New devices need new content
I’m now making an effort to use my iPad as much as possible. There certainly is a lack of good apps (my brother said this morning that the only good app for the iPad is Safari – and he is a Flash programmer) but I love reading on it. May it be an e-book, pdf files or just a blog post.
However, I’m being constantly reminded that content producers keep making a crucial mistake: they try to use content that worked on one ‘data carrier’ and just copy it on another. This is what the music industry has been trying with albums, hoping they would just sell digitally like they did on the CD. It didn’t work and many music buyers decide just to buy the best track from the album as oppose to the whole package.
Another example and more specific to the iPad: You can subscribe to some ‘traditional’ magazines on the iPad and what you get is essentially a pdf of the print version (Zinio is an example and Music Week does the same). It doesn’t work. The way magazines are designed is specific to the ‘data carrier’ which is paper. The layout and typography doesn’t necessarily work on a screen even though the size of the iPad is similar to a magazine. It also feels very static, knowing that the iPhone can display (some) videos and all you get is text and images. There is also a lot of scrolling involved but I just want to turn the page when I’m done.
This is not to say that magazines will not work on tablet computers, in fact I think they will be one of the main types of content for this new category of devices. But publishers will have to re-think what a magazine can do. One company who seems to be on the forefront again: Wired magazine have showcased their iPad version before it even came out. Let’s hope there will be a lot to follow.
Tags: apple, e-books, ipad, magazines, tablet computers
May 12th, 2010 at 6:39 am
But Wired had to start again from scratch after writing their app in Flash.
Music Week seems to be more than ‘essentially a pdf of the print version’ too – you can click on weblinks and page numbers, there are click-to-call numbers, you can search…and it’s recognisable as Music Week, not re-jigged beyond recognition.
May 12th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
I’ve heard that Wired will have to re- program their iPad magazine as they have built it in Flash but they will still be able to use all they ideas and designs. So the Flash issue should just be a technicality.
I saw the links in the digital version of Music Week and those are helpful. However they only help me avoiding copy/paste and don’t really improve the digital experience of the magazine. I would like to see the audio/video versions of the interview, interactive charts and maybe audio snippets or full length version of the songs mentioned in the mag.