iPhone / iPod touch Digital Magazine Demo

This is Texterity's take on the whole "Magazines on iPhones" angle.

Nice usability features but doomed to failure in the UK thanks to our (current) availability of wifi

Zinio launches iPhone newsstand

Digital magazine specialist Zinio is offering iPhone and iTouch users their top selling titles to download for free. They have also launched a mobile newsstand, from which the users of Apple's gorgeous new products can get their magazines.

The Zinio reader will allow users to flip through pages as per the full PC version.

Kindle (no) surprise

And here it is... Amazon's new kindle portable ebook reader.

Utilizing a new high-resolution display technology called electronic paper, Kindle provides a crisp black-and-white screen that resembles the appearance and readability of printed paper. The screen works using ink, just like books and newspapers, but displays the ink particles electronically. It reflects light like ordinary paper and uses no backlighting, eliminating the glare associated with other electronic displays. As a result, Kindle can be read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room.The screen never gets hot so you can comfortably read as long as you like.

James Patterson, author of You've Been Warned, says, "The screen is fabulous. You would expect that, with a screen, there would be a glare, it would be hard to read but it's not. There’s no glare. It's not backlit, which is kind of magical. I think people are going to be very, very surprised and delighted. This is a lot easier to read than a lot of books are these days."

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, added"I'm telling you, after five minutes I've ceased to think I'm looking at a screen. It's not like reading a computer screen. It's more like reading a piece of paper. I think it's actually clearer, easier on the eye than the printed word."

And the final word goes to sci-fi author Neil Gaiman, author of Stardust, "It's like paper and it’s very interesting. It’s very, very crisp. Very functional. Very readable."

I'm buying one next week so we'll see..

Amazon set to unveil EBook Reader

The Wall Street Journal says that Amazon is set to unveil its long awaited e book reader today in New York.

Industry speculation about the new Amazon device, reportedly named "Kindle," has occurred for the past year. Amazon has been preparing its digital book store for the launch of the new device by making inactive links to electronic books called "Kindle" editions available on the product pages of various books.

The Kindle device will connect users to Amazon's e-book store through a built-in Wi-Fi connection, and will likely retail for $399, according to reports.

It's not clear yet if/when this reader will be available in the UK.

Pay what you want, what you really really want

Inspired by the rock group Radiohead's idea of inviting fans to pay what they think they can - or indeed want to - for their latest realease, a US magazine has boldly followed suit.

Paste magazine, which covers the indie music scene, is offering readers the chance to "Price It Yourself" on their subscriptions.

“We were curious to know what our customers thought we were worth. And what better way to find out, than to let them tell us?” explained Paste President/Publisher Tim Regan-Porter. “While it’s certainly a bit unconventional, we also see it as a chance to get our product in the hands of people who could become lifelong fans. It’s been our experience that once people become familiar with Paste, they turn into loyal readers.”

To ensure this move doesn't result in a Hoover-type promotional disaster, Paste have set a minimum price of $1 a subscription and interestingly have incentivised readers to pay more than the standard price of $20 by homouring anyone who does in print.

There's no place for House & Garden

Sign of the times - Conde Nast has closed the 106 year old House and Garden magazine in the USA.

Here's the release -

House & Garden magazine will cease publication with its December issue, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, President & CEO of Condé Nast Publications. The website, houseandgarden.com, will also be shut down.
"House & Garden has a long and venerable history within Condé Nast," Mr. Townsend said. "This has been a difficult decision to come to but we feel it is one that must be made at this time. I would like to thank Dominique Browning and the entire staff for their award-winning efforts throughout the years. House and Garden's intelligent and graceful editorial attracted a loyal readership. We were proud to publish it.
"With the unexpected departure of the publisher of the magazine, we decided to take a serious look and re-evaluate the title," Mr. Townsend said. "Our investment in House & Garden throughout the years has been substantial and we no longer believe it is a viable business investment for the company."
Condé Nast will continue to be a leading publisher in the home and lifestyle category with magazines including Architectural Digest, Domino, and Vogue Living (which will increase its frequency in 2008).

Turning the ebook page (again)

Chris Morrison at Business 2.0 has the latest spin on the (hardly inexolerable) rise of the EBook..

Back in 2000, the handheld electronic book was thought to be as much a part of the future as MP3s, broadband video, and ad-supported websites. That year, Forrester Research predicted $251 million in sales of e-book content by 2005. It seemed a modest goal, but today the market is so small that Forrester doesn't even track it. Held back by a lack of available titles and stifling copy protection, the e-book reader gathered dust while other dotcom-era innovations flourished.
But one part of the stalled e-book industry could yet surprise us: electronic paper. At the forefront of the technology is E-Ink, a company spun off from MIT in 1997. E-Ink's thin film display functions as a screen and looks much more natural than its LCD counterparts. Instead of using standard pixels, e-paper contains millions of microcapsules that change color when an electric charge is sent through them - mimicking the look of real ink on real paper, without any backlight to hurt your eyes. The power required is negligible.
Right now e-paper is still married to bulky devices like the Sony Reader and the Motorola MotoFone, which use e-paper in their displays. But in the next three years, according to E-Ink, e-paper will become untethered. E-Ink customers like Samsung and LG Philips have already created 14-inch color displays nearly as thin as a piece of paper.
E-paper's success, says Lawrence Gasman, principal analyst at tech research firm NanoMarkets, "depends not so much on the technology as on designers coming up with cool stuff." In 2008, for example, U.K.-based Polymer Vision will launch the Readius, a mobile device with a flexible 5-inch e-paper display that unfurls like a scroll.
By 2010, look for stand-alone e-paper that plugs into your laptop to update its content. Eventually e-paper could display video and contain tiny Wi-Fi chips to update itself on the go. (E-Ink has demonstrated paper with limited Internet connectivity.)
If that makes you think of the moving, self-updating newspaper featured in the movie Minority Report, you're on the right track, says Kenneth Bronfin, president of interactive media for Hearst and chairman of E-Ink's board of directors. "The dollar you pay for your newspaper doesn't even pay the printing costs," he says. "If there was a device that newspapers could give consumers to eliminate the printing cost, the economics could really work." Sign up for a two-year subscription to an e-paper, he suggests, and you might get the device for free. E-Ink's profit in such a venture would be more than paper-thin.

Lets party like its, er 2009

Russell Wilcox, CEO of E Ink in the US, has made some predictions about when technology will mean we can view magazines in an "e paper" format.

Interviewed by BtoB Magazine, Wilcox noted that :

"Currently, you can see e-paper being used in trade paperbacks. It’s a small portion of the retail world, like the Internet was at first. There’s speculation that Amazon will come out with a device. By next year there will be more than 10 companies selling electronic book readers. All of these are monochrome and around six inches wide. Next year you’ll also see bigger sizes, like eight-inch and 10-inch screen sizes, and by 2009 you’ll see 11- and 12-inch screen sizes. As they get bigger and bigger, they get to be a more and more appropriate way for magazine publishers to publish. The order for us is books, newspapers, magazines. Once we get beautiful color and images, we’ll go into the magazine world. That’ll be a year or two."

Hopefully

Lost in translation?

Exact Editions, who produce The Spectator, Prospect Magazine and others here in the UK, are venturing into continental Europe with the launch of a French operation.

The first magazine to be "digitized" in France is Le Monde diplomatique, the monthly spin off from respected French daily Le Monde.

Exact say this will be the first of a number of new products on their french store so we'll keep you abreast of developments.

Let's party like its (still) 1999

Its like deja vu at the moment.

Microsoft's Table (now known as Surface) computers were demoed on the ITV News last night - roughly 4 years after they first emerged at Comdex in the US.

Now the latest ebooks article has hit the national newspapers, with the Telegraph's Daniel Lee submitting the by now obligatory think piece on "We could soon be able to read all our books electronically".

If only. Read the whole article here

Europe's first digital newsstand launches

Billed as "My Mag, My Way", Dublin-based mymagonline has launched what it claims to be Europe’s first digital newsagent, providing 24-hour access to leading magazine publications.

Interestingly, this has been produced in conjunction with the Irish PPA; would that our own association were so bold.

Typically, the CEO, Barry Baker, has made some bold claims for the service - promising that it will become the "iTunes for magazines" - which currently don't really stack up. Load time is slow, there are a number of spelling mistakes on the site, and when I used the shopping cart it had a few er "teething problems".

Nonetheless, this is an interesting experiment on which I'll make three immediate observations...

(i) They are using a simple PDF format, which although getting round the Zinio problem (of requiring a proprietary reader), does throw up all sorts of copyright issues, and let's face it, is simply a replication of the print magazine. And as we all know from our digital reading, print versions don't make the most of interactive formats.

(ii) The success of a product like this is reliant on volume of sales, on which the merchant can take a commission. The product base is currently 15 titles so they will need high demand to make this fly.

(iii) Zinio have made more money off digital sales of adult titles in recent months than anything else. How would a model like that work in what is still a very Catholic country ?

Anyway, fascinating stuff, as they are expanding into the UK later this year, so we'll keep an eye on how they are doing.

The CountryFile

The BBC's latest show spinoff, Countryfile Magazine, is launching. Helmed by my erstwhile colleague Mr Cavan Scott, its very much a magazine for the new generation, despite its conservative country roots.

It has a podcast and an 8 page digital sampler, which you can find here.

Best of luck Cav !!

Punk? Meet Posh

A new ezine targetting Londoners has launched, entitled Punk Meets Posh.



Its an art magazine first and foremost, with an accent on photography. By the looks of things, its still in early stages of development, as the page turning (from the foot of the page) is hidden on certain browsers, and the text needs to open in a new window.

Again, its aiming for a high circulation figure - 200,000 copies, so it'll be interesting to see how it approaches garnering a readership just 40,000 less than Monkey.

New digital magazine for footie

A company in Manchester is launching a new free digital magazine targeted at football fans next month.Entitled "Catflap", it will debut on 11 September, with David Beckham as its firstcover star, and will carry the tagline: "It's not about cats, it's about football".

Er......

Even odder is the opinion of its publisher that it should achieve 100,000 downloads in just four months, which I think is a tad optimistic.My advice ? Try some SEO boys, as you can't find any reference to it on Google

Jellyfish all washed up

In a surprising move, NatMags has axed its teen girl digital magazine experiment called Jellyfish. The project, which lasted just 20 weeks ( the average life expectancy of a Box Jellyfish ironically) was, according to Duncan Edwards "...extremely valuable but we could not see a sustainable business model emerging. We have learnt a great deal about digital and email marketing, which will prove to be useful for our core business."

Which of course means that they couldn't get any ad support. The decision to close the title will likely surprise many, who have touted the online teen market as one of the major growth areas of digital media. However, the company had decided to refocus Jellyfish at an older age group of 18-to 25-year-olds and said it was still in a test period that was slated to run until September.

Lets go Outside...

Outside magazine has launched its digital edition using the Zinio publishing and distribution platform. Outside's Go, a travel and style magazine aimed exclusively at active, affluent men, will launch using Zinio in September.

IWeek for IPhone

IndustryWeek has partnered with digital publisher Texterity Inc. to launch a beta version of the first digital magazine interface and portal designed for the Apple iPhone.

As part of the demonstration, publishers have made free digital editions available to any iPhone user. Publishers are joining the beta test for the opportunity to reach a new audience and offer cross-platform convenience.
"Cross-platform, digital magazine delivery and mobile access are key elements of our audience marketing strategies for all of our more than 110 leading trade magazines," said Blair Johnson, Vice President, Business Development, Penton Media. "We're extremely pleased that IndustryWeek will be among the first publications available to users of Apple's advanced iPhone platform, through this release of Texterity's new reader."

Have a look at www.texterity.com/iphone

River and GNC make men more Healthy

River Publishing, the customer publishing firm have launched a digital version of their Healthy for Men magazine, which is produced on behalf of GNC and Holland and Barrett.



The magazine is bi monthly and has a huge print run - over 200,000 an issue, so its obviously an advantage to GNC in print savings alone.

Like their Honda project, they are using an in house digital solution and are marketing it off in house databases and viral marketing.

Well worth a look.

Japanese teenagers need to mind their digital manners

A new plague of "digital shoplifting" is evidently sweeping Japan.

Many young girls are taking camera phone picture of a new hairstyle or a new dress they might spot while browsing a magazine in a shop. They then send the picture to all their friends and comment on it. The publishers of those magazines feel they are being cheated out of valuable sales and have issued posters which warn shoppers to be careful of their "magazine manners".

Digital fashion magazine from EMAP

According to today's Brand Republic, troubled media company EMAP is to launch a fashion product in the hopes of boosting its ailing consumer division.

Emap is remaining tight-lipped about the nature of the project, but according to Media Week it will involve consumer and business-to-business aspects and build on its existing fashion portfolio, which includes weekly women's title Grazia; WGSN, the online research, trend analysis and news service for the fashion and online industries; and Drapers, the fashion trade title.