Another interesting week.
Hot on the heels of the release of Kindle 2, comes very tantalising announcements from another direction. Plastic Logic have a very slick hardware platform that comes straight from sci-fi movies of the 90s. With a 8.5 x 11 inch screen, this is an eReader platform that is perfect for larger format publications like magazines and newspapers. It is then not surprising that a number of heavy-weight content providers like Zinio, McGraw-Hill and the New York Times have already signed up to support the platform for its release in 2010.
One area I see Plastic Logic making big inroads is in the music publishing industry because this is the first screen I have seen that is PERFECT to display music scores. Other attempts by orchestras and musical ensembles to try and reduce their dependence on paper have never been practical despite a fortune being spent in the quest. I can however see this technology sitting very comfortably in concert halls around the world in the next decade, a move that potentially could save music organisations and publishers millions of dollars each year.
So is it the hardware or the content that is driving these advances? As history has shown, you cannot succeed without both which is why I believe that Kindle and Plastic Logic each have bright futures.
Now we have to consider that instead of having just one device to satisfy our digital print appetites we will need at least two?
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Is Kindle the Digital Holy Grail?
This piece: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle has sparked some interesting comment the industry about print v. digital.
If you do not live in the USA you may wonder why is Kindle the comparison point for all things digital. This is a very cool piece of hardware from Amazon which has a number of innovations, the most important being its "electronic ink" display which uses reflected rather than projected light. It is actually a joy to read day or night.
Whether or not Kindle is a triumph of design, marketing, or both it is now the basis from which all competitors are judged. Those users lucky enough to get one (because demand has outstripped supply ever since its launch) are even more noticeable than the iPhone zealots of 2008.
If you have not got your hands on a Kindle yet, then if you read this blog I suspect you will not have long to wait.
If you do not live in the USA you may wonder why is Kindle the comparison point for all things digital. This is a very cool piece of hardware from Amazon which has a number of innovations, the most important being its "electronic ink" display which uses reflected rather than projected light. It is actually a joy to read day or night.
Whether or not Kindle is a triumph of design, marketing, or both it is now the basis from which all competitors are judged. Those users lucky enough to get one (because demand has outstripped supply ever since its launch) are even more noticeable than the iPhone zealots of 2008.
If you have not got your hands on a Kindle yet, then if you read this blog I suspect you will not have long to wait.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Why Digital Editions struggle
An interesting article here http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/print/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003685720 that uses the rather poor audit circulation results for digital edition and industry comment to highlight the move to Web-based Mag sites rather than digital editions.
While these figures cannot be ignored, there are a couple of reasons why I think digital editions still may have their day.
In this article http://www.ojr.org/ojr/technology/1054780462.php consultant Vin Crosbie lists circulation, context, familiarity, portability and convenience as compelling reasons for a digital edition.
I would also add two more:
1) The social cost: with the growing forced global social conscience about the plight of our world, the conversion of the earth's lungs into paper pulp combined with the environmental costs of moving it around will ultimately influence more consumer decisions in the future.
2) The financial cost: As the cost of print continues to spiral upwards, digital is becoming cheaper. It is possible to turn a magazine into a digital version almost instantaneously and economically (certainly a fraction of a cost a Mag site) and so the technology can be introduced without a huge capital cost. Also consumers seem to be prepared to pay for something packaged in this form whereas it is difficult to get anyone to pay for anything on the www.
It will be advertisers though that will drive this revolution. The www is almost anti-adverting with companies resorting to all sorts of tricks to try and catch the attention of the digital generation. With print and its digital cousin, advertising can happily co-exist with content which benefits both the advertiser and reader.
In my view as soon as we have the hardware that allows us to recreate the experience of print in a digital form then nothing will stop it.
While these figures cannot be ignored, there are a couple of reasons why I think digital editions still may have their day.
In this article http://www.ojr.org/ojr/technology/1054780462.php consultant Vin Crosbie lists circulation, context, familiarity, portability and convenience as compelling reasons for a digital edition.
I would also add two more:
1) The social cost: with the growing forced global social conscience about the plight of our world, the conversion of the earth's lungs into paper pulp combined with the environmental costs of moving it around will ultimately influence more consumer decisions in the future.
2) The financial cost: As the cost of print continues to spiral upwards, digital is becoming cheaper. It is possible to turn a magazine into a digital version almost instantaneously and economically (certainly a fraction of a cost a Mag site) and so the technology can be introduced without a huge capital cost. Also consumers seem to be prepared to pay for something packaged in this form whereas it is difficult to get anyone to pay for anything on the www.
It will be advertisers though that will drive this revolution. The www is almost anti-adverting with companies resorting to all sorts of tricks to try and catch the attention of the digital generation. With print and its digital cousin, advertising can happily co-exist with content which benefits both the advertiser and reader.
In my view as soon as we have the hardware that allows us to recreate the experience of print in a digital form then nothing will stop it.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
What to look for in Digital Publishers
The move from print to digital can be overwhelming due to the massive amount of choice available and the most complicated task seems to be finding the right provider that meets all of your requirements.
To help you in your quest, here are a few key points (in no particular order) to consider when deciding between all of the products currently available:
1) Platform (Web, Flash, Custom)
There are essentially three ways to go here:
Web-based content (based upon existing technologies the generally deliver static images)
Pros: Universal availability, economical
Cons: Limited user interface, no security
Enhanced Web Content via Flash/Silverlight
Pros: Highly Customisable Interface and enhanced functionality
Cons: High Bandwidth, only available on supported platforms (NOT iPhone), not natively available to search engine spiders
Custom Solutions(requires the installation of the supplied interface)
Pros: Highly Customisable Interface and enhanced functionality and security
Cons: Limited to supported computer systems
Flash is by far the most common platform, but even amongst this category there is a lot of variation between offerings.
Advice: Try before you buy!!
2) Integrated Commerce
If you want to sell your publication online, your providers should be able to provide integrated secure, multi-currency commerce options that can handle small monetary amounts. Being part of a larger stable of publications is a big advantage here and so an evaluation of market presence is worthwhile. In my experience digital sales are hard work unless you are very aggressive in your marketing. People will always prefer paper unless there are some BIG advantages in digital and so consider this when looking at selling your content online.
Advice: If you REALLY need commerce, find a provider that specializes in this area.
3) Customisation
Most of the free digital publisher offerings are built around the promotion of their brand names and may include advertising or other distractions. Most pay for use products allow a high level of integration and customisation so can provide a truly corporate solution.
Advice: For complete control, find solutions that allow you to customise the experience for your users.
4) Hosted or Local (or both)
Many newbies to digital publishing like the idea of hosting their digital offerings on their own websites. While there are some advantages to this approach, without considerable resources you may lose functionality and reliability when compared to the hosted offerings available. Some providers provide both Hosted and standalone offerings.
Advice: So long as your customer cannot tell if your solution is locally available or hosted elsewhere, they will not care.
5) Security/DRM
If the protection of your intellectual property is a prime concern, then all of the providers have various levels of security available with the more secure options being more expensive. Digital Right Management can though be an impediment to customer satisfaction, and there are few systems that are willing to totally guarantee the security.
Advice: DRM is expensive, and may be an impediment to sales.
6) Enhanced functionality (click capture, multi-media, forms, re-purposing)
Every digital offering is different and so it is important to get to know how each works to see that it your chosen offering fulfils your personal requirements.
Advice: If additional functionality such as multimedia, users interaction or content re-purposing is important, select a solution that fulfils these needs.
7) Reporting/Statistics/Search Engine Optimization
The depth of the reporting available is an important consideration for publishers and is especially useful to drive advertising revenue. Also choose providers that allow the content to be indexed by search engine robots to make sure that your publications feature on their pages.
Advice: Web statistics are an important tool to provide you with a level of detail and direct information about your customer base. Opening up the content to search engines is important for the visibility of your offerings.
8) Price
Free offerings generally offset their costs in providing the service with advertising and limited functionality. Paid options generally have more flexibility and reliability. Be careful though on the basis that you are charged. Some platforms, like Flash, can use huge amounts of bandwidth, and because you cannot necessarily control how many people see your offerings, be wary of arrangement that charge by Gigabyte or page view.
Advice: You pay for what you get
9) Support
Despite all of the advances, getting the best results out of digital publishing requires considerable time and expertise.
Advice: Get a partner that can work with you.
To help you in your quest, here are a few key points (in no particular order) to consider when deciding between all of the products currently available:
1) Platform (Web, Flash, Custom)
There are essentially three ways to go here:
Web-based content (based upon existing technologies the generally deliver static images)
Pros: Universal availability, economical
Cons: Limited user interface, no security
Enhanced Web Content via Flash/Silverlight
Pros: Highly Customisable Interface and enhanced functionality
Cons: High Bandwidth, only available on supported platforms (NOT iPhone), not natively available to search engine spiders
Custom Solutions(requires the installation of the supplied interface)
Pros: Highly Customisable Interface and enhanced functionality and security
Cons: Limited to supported computer systems
Flash is by far the most common platform, but even amongst this category there is a lot of variation between offerings.
Advice: Try before you buy!!
2) Integrated Commerce
If you want to sell your publication online, your providers should be able to provide integrated secure, multi-currency commerce options that can handle small monetary amounts. Being part of a larger stable of publications is a big advantage here and so an evaluation of market presence is worthwhile. In my experience digital sales are hard work unless you are very aggressive in your marketing. People will always prefer paper unless there are some BIG advantages in digital and so consider this when looking at selling your content online.
Advice: If you REALLY need commerce, find a provider that specializes in this area.
3) Customisation
Most of the free digital publisher offerings are built around the promotion of their brand names and may include advertising or other distractions. Most pay for use products allow a high level of integration and customisation so can provide a truly corporate solution.
Advice: For complete control, find solutions that allow you to customise the experience for your users.
4) Hosted or Local (or both)
Many newbies to digital publishing like the idea of hosting their digital offerings on their own websites. While there are some advantages to this approach, without considerable resources you may lose functionality and reliability when compared to the hosted offerings available. Some providers provide both Hosted and standalone offerings.
Advice: So long as your customer cannot tell if your solution is locally available or hosted elsewhere, they will not care.
5) Security/DRM
If the protection of your intellectual property is a prime concern, then all of the providers have various levels of security available with the more secure options being more expensive. Digital Right Management can though be an impediment to customer satisfaction, and there are few systems that are willing to totally guarantee the security.
Advice: DRM is expensive, and may be an impediment to sales.
6) Enhanced functionality (click capture, multi-media, forms, re-purposing)
Every digital offering is different and so it is important to get to know how each works to see that it your chosen offering fulfils your personal requirements.
Advice: If additional functionality such as multimedia, users interaction or content re-purposing is important, select a solution that fulfils these needs.
7) Reporting/Statistics/Search Engine Optimization
The depth of the reporting available is an important consideration for publishers and is especially useful to drive advertising revenue. Also choose providers that allow the content to be indexed by search engine robots to make sure that your publications feature on their pages.
Advice: Web statistics are an important tool to provide you with a level of detail and direct information about your customer base. Opening up the content to search engines is important for the visibility of your offerings.
8) Price
Free offerings generally offset their costs in providing the service with advertising and limited functionality. Paid options generally have more flexibility and reliability. Be careful though on the basis that you are charged. Some platforms, like Flash, can use huge amounts of bandwidth, and because you cannot necessarily control how many people see your offerings, be wary of arrangement that charge by Gigabyte or page view.
Advice: You pay for what you get
9) Support
Despite all of the advances, getting the best results out of digital publishing requires considerable time and expertise.
Advice: Get a partner that can work with you.
Monday, July 7, 2008
PDF Hell
Adobe's PDF format is more that 15 years old and so it should not be surprising just how different one PDF is to the next. Anyone who works with PDF files for their content and layout will have encountered PDF files that all look perfectly fine on screen but the system hides a myriad of complications that can render the file unusable.
As PDF files are the basis of most print and digital systems it is worth the time to make the PDF file as best you can for the purpose as the output is only as good as the source.
For users that are creating PDF files for digital publications, there are a few more challenges that I regularly have to overcome and a couple of these are listed here:
1) Gigantic PDFs - This is a problem that rarely bothers the print industry, but huge PDFs can severely impact the performance and distribution of digital versions. Unfortunately the only tool that makes any real difference in Acrobat is the "Save As" option which can reduce the size of a PDF a little and should also be the always be the last step of any editing (the SAVE button does NOT do the same thing). More significant size reductions though usually require 3rd-party software like those created by Apago (www.apago.com) and Enfocus (www.enfocus.com) but these solutions will not work on every file. The best answer is to see if you can encourage your designers to get rid of all of the layers and flatten everything (apart from text) before they export to PDF. I remember one motoring magazine which should have been about 20Mb was 400Mb and it became clear that the VW logo that was used throughout was a fantastically complicated EPS file that alone was 20Mb in size which should have been obvious as it Acrobat about 1 minute to render it on screen.
2) Fonts - One of the great features of PDF files is that the document can look exactly as the designer intended, but this ONLY works if these fonts are included in the PDF document itself (an option in the save screen). That is simple enough but when InDesign is used to create the PDF file, it often changes the fonts into a special type called CID or Identity-H which look perfectly normal on screen, but make the text impossible to search or index (the second option discussed here http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=329611&sliceId=2 is the only way around this that I know).
I will share more tips on PDF creation for digital in later editions of this blog.
As PDF files are the basis of most print and digital systems it is worth the time to make the PDF file as best you can for the purpose as the output is only as good as the source.
For users that are creating PDF files for digital publications, there are a few more challenges that I regularly have to overcome and a couple of these are listed here:
1) Gigantic PDFs - This is a problem that rarely bothers the print industry, but huge PDFs can severely impact the performance and distribution of digital versions. Unfortunately the only tool that makes any real difference in Acrobat is the "Save As" option which can reduce the size of a PDF a little and should also be the always be the last step of any editing (the SAVE button does NOT do the same thing). More significant size reductions though usually require 3rd-party software like those created by Apago (www.apago.com) and Enfocus (www.enfocus.com) but these solutions will not work on every file. The best answer is to see if you can encourage your designers to get rid of all of the layers and flatten everything (apart from text) before they export to PDF. I remember one motoring magazine which should have been about 20Mb was 400Mb and it became clear that the VW logo that was used throughout was a fantastically complicated EPS file that alone was 20Mb in size which should have been obvious as it Acrobat about 1 minute to render it on screen.
2) Fonts - One of the great features of PDF files is that the document can look exactly as the designer intended, but this ONLY works if these fonts are included in the PDF document itself (an option in the save screen). That is simple enough but when InDesign is used to create the PDF file, it often changes the fonts into a special type called CID or Identity-H which look perfectly normal on screen, but make the text impossible to search or index (the second option discussed here http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=329611&sliceId=2 is the only way around this that I know).
I will share more tips on PDF creation for digital in later editions of this blog.
Monday, June 23, 2008
DPAC 10 out of 10 for Persistance
You have to hand it to the organisers of The Digital Publishing & Advertising Conference (DPAC) http://www.dpaconference.com to be held this week in NY. My weekly reminders to register have turned into daily ones and so I think I know the event is on, and no, I will not be there.
Mind you, if I were able to attend I would be fascinated to hear from the speakers at the event to see what the say. I would not necessarily be one of the "converted" though as I have found that marketing the concept of digital print distribution is easy - there is almost nothing that you can say against it. Unfortunately the sales figures are still way below expectations. I believe there are only 2 areas that are really working - free stuff and adult content. There has been success with some publishers that dramatically scale back the price of their digital content and yet the sales ratios between print and digital are still only in single figures for the most popular titles (I bet that is not discussed!)
Here is an interesting development, one publisher I know is making available a digital version of its printed content it sells absolutely free. OK, the digital version may come out a couple weeks after the printed one, but the content is exactly the same (although the digital version may include some extra multimedia content). The reason? Their advertising revenue is moving so quickly away from print to the www that they see more value in the online version than the printed one. While there is a demand for print they will supply it, but they cannot wait for the digital world to take over. A brave new world?
If anyone reading this attended the conference, I would love to hear more about what you got out of it.
Mind you, if I were able to attend I would be fascinated to hear from the speakers at the event to see what the say. I would not necessarily be one of the "converted" though as I have found that marketing the concept of digital print distribution is easy - there is almost nothing that you can say against it. Unfortunately the sales figures are still way below expectations. I believe there are only 2 areas that are really working - free stuff and adult content. There has been success with some publishers that dramatically scale back the price of their digital content and yet the sales ratios between print and digital are still only in single figures for the most popular titles (I bet that is not discussed!)
Here is an interesting development, one publisher I know is making available a digital version of its printed content it sells absolutely free. OK, the digital version may come out a couple weeks after the printed one, but the content is exactly the same (although the digital version may include some extra multimedia content). The reason? Their advertising revenue is moving so quickly away from print to the www that they see more value in the online version than the printed one. While there is a demand for print they will supply it, but they cannot wait for the digital world to take over. A brave new world?
If anyone reading this attended the conference, I would love to hear more about what you got out of it.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Welcome!
With a background that encompasses both print publishing and technology, I have been spending quite a deal of my professional life recently examining how these areas interact and it is my belief that there are big changes afoot.
Strangely, it is not so much the march of technology that will be the catalyst for change, but the reliance of print publishing on the diminishing natural resources of paper and petrol for their existence. With higher production and distribution costs and increased competition from the Internet, many publishers are being forced to re-examine the fundamentals of their entire business model to survive in the 21st Century.
It is then not surprising that a large number of technology companies are investing large amounts of money into technologies that will help publishers bridge that gap.
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