Do Magazines Need Their Own Kindle? Yes, Says Hearst.
by Peter Kafka
Posted on February 27, 2009 at 8:54 AM PT
If Amazon’s Kindle is the iPod for books, do we need a Kindle for magazines and newspapers? I’d say no. But publishing heavyweight Hearst disagrees and is going to come out with an e-reader of its own, according to a published report.
Fortune says Hearst, which publishes magazines like Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and, for the time being, newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Francisco Chronicle, is working its own Kindle-like device.
“I can’t tell you the details of what we are doing, but I can say we are keenly interested in this, and expect these devices will be a big part of our future,” Hearst digital head Kenneth Bronfin tells the magazine. Some more vague details, which don’t include a launch date:
Insiders familiar with the Hearst device say it has been designed with the needs of publishers in mind. That includes its form, which will approximate the size of a standard sheet of paper, rather than the six-inch diagonal screen found on Kindle, for example. The larger screen better approximates the reading experience of print periodicals, as well as giving advertisers the space and attention they require.
…the Hearst reader is likely to debut in black and white and later transition to high-resolution color with the option for video….Downloading content from participating newspapers and magazines will occur wirelessly….
What Hearst and its partners plan to do is sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. The company will, however, leave it to the publishers to develop their own branding and payment models. ‘That’s something you will never see Amazon do,’ someone familiar with the Hearst project said. ‘They aren’t going to give up control of the devices.’”
Intriguing? Yes. But I don’t have high hopes for the Hearst reader.
That’s in part because building consumer gadgets is a lot harder than it looks–remember all those awful MP3 players that predated Apple’s (AAPL) iPod? And I’m particularly worried about consumer gadgets designed with publishers in mind instead of consumers/readers.
But I’m also skeptical because I don’t really see how a dedicated magazine/periodical player does much for readers, period.
You can debate the pricing and feature set on Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, but at least there’s a use case for the device: It’s designed to let you read for long stretches of time, which is pretty hard to do on iPhones and BlackBerries.
But I can easily plow through newspaper stories and magazine articles on my relatively frill-free BlackBerry 8830 (if you do the same, let me recommend Instapaper.com and/or Handmark’s FreeRange Reader). And bear in mind that Amazon’s device is also designed to let you hoover up newspapers, etc., as well; the New York Times says it is already selling a “modest” number of subscriptions to Kindle users.
So if Hearst’s Kindle Kopy is going to take up space in my gadget array, it’s going to have be something pretty special.
[Image credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]
Comments
They’d better start with color. The world isn’t black and white (literally and figuratively). And I don’t say that because I’m a photographer who prefers a color palette. Color plays too important a role in every day living to leave it out of most informational presentations.
Reading a novel is one thing. But they seem to forget what drove color into newspapers in the first place. It was advertisers demanding color ads. You want to sell ads? Better make sure they’re color.
Posted by Eric Welch at February 27th, 2009 at 9:27 amI think it’s more a technology issue than a “I do/don’t like color issue”. The Kindle display (which I just started using 2 days ago) is much easier on the eyes for long-term reading than an LCD display (which are more easy on the eyes than the CRTs were).
By the way, WSJ looks good on the Kindle, but few to no pictures (of any number of colors). I don’t know whether to blame this on Amazon or WSJ, since clearly the thing can display black and white (better then a newspaper anyway).
Also, no sign of AllThingsD which I would hope might tag along with a Kindle-WSJ subscription.
I spent WAY too much money on this thing, and would hope that competition will bring prices down significantly before I wear this one out (which could be any day now).
Posted by Mac Beach at February 27th, 2009 at 3:17 pmThere already is a full-color Kindle out there for magazines, it’s called a PC notebook or MacBook. The problem is that when traditional vertically-oriented magazine content is presented on a rectangular laptop screen, one must roll, scroll, and zoom the text. It’s not a magazine-like reading environment.
I edit and publish an online-only magazine, Automotive Traveler (automotivetraveler.com/jump/156) so I speak with some experience on the issue of digital magazines. When a magazine is built from the ground up to be presented digitally, you can optimize the presentation in many ways. It requires an entirely different way of thinking about magazine design and layout; instead of two pages making up the “spread” in a traditional magazine we design our page to fit a wide variety of computer screens. As the world goes from a traditional 4×3 format to a 16×9 relationship, things are easier, from the standpoint of design.
When I sat down with my designers two and a half years ago when we first thought about our layout template, we made some very calculated decisions about things like font selection for instance. I use a compact, 4-pound laptop with a 13.1-inch screen (smaller than the typical laptop) for all of my editing but we’ve tested our layout with displays from a 9-inch Sony laptop all the way up to a 60-inch plasma flat panel, which can be easily read from 10 feet away from the Lazy Boy in your home theater.
Skeptical? Try it for yourself, select and load a conventional magazine that has been re-purposed for the web; there’s hundreds out there from a number of publishers on a variety of platforms. Here’s a link to one that can be viewed for free. (tinyurl.com/MuE-HP – I use this because it is both representative of a traditional magazine ported digitally as well as the fact that I contribute to it) Then load Automotive Traveler (automotivetraveler.com/jump/157) and ignoring the subject content for just a moment, compare how easy it is to read, follow and navigate in each environment. I’m confident that you will immediately see a difference, no matter what the size of your display. To further optimize the presentation of Automotive Traveler, hit “f11” to go into a full-screen mode in your browser and watch what happens to the size of the “page” as it resizes itself to optimize for your monitor and screen resolution.
Just because magazines have always had vertical page orientation doesn’t mean that they will in the future. That was the first convention we threw out the window, not shackled by having to work off the vertically oriented script. We knew that there was little chance, in this business publishing environment even two years ago, that we would try the even more expensive route of a print companion, no matter how much we would have liked to go that route. And in reality, with all the interactivity we’ve built into our digital presentation, I truly believe that a paper version of what we’ve done would pale in comparison. (Of course, if you want a hard copy, you can always print out specific pages. I will not go into how much greener Automotive Traveler is and how we by-pass all the current problems with distribution of magazines to news stands.)
We are a tiny publisher serving a very specialized niche. But there is no reason why a larger, forward-thinking publisher can’t do what we do. But I will tell you that while we work with a great platform supplier, the IT team at Automotive Traveler has integrated several enhancements “under the hood” to fully optimize our presentation. This is the value-added package that we bring to the game. Do we have all the answers? Of course we don’t. Building a sustainable business model based on advertising is one piece of the puzzle that has still eluded us. If the content is on the web, people expect it for free; it’s just that simple.
What these readers don’t understand is that while we have eliminated paper, printing, and postage, we still have contributors that we pay for content as well as editors, and designers to make our presentation look professional, to name a few, that are required to put together Automotive Traveler. Then there’s servers, bandwidth, hosting fees, and a guy sitting in Houston (I’m in California with the Managing Editor and one designer, another designer is in Germany, and our offices are in Scottsdale so we can truly be called a virtual printing company.) who makes all of it work, including our companion website (automotivetraveler.com/jump/156).
Sorry this is turned out so long but as you can tell, I’m just a bit passionate about this subject and hope that if you have any comments or questions that you’ll post them here or contact me direct. I’ve bookmarked this page and will check back here often. Until then I hope you will check out Automotive Traveler and check out our practical vision for digital publishing that requires no specialized device, just the laptop you’re currently using and see if we don’t have the most magazine-like reading experience (clicking on either corner of the page flips it forwards or backwards). The vision we had from the start was to combine elements of a great travel magazine with an equally great automotive magazine. Maybe you can tell us if we’re meeting that goal?
Thanks for reading.
Richard Truesdell
Posted by Richard Truesdell at March 4th, 2009 at 9:49 amFounder and Editorial Director, Automotive Traveler
Sorry for the wrong link in the previous post, the link to the digital magazine version of Automotive Traveler is automotivetraveler.com/jump/156.
Posted by Richard Truesdell at March 4th, 2009 at 9:51 am