smarttpapers.com has innovated a super-compression software engine which shrinks high resolution files beyond Zip and similar tools. This downloads magazines at a flip of the eye!
Amazingly, there is NO degradation of image quality. It is now being adopted by Singapore Airlines to convert its daily load of hardcopy newspapers and magazines to on-screen digital menus. This is expected to save SIA million$ annually in fuel costs.
IATA the airline industry body has co-opted Smarttpapers as its 'strategic partner' and is advocating a similar switch by other member airlines to reduce costs.
Digital publishers would do well to explore this breakthrough to streamline their digital files for subscribers.
ENDS
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