If you’re waiting for Apple’s iPad to rescue the magazine business, you may have to wait a very long time indeed. But the present-tense magazine industry–the ink-and-paper version everyone has left for dead–may be limping its way to a recovery.
Can’t really say that BusinessWeek’s 80-year run at McGraw-Hill ended on an up note, since the publisher sold the magazine for a fire-sale price.
But at least that price was a little bit more than McGraw-Hill expected.
A few thousand copies of GQ magazine in iPhone form won’t turn Condé Nast around. But it’s a start, and it’s a good bet that the company’s first Apple tablet apps will look awfully similar.
Here’s what qualifies as a man-bites-dog story these days: A big mainstream business publication hiring an experienced business journalist.
Weird, right? But true: Fortune magazine has hired veteran writer Dan Roth to run and revitalize the title’s Web site. He starts as managing editor next week.
Here’s someone else you won’t see onstage with Steve Jobs next week: Anyone from Time Inc. With good reason: The magazine company doesn’t have any tablet-ready stuff to show off yet. Tease that out a bit and you can tell the story of most media companies. They’re excited to start taking advantage of the tablet–as soon as they find out what it is, exactly.
Apple is set to show off a shiny new device, which means the company needs shiny new media products to show off, too. Like what? Some educated guesses: Expect stuff from Disney and the New York Times, but not from the music labels.
The Apple tablet is threatening to approach Yeti status, but here’s an indication it will turn out to be very real, indeed: The company has told some of its key developers to prepare versions of their iPhone apps that will work on a device with a larger screen, in time for an event next month. Sound like a tablet to you?
Since we’ve spent the past few months dreaming about what a magazine might look like on a tablet from the future, why not do a little dreaming about the tablet itself?
Sound good? Then take a gander at the XO-3, a superlight, supercheap tablet that the people from One Laptop Per Child think they’d like to have available in 2012.
Condé Nast has taken another small step into the future of digital magazines: The publisher has put a second edition of its GQ magazine up for sale on Apple’s iTunes Store. Seminude pop star aside, this doesn’t seem as sexy as the Tablet of Tomorrow talk. But the fact that people are indeed buying magazines in digital form seems pretty relevant to me.
No one has actually spotted one of the much anticipated tablet devices in the wild. But that doesn’t stop publishers from dreaming about what they can do with them once they appear. Here’s the latest, and perhaps most attractive, one–from Sweden’s Bonnier Group. It seems to be purely conceptual at this point, but it’s fun to look at.
You’ve been reading about it for a couple of months and now it’s finally official: The magazine industry is forming its own joint venture to control distribution of digital products that don’t yet exist.
Last month, Condé Nast played show-and-tell with its concept of a digitized magazine. Today it’s Time Inc.’s turn: The publisher is demoing a concept version of Sports Illustrated it says will be able to run on whatever tablet Apple or any else has up their sleeves.
How do you get Web users to pay for content? Get an iPhone into their hands.
That’s one conclusion you can draw from a new survey showing that people who own Apple handsets are more willing to pay for stuff than the average Internet surfer.
Want to see Condé Nast’s not-so-secret plans to produce tablet-friendly editions of its magazines? Get yourself to New York’s Meatpacking District. Or check out this grainy YouTube clip.
Adobe is preparing to put magazines on Apple’s purported wondertablet. But what if that device, like Apple’s iPhone, doesn’t want to work with Adobe?
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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