Peter Meirs, director of alternative media technologies at Time Inc, reviews developments in digital technology and finds magazines still have a chance to get it right first time

Not too long ago, Stephen King published his digital novella Riding the Bullet; two days later 500,000 copies had been downloaded via the web. A new media model was born and book publishers were dazzled by predictions from credible sources that ebook sales would top $2.3 billion by 2005.

This irrational hype of ebooks and their failure to deliver a satisfying user experience to the public has all but killed the ebook concept. Today, the ebook industry is a mere $12 million a year business with some clever reading applications that run on all sorts of devices. Had ebooks been initially introduced with today's technology and platform flexibility, there would be a wholly different perception of the model and $12 million in sales would seem promising.

Digital magazines still have a chance to be successful the first time around, but it will take significant changes to the current technologies and processes to ensure that success. For digital magazines to catch on, publishers and technology companies must pay attention to what the marketplace wants and then deliver on those expectations. What follows are my opinions on what things need to be developed, fixed or eliminated to make digital magazines a credible alternative to print.

Let's begin with the digital magazine reading experience. The digital magazine consumer requires some type of device to read digital content. There are three basic platforms for experiencing a digital edition: PC, laptop or Tablet PC. Most PCs are difficult to transport and this is a problem since the ability to take the magazine into the bathroom seems to be important to most people when they explain why they don't like digital magazines.

Lessons to learn from ebooks

Laptops are an improvement when it comes to transportability, but they still take a long time to boot up, they get hot when they sit on your lap and their batteries run down after one or two hours. This leaves us with the Tablet PC, lighter than a desktop and more portable than a laptop, it boots up quickly and you don't need a keyboard to use it. I've had my Tablet PC for about a year. After my initial "look how cool I am" boasting, I find that I seldom use it except to highlight the concept of a Tablet PC during presentations.

So far, at least, the Tablet PC technology has not delivered on its original promise of providing a satisfactory digital magazine reading experience. There's still an opportunity, however, to do this with the next generation of the technology. At this point I'll qualify the Tablet PC as a directional technology that might be much better in a few years.

If Microsoft and its partners want to sell a digital content device that competes head-on with print, they must deliver features that render readers indifferent to the media, print or electronic. This means a device that weighs fewer than 24 ounces, runs more than six hours on a charge, boots as fast as a PDA and, most importantly, displays text and graphics with a clarity and precision that rivals print. Until this last condition is met, tablet-based digital magazines will never find a broad consumer audience. No matter how well the reader application flips, zooms, renders graphics or plays media, the reader will ultimately judge his or her experience based upon the hardware.

Keeping with the theme of providing a satisfying reader experience, my next targets are the digital magazine reader applications themselves. There are two strategies for presenting digital magazine content: proprietary applications that provide a feature rich reading experience (e.g., integrated search, indexes, enhanced navigation) and general applications (Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer) that provide a less customized reading experience.

Reading online can be a pain

Readers usually prefer proprietary solutions, like Zinio and Newsstand, but getting consumers to download and install these applications is a challenge that could turn people off from digital magazines entirely. The non-proprietary solutions like, qMags, Olive and Texterity, fall somewhat short on delivering a compelling reading experience, especially with digital magazines that are presented as digital facsimiles of print magazines. Of this group, only qMag, with their Q-vu format, offers a strategy to optimize content for presentation on an electronic display. The overall lack of standards for digital magazine readers provides a terrific opportunity for a company like Adobe to deliver a feature-rich magazine viewer within Adobe's next generation Acrobat Reader. A move like that could render proprietary solutions irrelevant.

Even as reading applications improve, the challenge of providing value to the publisher and providing a better experience for the reader becomes greater once other variables are introduced. Publishers who appreciate digital editions understand the value of offering an ABC or BPA qualified magazine that can be delivered to subscribers in minutes at a lower cost than its print equivalent. Digital magazine consumers appreciate the immediacy of delivery as well as rich features, like search, that only digital can provide. Many consumers complain, however, about the presentation of print content on an electronic display. Like home video letterboxing, forcing print-formatted content onto a digital screen often renders a disappointing result.

The solution is simple; reformat the print design to accommodate the differences in resolution, aspect ratio and size between the digital and paper versions. If the actual content is the same between versions, then auditing bodies like the ABC should qualify the reformatted editions and allow publishers to provide a digital reading experience that consumers would enjoy for reasons other than convenience.

While we're mentioning ABC and BPA, it's worth noting that the single largest business issue related to the success of digital magazines is digital publication rights. The need to secure digital rights for every content element within a magazine is reason enough to discourage many consumer publishers from delivering their magazines in digital format. Both ABC and BPA require that digital editions be exact replicas of the printed versions. Any photographer who refuses a publisher the right to publish his photos in a digital edition can prevent that publication from qualifying under ABC or BPA rules.

Given this concern, it is difficult for many publishers to commit to selling digital subscriptions. If ABC and BPA were to grant publishers some flexibility (allowing alternative photos, for example) then publishers might be more motivated to pursue the digital distribution model.

Then there are the magazine publishers themselves, especially those who ignore the opportunity to develop a digital distribution model that could eventually supplant the print model. The best opportunity for publishers to manage against newstand waste, rising postal costs, an unpredictable paper market and competition from other media is to develop and support electronic versions of magazines that are valued equally to print. Without the enthusiastic encouragement of publishers to motivate them, the hardware, software and qualification challenges will be left unmet, and digital magazines will suffer the same disappointing fate as ebooks. So, let's work together to ensure that doesn't happen.

First published in Digital Magazine News (www.digitalmagazinenews.com) Edited by FIPP.

Source: Magazine World, issue 40