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Insights and headlines from Shore analysts on trends in enterprise and media content markets.
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| Friday, January 15, 2010 |
  This year's International Consumer Electronics Show was awash in more tablets than a local pharmacy, with both actual models being shown and overarching buzz from Apple's anticipated iSlate tablet offering expected later this year. While many of the new tablet models were largely warmed-over versions of netbooks or smartbooks, some were oriented towards executives and (presumably) wealthy students who would be willing to pay close to a thousand dollars for a tablet that "acted" like a paper document. Two key models making their debut at CES in this column were the Hearst-sponsored Skiff newspaper and magazine reader and the Que document and e-book reader from Plastic Logic.
The Skiff initiative from Hearst is far more than a tablet gizmo, encompassing distribution on a number of platforms including smart/super phones, PCs and other devices on which their clients would presumably want to view content laid out in traditional print format - and pay presumably premium print prices for it. The reader itself has a display almost as large as a typical notebook PC, with wafer-thin construction, eInk-like resolution and touch-screen activation. The Que reader is a similarly "thin is in" device, but the content that it can manage is oriented towards both traditional media and enterprise document management. The idea behind both devices is that you can have the convenience of digital storage and display without the hassle of dealing with Web-oriented content formats.
The real rationale behind these initiatives, of course, is more of a regressive approach to content than a progressive approach. The Skiff screams at its audience, "Print formats are still relevant, darn it!" while the Que burbles out, "Web sites for collaboration? Nevah hoid of it." And in common to these devices both traditional publisher and enterprise document management business models hope to thrive by locking in support for bright and shiny new high-tech toys that amuse people enough to let them forget that they are paying not just for a pricey device but for outmoded ways of looking at content aggregation, integration and contextualization. The Web site for Skiff tells people first that it's a "publisher-friendly" device, meaning that publishers can obtain revenues from lock-in via proprietary formats while changing as little of its outlook on its revenue streams as possible.
I am hard-pressed to think of an army of executives who have to already juggle laptop PCs, smartphones and other gizmos who will find their world to be truly simplified by this emerging world of proprietary devices. There's little doubt that the tablet format for devices will begin to pick up steam this year, especially those that are touch-enabled devices that help to eliminate the need for physical keyboards. But much of the tablet buzz is smoke and mirrors for journalists, hiding the broader reality that most major publishers are faced with a world in which their revenue streams are drying up and unlikely to be propped up for very long by proprietary tablet plays. None of these devices seem to address the primary issue facing their operations: namely that the Web as a whole is far more interesting and engaging to its readers than any given publication.
Publishers do need to focus on quality editorial operations, to be sure, to ensure that they have a product that's worth the premium prices that they hope to extract on their tablet devices. But their real competition is not bloggers or online aggregators, but other Web formats. The ease with which video can be displayed both on PC and mobile devices and the rapidly accelerating integration of voice services into Web services is creating an environment in which an enormous amount of information is being created and shared with people around the world well before it ever gets into words. The prevalence of status posting services such as Facebook and Twitter make people aware of the first and best news coverage of an event to the point that follow-up reports are as redundant to the general public as they are to stock traders equipped with real-time news feeds.
Yes, the experience of print is engaging, and, often, seductive. But in an online world built around relationships, context and collaboration, investing heavily on keeping up the appearance of the seductiveness and power of print seems to make about as much sense as an 80 year-old investing in a fifteenth round of cosmetic surgery. Premium publishing models are important, but investing in outdated business models to drive premium revenues again and again is a non-starter. It will help to stem the tide of the Web no more than 3-D television or other diverting forms of repackaging. The movie " Avatar" succeeded not because of 3-D images but because it appealed to generations young and old who are moving into new forms of relationships with information and experiences via the Web, enveloped in them constantly to the point that publishing is becoming part of who they are, as I infer in Chapter 10 of Content Nation.
With this in mind, I think that the most important "tablets" are already in many people's pockets - Web-enabled smart/super phones that provide touch-activated access to content and applications that free people from heavy and expensive PCs. Most of these devices cost a fraction of the price of the premium tablet units being promoted for sale. When touch-sensitive tablet devices based on Google's open-source Chrome OS debut later this year, the need for price-sensitive access to full-display content will be underscored yet again. The publishing industry will never grow, much less survive, if it insists on locking its hopes into the most expensive delivery mechanisms available when cost-effective alternatives abound.
What publishers should be focusing on is enabling their content for cross-platform distribution as effectively as possible, demanding premium price points where warranted based on the contextual value of their communities, features and services, not on the fleeting value of a handful of specific devices. If we are headed towards a world in which people will be able to wave an RFID-enabled phone at an item to purchase it, or similarly to execute a business agreement, then publishers need to jump off yesteryear's bandwagon and tool content to be valuable where organizations generating products and services will be thrusting their marketing investments. Gimmicky tablets will prevent this no more than Cinerama-produced films stemmed the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s. So congratulations to the tablet producers for sucking money out of publishers who should be investing elsewhere. Hopefully next year's CES will see some more sensible solutions to content display and distribution that will be true boosts to publishers. Labels: 3-d, apple, avatar, cinerama, eBooks, ereader, facebook, hearst, islate, magazines, mobile, newspapers, pc, plastic logic, que, skiff, tablet, television, Twitter
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:04 PM |
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| Friday, December 11, 2009 |
 In the process of selling off several of its core B2B entertainment industry titles, Nielsen Business Media also announced the eminent closing of Editor & Publisher, the century-plus old trade publication that had chronicled the ins and outs of the news industry. At a time at which magazine closings seem to be about as regular as train stops on a commuter line, E&P's demise is not exceptional in many ways. Any number of trade publications are struggling to survive in an era in which online media enables unlimited competition for the attention of its readership and for its advertisers' and subscribers' cash. But there is something particularly poignant about E&P's shuttering. After all, if an industry which insists that the quality of its content will be its distinguishing factor cannot support the high-quality journalism covering itself, then how can they expect others to do likewise for their own interests?
There are few people who can scream about canaries in coal mines and get away with it for long, and I am no exception to that rule. If you haven't figured out that most publishers are caught between highly skilled staffs oriented towards traditional publishing platforms and new platforms that can't deliver them decent salaries with room for both management's profits and platform reinvestment, then you must have been clipping your bond coupons on a tropical island. But that doesn't mean that publications like Editor & Publisher have to die. What it does mean, though, is that in some ways the publishing industry is returning to its roots of scrappy, independent publishing that may do better without the overhead of large, corporate parents.
This doesn't mean that news publications will always do best as independent outlets, but it does mean that publishers that are mean, lean and more focused on their markets than on hitting the train back to comfortable suburban homes are going to do just fine. The good news is that Web infrastructure is perfectly suited to such operations, most especially when publishers listen to their audiences and engage them effectively. An interesting an ironic example of this positioning is the recent rebirth of Conde Nast's former Portfolio.com Web site by American City Business Journals as a portal oriented towards the owners of small and medium businesses. With a platform that is well designed to slice and dice content and functionality for any number of focused local and topic-oriented markets, ACBL's no-nonsense approach to publishing is far more emblematic of what will succeed moving forward in profitable B2B and consumer media than the high-gloss world of major media companies.
The caveat to this approach, though, is that the scrappy publishers must push themselves to the extreme to take advantage of highly affordable publishing technologies to outpace major media companies in having audiences adopt their brands on the platforms that they prefer. This is to some degree why blog-oriented publishers such as TechCrunch and The Huffington Post have survived and thrived in online media. Having been handed the equivalent of a guerrilla fighter's AK-47 automatic rifle in today's affordable social media publishing technologies and deploying the tactics and strategies that they enable, lean and agile online-first publications and their technology partners have carved away a good portion of the meat of publishing's profits.
It's not as if the major media companies can out-tech these smaller rivals easily, either. The expense and useful life of proprietary content technology development is rarely beneficial to a publisher today. There are some exceptions to this rule on the very high end of content markets such as in financial securities trading and other specialized professional functions, but in general it's source-agnostic content technologies that have defined today's most successful publishing platforms. For general media markets, publishers have tried again and again to gain the upper hand through sponsoring source-specific content technologies that simply don't deliver all of the information and experiences that people expect now through source-agnostic technologies.
It's what you might call a prolonged mourning for the mass-production printing press era, the ability to define a marketplace through a technology that only traditional publishers could afford and master easily. Sorry, that train left the station a long time ago. By ceding their technological superiority to others, publishers sealed their fate years ago. If Compuserve had knocked the socks off of the Web in its ability to amaze and delight content audiences, it would still be around today. Consortium services like Hulu are trying to regain some of that high ground of technology, but as long as they fail to leverage all of the content that people find to be valuable based on the artificial divide of "it isn't real content," they will always fall short of audiences who know "real" when they see it.
In short, I do think that the closing of Editor & Publisher is a small but significant landmark in the history of publishing. It marks the point in the publishing industry's history when it admitted that it no longer really cared about its traditional strengths. Print publishing and the editorial disciplines that drove it are now officially legacies that will inform the future, but no longer define it. There will continue to be print products indefinitely, and highly customized print products are likely to be a growing marketplace for some time. But when an industry will no longer buy coverage of its own traditional operations, then it's time to admit that a chapter in that industry's history has been finished. I wish the very best of luck to the staff of Editor & Publisher, they have put out quality journalism in the face of enormous industry change. I hope that we will see E&P resurface in the near future as a web-first publication, perhaps with a focus on the future rather than on the past. Labels: B2b media, Custom Printing, editor and publisher, magazines, print, Publishing, Web
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:42 AM |
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| Thursday, December 10, 2009 |
 While Mark Logic is far from the only game in town for cross-platform publishing technologies, its recent Digital Publishing Summit at the Plaza Hotel in New York City was a huge down payment on establishing itself as a thought leader that could merge the best of East Coast and West Coast thinking in enterprise and media content markets. As one would expect with a vendor-sponsored conference, the day was filled with "friendlies" who use and support Mark Logic and its XML-based databases, APIs and content delivery services. But it if you had to pick friends, CEO Dave Kellogg and staff picked some friends who had excellent examples of how cross-platform and cross-source publishing is "the new normal" that is helping to drive value in the publishing industry. The trick is, though, is that this new normal is filled with some ironies that the content industry is still struggling to absorb.
With a packed ballroom listening on (nothing like "free" as the price of admission for networking in this economy), Dave Kellogg opened with a lively video, followed by Outsell's David Worlock pointing out that user-oriented networked services, not pre-conceived publications, are the key to this "revolution" in publishing services. Yet at the same time his slides showed a pyramid of value-add content services from simple published documents to "workbenches" that seemed to be quite standard in its pre-conceived product flow. Databases are indeed key components in today's publishing environment, but as exemplified by Mark Logic's technologies, the database is now - that is, whatever a user needs it to be in the moment. Both enterprise and media oriented publishers are discovering that publishing cultures centered around traditional databases, be they for traditional editorial content, business data or multimedia, are not agile enough to respond to the demands of their markets. Richard Maggiotto, Founder, President & CEO of Zinio, highlighted similar ironies that print publishers face in confronting mobile markets. Zinio is moving beyond simple "page-flipping" technology for magazines on PCs and mobile devices to enable video-like animations of content, including ads, to draw magazine publishers into more appealing online presentations in their software. One demo that Richard flashed on the screen was for a $30,000 watch, paid for by a manufacturer that refused to produce Web ads. A beautiful ad, but the question becomes: how can you build a market based on a tiny sliver of people who are using iPhones but preferring magazine-like layouts of content? Building beautiful and engaging content is a plus for any audience, but no arbitrary container in today's online world is going to fence an audience in to your message for very long.
I had to take a phone call at this point, so I missed a good portion of a presentation by Chris Tse, Director of Information at BusinessWeek, who focused on their "BX" social media initiatives. Ironically, when I came back, Tse was explaining how social media content was harder to monetize than traditional editorial content, although he acknowledged that it would probably grow in its revenue impact over time. So even when you have good design, interactivity, repurposed content and social interaction, there's no guarantee that you'll have the systems in place to match revenue opportunities to your content - or have a sales force that knows how to sell it.
 Kent Anderson, Executive Director for Product Development at The New England Journal of Medicine, a leading Sci-Tech journals publisher, showed off a popular "diagnose the disease" quiz that they had ported over from their Web site to the iPhone, and, through Mark Logic's infrastructure, easily retooled for Google's Android and other mobile platforms. The growth of the app's use on iPhone was quite extraordinary, paralleling the growth of overall iPhone use. But when Kent was quizzed about the impact on overall subscription revenues in the Q&A, he expressed some optimism for future, non-free applications in mobile markets but didn't offer any indication of how the app helps to boost core journal subscription revenues. Certainly highly functional mobile apps can help to build a publisher's brand value through higher engagement, but there needs to be a clear conversion strategy devised to ensure that the engagement actually converts that brand value into revenues efficiently. Repurposing content in and of itself doesn't ensure those conversions, though it can help to define a much larger addressable marketplace.
Shannon Holman, Director of Content Management for McGraw-Hill Higher Education and Lee Fife, VP of Publishing Solutions for Flatirons Solutions, put on an excellent demo of McGraw-Hill's Create online custom textbook creation application. Their development of Create was based on the assumption that they needed to empower their customers to design and customize their custom textbooks online, instead of relying on institutional sales forces. The Create application does an excellent job of fulfilling this mission, enabling its users to choose specific sections of books, insert personal course materials and papers and produce both PDFs and bound, custom-printed textbooks on demand with remarkable ease. This interactivity that allows clients to package content the way that they really need it packaged was probably the closest example of "the new normal" during the day's presentations. But even here, the very success of the Create application leaves McGraw-Hill's institutional salespeople scratching their heads somewhat. Better that in the long run, though, then becoming a captive of sales methods that may be out of date.
The final featured speaker of the day was Gordon Crovitz, former Publisher of The Wall Street Journal and a founder of Journalism Online, which is preparing to launch in 2010 an online content ecommerce service that will enable people to have one single sign-on for accessing premium content sources across the Web and mobile platforms. Crovitz outlined at a high level the range of use and pricing models that the Journalism Online platform will support, such as single-article micropayments, multi-article/time-based payments, bulk multi-publication subscriptions and print/online bundled subscriptions.
Interestingly, both the questions that came up from the audience afterwards and some discussion in the panel discussion following Crovitz' panel indicated that there was still a fair amount of resistance from some people in publishing to this concept - and not necessarily for the reasons that you might think. Some people were concerned about Journalism Online being a publisher-centric model, solving their own particular pricing problems but not necessarily solving problems for audiences. This is a reasonable point, one that highlights how publishers are to some degree still on a fishing expedition for successful online revenue models for premium online content that no technology alone can answer. Yet Crovitz emphasizes that premium's opportunities lie where people already believe in your content brand. In other words, premium plays well when you have a relationship with an audience that's already valued above the norm. You may, as Crovitz suggests, convert only a fraction of them, but if the relationship will support it, then demand it where the value suggests that it's worth it to them.
So what is "the new normal" in the era of repurposeable content? To put it succinctly, it's having content that's always ready to attain its highest value in audience-defined moments. Be it through search engines, self-published and self-packaged content, real-time collaboration or easily repurposed and relicensed data and editorial content, the companies that can chase those moments most effectively wins. Sometimes this means being able to aggregate content from any number of sources more rapidly and effectively than anyone else, based on your insights into audience demands. But often it means letting your content flow to where your audiences want to consume it and to be ready to know how to make money with it once it gets there. A multi-platform strategy for repurposed content is not simply slamming the same product into different packages.
Multi-platform publishing also requires the recognition that it's not about platforms at all - it's recognizing that your audience has to be the center of your publishing at all times - and to recognize that each platform and application may draw out a different audience persona from the same person. It's not enough to ask "What does your customer do ten minutes before and after they use your content." It's also necessary to ask your audiences, "who are you" in each platform environment. Your hardcore diagnostician may be all business on a PC, but be out for kicks or socialization on their iPhone - or vice versa. These types of variations only enhance the need for good content multipurposing infrastructure, even though that infrastructure will not guarantee that you'll be offering the content that they want most.
Mark Logic's Digital Publishing Summit probably raised more questions for publishers than it answered, but that's probably not a bad thing in a market in which publishers have very few clear-cut options for succeeding in content markets. It also left outside the doors of the ballroom the uncomfortable fact that many platforms are in use today that enable people to aggregate content on their own with minimal assistance from traditional publishers. You can have the best aggregation and monetization strategy in the world, but if your audiences are creating and aggregating more content than you can, then it's going to be an uphill battle for most any publisher. But within those constraints, Mark Logic is showing the way to a "new normal" for publishers in which matching any content to any audience demand is creating a much more flexible, responsive and audience-centric publishing industry.
Labels: aggregation, B2b media, BusinessWeek, BX, consumer, content, crovitz, databases, magazines, mark logic, mcgraw-hill, nejm, textbooks, xml, zinio
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:06 PM |
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| Monday, August 31, 2009 |
 At first it might appear as if some people in the magazine industry are in dire need of searching for their sanity when you first read FOLIO:'s article on a spate of new magazine launches in recent weeks. Certainly print media has its fair share of die-hards, and, well, when it's what you do well and you want to keep doing it, it's not likely that you're going to stop any time soon. But as much as there's that never-say-die strain to print media these days, there's also a lot of sense to many of the efforts that are being undertaken these days to launch new print titles.
For one thing, you'll notice that the list of magazines being launched includes a strong mix of private-labeled publications for stores, enthusiast organizations and other types of very focused market niches with loyal followings and a strong desire for relevant content. These are the kinds of niches in which print media has done very well historically and also the types of publications where captive audiences are going to appeal to many advertisers and marketers. It may be less expensive to advertise online, but when you own the audience for a particular niche anyway, why not capture the value for advertisers as effectively as possible? When you're involved deeply with a very focused topic or geography, print offers a way to get very personal with an audience that still appeals to many audiences and advertisers.
But as much as new titles such as these are valiant efforts to help marketers still looking for value in their advertising budgets, there is a larger and more nagging problem that is hanging over both consumer and B2B magazines that's just not going away; namely, why are magazine publishers still so intent on maintaining gross revenues to support ultimately unsustainable cost structures? Yes, there are good reasons to demand higher revenues for quality online content, be it through higher ad rates or various subscription and pay-as-you-go plans for readers, and these are likely to start taking off as advertisers chase their audiences into online venues more aggressively. Premium outlets will continue to thrive online indefinitely if they manage the mix of content and community features effectively. But the broader truth is that the era of big media founded on high revenues from a handful of titles is largely drawing to a close. This doesn't mean that media is dying; to the contrary, media is thriving more than ever before, even as it thrived before the past several decades of media consolidation. But what it does mean is that success will be measured by different standards moving forward.
I was struck particularly by an entry posted recently in Howard Owens' blog that underscored the importance of accepting different cost structures for media moving forward. Howard notes: It wasn't until late 2007 that a switch tripped in my head and I realized I needed to flip the expense/revenue picture upside down. Instead of thinking about how to generate more cash, I needed to figure out how to create a news operation that could exist profitably based on a reasonable expectation for local online revenue.
In a market where the newspaper newsroom might cost $10 million, I knew how to make $1 million online, or even $2 million, but I didn't know -- and still don't -- how to make $10 million.
So if I can make a million online, why do I need operate a $10 million newsroom, especially given the greater efficiencies of online publishing?
In other words, while it's great to get that ten million if you know how to do it, why are publishers still so intent on launching a handful of publications that might make big revenues the old way then they can launch far easily many smaller publications online that can succeed in smaller increments very effectively? While it's not a perfect analogy for every publishing operation, I am thinking particularly of portals such as TechTarget, which is able to define and publish very discreet slices of content for very specific computer technology topics that it pays for by selling qualified leads to tech marketers. The very targeted special topic sections that The Huffington Post and other publishers are able to create rapidly and efficiently are also good examples of how online technologies can allow publishers to adapt rapidly to hot interests far more effectively than the usual "book"-oriented mentality would allow.
At the same time, many of the people who advertisers are seeking are spending more and more time with the people with whom they share common interests in social media outlets such as Facebook and brand-specific online communities managed via white-label services such as Lithium Technologies. Good editorial content will always be a draw for advertisers, but increasingly it's an extension of a core online market conversation that's managed via platforms other than news and magazine portals. The recent addition of a Facebook Connect-enabled discussion community on The Huffington Post underscores the importance of editorial content having tight connections to the personal networks that people trust to underscore their willingness to trust sources of editorial content. The fundamentals of marketing are changing before our eyes, yet media companies still whistle in the dark in search of dated metrics while opportunities to invest in the success of future metrics remain underfunded.
In this sense it's fortunate that Reed Elsevier has dared to float a GBP 824 million stock placement to gain more capital in spite of its short term effect on its share prices. If publishers should double-down on anything, it should be on raising capital to reinvest in the innovations and new business models that will sustain them well into the future. The Web has, by fiat, declared publishing to be a innovation-driven growth industry for more than a decade, even while major publishers have tried to maintain the illusion that it's still an IP-driven cash cow industry. Lower share prices from dilution may seem like a painful decision in the short run, but if publishers don't have the working capital to keep up with mean, lean operations that have invested in innovative approaches to publishing already, then they won't have much in general very shortly. For those who tried to leverage their way into a mythical king-of-the-hill media mogul position in the marketplace, well, sorry, timing is everything, they say. In the meantime, congratulations for those folks who have managed to float new print titles for very focused markets. It works for today, at least. Labels: B2b media, magazines, online, print
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:13 PM |
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| Thursday, May 28, 2009 |
 I've had the privilege to have moderated many great SIIA panels over the years, but the 24 June Brown Bag Lunch mid-day event at the McGraw Hill building in New York City (online video available) certainly ranks among the most important topics that I've had the opportunity to moderate with some excellent panelists who will stimulate your thinking on how best to monetize content on today's hot distribution platforms. Please register soon, the last Brown Bag Lunch event was a sellout both in-person and online. If you have suggestions for questions that the panel should address, please add them as comments to this post. A panel summary and a list of our truly distinguished panelists follows. See you there!
Google, Kindle, iPhone: How to Leverage Hot Content Delivery Platforms for Profits
Today's publishers are finding both great opportunities and great challenges in using leading-edge technology platforms to deliver revenues for their premium content sources. iPhones, Kindle e-book readers and Google Books and search services are being adopted by both consumers and enterprises to access premium content at a pace that challenges publishers to come up with effective pricing and marketing strategies. Key questions that arise include:
• What are going to be the most successful business models on these platforms for news and information, books and magazines - and what are the up-and-coming platforms that will challenge publishers to keep those business models working?
• In locking down deals and settlements for content distribution on these platforms, who are the winners and losers?
• How does the availability of premium content on these platforms change how publishers manage the value of their brands?
• What will be the emerging role of the open Web in an environment that is seeing more proprietary content distribution technologies emerging?
A panel of leaders from the worlds of media, enterprise and academic publishing and intellectual property management will explore how news, books and other intellectual property from publishers can best take advantage of emerging technologies to generate revenues from premium content in mobile and online markets and on the open Web - and how these platforms are likely to affect how content creators view the role of publishers in delivering them value for their efforts.
Panelists:
Alisa Bowen, Senior Vice President, Head of Consumer Publishing, Thomson Reuters
Gordon Crovitz, Co-Founder, Journalism Online
Chris Kenneally, Director of Author Relations, Copyright Clearance Center
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=72c0c385-cf70-4de4-97c0-351cc2517a2a) Labels: Amazon Kindle, books, brown bag, busines models, crovitz, events, Google, iPhone, journalism online, magazines, Monetization, newspapers, Oxford, profits, Publishing, settlement, SIIA, thomson reuters
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:57 AM |
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| Thursday, May 07, 2009 |
 The landscape of Europe is dotted with the ruins of hundreds of castles and city walls dating from the Medieval era of feudal rule, when local kings, dukes and other land-owners defended their claims to farms and forests through their ability to repel invaders from behind their castles' walls. Castle defenses worked reasonably well for several centuries, but eventually the use of castles as power bases became obsolete. Was it improved war technology that made castles charming antiquities? To some degree, perhaps, but the larger force that made castles irrelevant was the rise of a new way to store and protect wealth: banking. Once the rise of wealthy merchants made the marketplaces of towns and cities the real battlefields for proving out power, castles protecting farmlands became far less important for securing power than having an economic system that could enable efficient trade. Yet those old castles still stand, and, darn, they do look rather nifty even today.
Fast-forward to 2009, as Amazon introduces its Kindle DX, the latest iteration of their  wireless ebook reader that offers a larger screen with eInk technology. Just as those kings and dukes were thrilled to build ever-larger battlements against their enemies, publishers are flocking to the Kindle as the wonder machine of choice, now with a screen size that lends itself to larger materials such as magazines and newspaper articles. With a USD489 price tag, the Kindle DX is hardly an economy model digital device; in fact, many new netbooks with similar screen sizes go for hundreds less and offer color displays with Web and PC functionality. But as the copy from the Amazon catalog page reminds us, this new Kindle is slim, "Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines." Why even compare a Kindle to a netbook when it offers such obvious advantages and comforts to print readers? And if the price is a little to steep for some people, a few of them may be able to rejoice (a little): some major newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Boston Globeare offering a discount off of a USD400-plus annual subscription to their papers via the new Kindle - if you live beyond the delivery range of their paper editions. This new-fangled technology does allow some miraculous breakthroughs, doesn't it? It's not as if the Kindle does not have its own unique virtues - or its own promising revenue streams. Sales of smaller Kindle units have been brisk, and the affluent older people buying them online are also fueling skyrocketing ebook sales. Silicon Alley Insider notes that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos brought a stunning statistic to light during the Kindle DX intro show: when Kindle-formatted books are available on Amazon, about 35 percent of those books' sales are now through Kindle editions. There was no breakout as to how many buy a print edition as well, but the chart behind Bezos at the intro showed this percentage hockey-sticking from only 14 percent in February of this year. Based on my own experience with getting my Content Nation book into a Kindle edition, much of this growth is actually publisher-driven: titles are being pushed into Kindle format as quickly as Amazon can handle the conversions and postings. In a year in which print book sales are sluggish, the reduced price of Kindle-edition books offers publishers a discount-bin pricing strategy with zero inventory or print-on-demand cost exposure. In other words, in a year in which the slowly-moving denizens of print are trying to salvage some semblance of sensible quarterly earnings, the ability to charge a premium for access to content on electronic platforms - or any platform, for that matter - has to be a strong plus. Yet in doing so many of these publishers continue to invest minimally in developing a more competitive stance in the more competitive markets of online publishing that are able to reach younger and broader audiences far more effectively than Kindles. Kindle is attractive to newspapers and magazines as a platform that can be used to appeal to older and more affluent audiences who are the targets of their advertisers, a fact that fuels hopes that a larger Kindle will enable them to sell display ads at good rates for this elite group. Yet where will tomorrow's older and more affluent audiences be congregating? Kindle, we hardly knew ye. Kindle is an important content delivery platform that has enabled the book industry to begin its slow transition to the online era and that has offered a shelter for premium content sales in the face of an online content industry that largely baffles most publishers. Yet for the most part it is a transitional proprietary platform, much as Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online were proprietary transitional services for premium online content prior to the emergence of the Web as a dominant content delivery network. Publishers are welcome to continue to build short-term profits on Kindle as part of their transition away from the printed versions of their content, but the rush to Kindle at this very late stage in the online game is ultimately yet another indication that many publishers are ill-prepared to compete in the Web world of highly distributed content production and aggregation. If there were a commitment by publishers to use some significant portion of their revenues from Kindle sales to invest in making a more effective transition to Web revenues, then perhaps there would be reason to think that Kindle will represent an effective transitional strategy. But with a soft economy making profits in publishing more elusive, it's more likely to turn into a strategy that yet again kicks key decisions about Web strategies down the road. In the meantime billions of people around the world are going to be equipped with very affordable netbooks over the next few years - many of them being about as slim as a magazine, no doubt. My book royalty checks say "Thank you" to Kindle for the time being, but underinvestment in advanced Web strategies is making publishing via traditionally print-oriented publishers an increasingly unattractive option for authors trying to reach both mass audiences and affluent audiences. The skyscrapers that house major media companies will stand for many years, no doubt, just as Europe's feudal castles still stand today. But unless those companies start to gear themselves for the reality of a market-driven content economy, instead of a property-driven content economy, we may see those glass buildings as tourist attractions displaying the hubris of a bygone era sooner than one may imagine. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=cdc96537-9281-435f-a5aa-3688ede933c0) Labels: Amazon Kindle DX, books, E-book, introduction, Jeff Bezos, magazines, Newspaper, Publishing
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:46 AM |
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| Monday, July 23, 2007 |
 The headline at BtoB Online announcing rosy revenue increases for magazines seemed like great news for the magazine industry, but when you look at the details of statistics from the Magazine Publishers of America’s Publishers Information Bureau there's a far less rosy picture for several major publishers to consider. While Time Inc.'s People showed a reasonable 6.4 percent revenue increase in 2Q07 versus 1Q06 Time magazine was down 16.8 percent, Fortune down 13.4 percent, Money magazine down 8.3 percent, Business 2.0 down 38.4 percent - enough to spark talk of Business 2.0 heading to the dead pool - and the now-deceased Life magazine clocking a 78.7 percent drop in revenues. Overall health, fitness, food titles and hardcore business magazines fared well while older regional and niche titles, small business, consumer-oriented finance and men's enthusiast magazines seemed to fare worst. Magazine gainers easily trumped losers in overall title count and revenues so there's some good reason for print producers to feel that there is some good potential growth ahead as print becomes the status media of choice for affluent people trying to achieve more and to hold on to what they have through health and diet regimens. But general-interest print publications and publications catering to more traditional home and recreation interests (who has time?) seem to be fading or growing moderately at best, with few exceptions. This may be a reflection of the current U.S. economy as much as anything else, but it also indicates that print is going to continue to succeed as a status symbol for mostly high end up-and-comers but only when it meets very specific points of pressing concern. In the meantime most entrepreneurial and tech-oriented audiences seem to have migrated for good to online venues. Where this leaves general interest publishers such as Time Inc. is uncertain. The Web's ability to excel in both general audience aggregation and to dissemble general interests into highly focused niches rapidly via social media and vertical portals puts any traditional publication's strengths in a precarious position. For the most part these publications are going to have to make sure that they are contextualizing their content online as effectively as possible via search engines, social media and personal syndication, with their revenue streams following their content to its most valuable contexts. In print these publications will need to consider how mass customization will enable them to extract editorial value from a range of staffs more effectively through different interest lenses. In general publishers have to consider how they can use their online portal presences to drive print consumption more effectively. Users need to be encouraged to let publishers know what they'd like to see in print - and to facilitate its delivery along with other editorial content that complements those expressed interests. It is difficult for publishers to out-Google Google in contextualizing online content but for now they stand a chance to do that more effectively for individuals in the print medium Labels: magazines, marketing, print
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:41 PM |
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