The iPad is six years old…let go of the traditional magazine format
Retro replica (0.02)
More than 90 per cent of today’s applications from top publishers are still replica editions where you’ve gotta point and move your finger around. It’s a lot of work on behalf of the consumer. And so we’re asking the reader to do a lot of work when the world is now – in a smartphone world – we’re flipping and we’re turning and we’re able to very quickly with agility move through content. So if magazines don’t adjust to that we’re not going to get to the growth rates we need to.
Technical challenge (0:30)
The part of it that’s quite important is that you need to take the technical challenge of doing that – meaning converting your content to XML, getting it into templated formats, producing an app that’s truly usable.
Second wave of online magazine content (0:43)
There’s an absolute need for the industry to rethink how they’re re-architecting their content for digital audiences. Particularly on smartphones. Because the first wave of digital content for magazines was on the tablet editions… It was relatively easy to get a replica of a magazine and read it, y’know because the tablet was roughly the format of a magazine. On a smartphone it’s a completely different issue. So you have to extract the content from that flat page, bring it into an XML environment, be able to repurpose it so that it’s actually readable.
And that work, that burden, has to be done on the technology side and publishers are finding that’s not easy to do. They’ve done it once with the tablet, but doing it for the smartphone is a whole other level of work and investment. And that’s why you need to rethink that and that’s what the Zinio Pro platform is about, is trying to make that cost effective and do it on behalf of the entire industry.
The intricacies of updating an industry (1:40)
I think one is making sure that you’re recognising that the tablet is only one device, you have to be optimised on smartphone. And also that there’s more than one operating system it’s not just an Apple world there’s Windows, there’s Android, there’s Kindle. You have to appreciate there’s a multi-platform world and increasingly those platforms will get more and more usage of magazines as they build their own App stores and build their own innovation into the reading experience.
Premium content (2:19)
There will always be a market for premium content. Even the music industry, and the book industry, and the movie industry: the people are still paying for the content. They’re paying for it in different ways, they’re paying for it with different models, and the magazine industry has to be just as flexible.
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