Why the iPad Will Not Save the Publishing Industry
The commercial success of the iPad and the App business model on the iTunes Store have opened unexpected horizons of economic opportunities for many developers. The publishing industry, in particular, has been interested from the beginning in evaluating the potential of Apple’s tablet in order to find an alternative option to the distribution of contents and to cope with the severe crisis of the sales of printed paper. I frequently buy and read magazines for the iPad including Time, Wired, Popular Science and recently I really appreciated the first release of Project, the Virgin’s innovative digital magazine designed specifically for the Apple tablet.
Leaving purely technical considerations aside (in some cases the final result is better than in others), the general quality of those magazines is without doubt extremely high and the integration between classic and multimedia content makes their reading experience very pleasant and engaging. But there is a basic limitation that could play a significant role in preventing their widespread diffusion, thereby making them not competitive in terms of economic return. The problem is not the limited number of iPads in circulation, as some may think, but the difficulty – or the inability – to download single issues of a certain magazines on your device because of their excessive size, which usually is around 400 MB.
In my own experience, each download may take a period ranging from twenty to seventy minutes if you are connected to a wi-fi hotspot. If you use a 3G connection, instead, the download is inhibited and a message warns you that, due to the excessive size of the file, you must be connected to a wi-fi to continue to the download. Apart from the frustration generated by waiting too long for the completion of the download (especially if you consider that there are an infinite number of alternative sources of information available in a few seconds, for free, just surfing the web), when the user doesn’t have access to a wi-fi network, he is likely to quit the purchase altogether.
This limit, which negatively affects sales volumes and profitability of editorial projects aimed at iPad users, will bring developers to rethink radically the structure of such contents and limit their size. Otherwise, a significant proportion of those users who have once experienced the frustration of the download will not want to repeat the purchase a second time. And perhaps the iPad will not be enough to revive the publishing industry.
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File size, are you serious? With all due respect but what a weak arguement. A magazine is not a song that you purchase and expect to download immediatey. People subscribe to magazines and look forward to their arrival. A 5 minute download time is going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Just the fact that people are buying digital magazines on the iPad means the biggest hurdle (paying for digital content) has been broken. File size is completely irrelevant in my opinion and it’s not like WiFi routers and cellular networks aren’t going to be improved upon
Would you bother buying a magazine from your local newsagent (and regularly), if you had to stand there and wait in a que for 30 minutes or more?
Some people will wait, but most busy people will go elsewhere for shorter ques. Why else do you think hypermarkets are so successful despite!? Despite all the arguments against them, for example; the quality of their meat is deemed inferior to a local butcher.
The web is successful because you don’t need to wait 30 minutes to read a page. If people had to wait 30 minutes for a page to load … mobile internet as we know wouldn’t even have happened.
I totally agree with Steven.
Nice piece, liked the fact of knowing if I would be able to download certain things online and the length I would have to wait for same…
“I know, (and thank you for sharing) that if a website only has (8) Eight seconds to capture a views interest then making downloads compatible for buyers would be always a strong point for US Developers”
Considering that the task of making files small would be of the Owner of said material! But shouldn’t it be responsibility be of the Social Network to convert them.
A proper approach would be to set guidelines which if followed correctly there shouldn’t be issues with file sizes. Simply someone has to step up and control the DEMAND!
PS. Nice article, just bought an ipad and have found so many issues…
Norman Flecha
Straight TALK
While a strong and convincing argument, publishers can optimize their material before it goes for sale ont he marketplace, and I believe they should strive to meet that goal. I would presume that the downloaded material is high-quality scans of the publication’s pages, which in effect will give you a much larger file size than if you were to recreate it say digitally and keep the total file-size under 40 MB.
Is someone here being sponsored by Microsoft? … (sarcastic question…)
IPad is one of the best inventions ever! I read all my Mac magazines and books/newspapers on my iPad, and I download them WHILE BEING HOME! into my iBook app. Why would I want to download reading content sitting in a coffee shop?
I have many magazines, which I expect or plan to read while out from home (e.g. in a train commuter to work, etc) inside the ipad as downloaded already. I really do not see the problem, some have, or maybe some “want” to have….
cheers. heinzbruno
I agree with you. I have an iPad and I love it! But it’s really frustrating to wait in average 30-40 minutes do download a magazine.
Sorry, but your bandwidth does not seem the fastest. In Frankfurt (Germany) the norm is now 16000 (some have 10000 to 12000) which is very fast. I download thick magazines in seconds (!) with my wifi via my (27″ ;-) iMac. It works flawlessly. So, the problem is not the iPad, it is the bandwidth.
Can you download 500 MB in seconds? That’s good! :) How long does it take your connection to download a file (for example an issue of Wired or Popular Science)?
My comment is about the line from Steven that reads:
“Would you bother buying a magazine from your local newsagent (and regularly), if you had to stand there and wait in a que for 30 minutes or more?”
I find this to be a rather misleading analogy to say the least. For one thing, comparing the atmosphere and environment of being on the road, to what goes on in the comfort of your own home, is patently ridiculous. When one is on the road, he or she does not stand in line waiting for anything, or anyone.
Whereas, at home, it is not unusual to set a file to download, while you browse the internet, or possibly do something else. The idea that there is this singularly activity that you are waiting to do, as in standing in line for a magazine, is generally false.
As well, there are files that are larger now (movie files) that are being downloaded, and that seems to be a booming business. So who’s NOT going to wait for his issue of GQ to download, with all the multi-media content that its offline counterpart does not have?
Paaaaleaze!!!
Jason,
I agree that people can make good use of downloading in the background, but magazines and bread sells quicker and in larger quantity because it is easy and quick to access, hence my analogy.
Techheads will of coruse plan and prepare material in advance, but the mobile business model is built around everybody else that is less patient and now expects to get what they want anywhere, immediately. Even at home, people don’t want to prepare content in advance because they can’t do that conveniently on the move. They would rather be streaming video on Youtube or talking to friends and family on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in real-time.
If you take a close look at where technology has taken us, you will clearly see that people stream video rather than rent videos now. People browse online to research and download music rather than trawl the record shops at the weekend, and people enjoy accessing information as and when they need it without having to plan or wait for it.
I agree it can be handy to prepare content in advance (get your moneys worth as it were) but people have begun moving away from the desktop computer user model for a good reason.
As for booming video download, you only need to look at all the telecoms providers to see that live streaming is the future of new multimedia content … downloading is becoming a thing of the past and will become of concern only for people that continue to use computers for computing (and all the other good stuff).
Great point of view Steven. I agree with you when you say “download is becoming a thing of the past…”
Just to finish up, I predict an inevitable rise of streaming content through mobile and internet providers, of video, website access such as news, social sites, commerce and video.
Purchasing (and ownership) of digital content will decline in favour of more lisenced content. Most people will adopt this simply because the offerings are becoming more attractive, and partly in becasue it is easier to prevent people illegally downloading content (Apples successful business model is a perfect president that is encouraging people to connect to content through stricter lisencing).
Except you don’t need to stand anywhere and wait 30 minutes to download a magazine. For starters you can just initiate the download and go about your business doing other work while waiting for it to complete. It’s really not comparable to standing in line at a newsstand when you can open up the browsers and do a wide variety of others tasks.
Secondly the entire 30 minute timeframe seems to be a bit of an exaggeration. Possibly in certain countries the speeds are not that great, however in others that’s not the case. I downloaded Rage HD which is close to 800MB in under 5 minutes on my home WiFi network, the same goes for Infinite Blade which was about 500MB. I might be lucky to be living a country with extremely high broadband speeds, and I acknowledge it. However the networks globally are going to continue to improve going forward. They are certainly not going to get worse.
“I downloaded Rage HD which is close to 800MB in under 5 minutes”.
For Italian networks this is a miracle.
800mb in 5 minutes?
I am sure the average demographic who actually reads published magazines on a regular basis outside of the exception are not going to be downloading at that kind of speed. To consider the best possible scenario for speed and software and operating platforms in a development environment when you are considering optimizing for web view you are not going to be testing at the kind of speed. More likely…the opposite you will be testing in the worst case scenario..were 800mb file takes an hour and a half to download.
That’s interesting that you say that people are willing to wait five minutes…when us developers develop a website we develop for a person with the attention span of 3 seconds…if you have a website that cannot load the page in 3 seconds…you will have significant bounce rates.
To use the analogy of comparing waiting in line for a magazine, is a good analogy. But it’s even worse then that again. At least the average demographic of person who goes to buy a magazine off the newsstand, may actually have to wait in line for a few minutes and they expect a wait. It’s statistically proven that the average attention span online is mere seconds to access content, which is instant. If access to a website is more then five seconds on a load time…chances are you have a horrible bounce rate percentage, and people are not reading your content.
“I downloaded Rage HD which is close to 800MB in under 5 minutes on my home WiFi network, the same goes for Infinite Blade which was about 500MB.”
Wowwwwww!!! My Rage HD’s download failed and Infinity Blade finished around 3 hours. :(
Hi Mike,
Yes, networks are likely going to continue to improve but more people are also going to be using it, to in turn access more data than at present, and alot of the copper and fibre that is to support it is already fraying away. Fibre and wireless connections will definately help with this, but god knows how the providers will cope with delivering it all with the imminent HDX streaming … providers are already struggling to provide iPhone 4 users with just 720 HD video streaming.
Anyways, I am swaying off the topic of advertising a little. Indeed 30 minutes for downloading a magazine is not likely a common problem and if it was, most of those users wouldn’t likely even bother to try, for it to be a bother. Now for 5 minutes, I agree it can download in the background with little invonvenience, but I still feel that magazines should not rely on eating a mobile users battery to download it, to then be unable to view it until they get home to plug their device in. Again, most people will not want to be downloading somethign that large whilst mobile, so we are still looking at the minority of people that would seriously enjoy purchasing a digital magazine over a few MBs.
I just think it’s not such a strong argument. I remember distinctly when we got the internet when I was a teenager, we had these 14k modems which then got upgraded to 56k. When this happened there were people that understood how the internet was going to change everything. And there were people that got stuck on the current limitations of the technology. At that time it took ages to download an MP3 file, it was simply not practical. However time went by, our connections got faster and then MP3 file sharing became a reality.
The iPad can save the publishing industry. It can do this because it’s taken the computer off of your desk and put it in your hands. No one wanted to pay to read the New York Time while sitting at their desk in front of clunky monitor. However now that you can sit on your sofa and hold it your hands everything has changed. You interact with it in a more natural way, rather than with a mouse and keyboard. The iPad (and iPhone) has taken the internet off our desks and put it in our hands, and that is in my opinion the game changer.
I don’t doubt the issues Antonio has raised in this article. However I feel they are minor issues. It’s more like nitpicking than anything else. What we are seeing now is something that is in it’s infancy. The technology behind these magazines will improve, the networks powering our devices will improve. We use to drive to the store to buy our magazines and books. Now a 5 to 15 minute download is supposed to a deal breaker?
I don’t think so, downsides yes but it’s certainly not going to stop us from the road we are traveling on.
The discussion here seems to be directed at two things – the magazine reading platform and network bandwidths… not so much at whether publishing industry will be able to use iPads as a new, business rescuing revenue stream.
The mobile magazine publishing platform is really in its infancy. My guess is that we’ll see more flexible and intelligent reading platforms on all sorts of devices that will hopefully address some of the issues raise in this post and comments. Hopefully they will :
- Allow for a modular download of magazines so that, for example, text can be read before multimedia content is fetched (that might be collected in the background).
- In a modular model, learn what subscribers want to read and fetch those items first.
- Degrade cleanly for smaller platforms like phones, fetching only the data required for that platform or bandwidth… like 240p vids rather than 720p, or less data heavy versions for lower bandwidth locations.
- Deliver issues to devices before they are required by the user so that there is no delay and they can be watched while out of reception.
In order to put all that together, there will obviously have to be support for publishers through integrated publishing platforms from companies like Adobe that can take a mag and drop it into the various formats required… It’s more about this mix that’ll make or break digital publishing – less about file size and bandwidth, both of which are always growing worldwide.
By the way the time you have to wait for anything in whatever place is annoying, everything tend to be faster from internet connection to car and food why not the time needed for a magazine to be downloaded.I as a consumer of such a product (magazines or newspapers via internet) I want to have my magazine in a more faster way can I? But Antonio you have to push the Italian networks to be faster too,in Greece there is hspa signal even in mountains and optical lines even to villages (at most)that means at least a 2mb per second and theoritically in excellent condition 24 mb per second but that would also would be a miracle.
The publishers are actively working on getting file sizes smaller. Companies that use more of an HTML5 approach, which is what Esquire and Oprah and other Hearst publications are doing (using ScrollMotion as their developer) can have apps that are under 100 megabytes, with selectable text and still have all the multimedia stuff.
I’ve spoken with Adobe (who creates the turnkey solution that Conde Nast and Virgin use for Wired, Project and some of the other iPad magazines) and they have tools in place that will let the size of the download shrink. For instance, linking to dynamic content like video and not embedding it full force and using better or alternative compression techniques can help.
So I’ll agree that the size can be absurd — though seriously look at what Esquire can do in under 100 megabytes — but it’s getting better and the publishers and the companies making the platforms are working hard to make it even better in the future.
The problem would be after waiting for a month, you get the same content found in websites few weeks ago. I think the (print) publishing’s main competition is the free and daily-updated news websites that are growing in number and quality
Kristian, good point. Several years ago I bought Car and Drive magazine monthly. I then found out I could find everything in the magazine on their website, I cancelled my subscription and went the online route. I’ve done this with almost every other publication. I’m more inclined to pay a very small fee to download an e-mag instead of paying $3-4 more for physical goods.
Good article and I’m agree with you. I am old fashion and I prefer to feel in my hand magazines and newspapers.
I think that it’s a joke. It’s a suicidial tendency from publishers to do such thing, Do they really expect that i will wait 30 minutes for a newspaper ? It is only a sign of total incompetence in terms of design of product like this, no one will never and ever accept this times, for example because the newspapers are the thing that you buy to quick reference some thing and then you will go to trash them. Idiots.
I disagree with the premise that the future of publishing is in peril. I find myself reading more of everything–not just magazines–now that I can give in to impulse at any time and have my reading materials available at all times.
I agree that magazine publishing is lagging behind book publishing (which is doing extremely well in the US, by the way), but that is due to the industry not having a good understanding of publishing to a low resolution environment yet. We saw the same problems as people transitioned to pdf as a portable document format. They would include oversized pictures, with unnecessarily high resolution, and then fail to optimize the document before distribution. I routinely have to post-process these files, and in doing so can reduce them from 40 megabytes to as little as 800k, with little obvious degradation in quality!
I am sure we will see similar improvements in magazines, now that the demand will be rising. Up until now only the ipad could view magazines, as the kindle was only designed to reproduce the printed word. Now we have the ipad competitors, as well as Barnes & Noble’s new Nook device that can display color and formatted layouts, there will be more demand for magazine publishing. I have no doubt publishers are gearing up even now to optimize delivery and files sizes, and I expect them to be much improved by the end of 2011!
I do think there will be room for all these devices though. The Android phone market will make the transition from phone to tablet a natural evolution for those that can afford it, just the way the success of the iphone paved the way for the iPad. And for book lovers, the Nook is a perfect device in and of itself, with no need for additional functions of a computer. I do hope to see these devices migrate away from their required ISPs, however, since that is where the user experience suffers the most.
You raise some valid points, but this is still in it’s infancy stage. Also, don’t look at the circulation of iPads alone, consider all mobiles & tablets with a screen size at least as big as the iPhone..
I believe the mistake made by publishers is trying to keep the printed style and implement it on the iPad. The way forward is to leverage the platform to utilise it’s strengths, not force-feed the print way upon it.
Look at most magazines on the iPad, they are basically the same file sent to print, with a page-flipping interface plastered on top. They even follow a monthly publishing schedule that’s a legacy of the print industry.
On the other hand, look at apps like Flipboard. Magazines could easily repurpose their content with a similar effect, effectively becoming a “superblog” that people pay to subscribe to due to premium content.
Publishers that plan their way ahead instead of clinging on to familiar processes are the ones that will flourish.
Nice Post! Love your website!