If you publish a magazine you should read this…
I had a thought today… and this is probably a thought that is lost on those of you who happen by this space without any interest in magazines or magazine production… but here it goes anyway: digital magazines are kind of like two-color printing. You could certainly do interesting things with both, but at some point any serious attempt at making a durable publication will have to evolve beyond the limitations of the structure they impose.
In the same way that two color printing is a limitation of what ink on paper can do digital magazines are a governor on the possibilities of digital communication. What determines how deeply your readers “feel” your digital product is not how well you can replicate the printed look and feel of your pub, its how completely you take advantage of the capabilities of the device on which your content lives. A lot of publishers just don’t see that. They are so tunneled into their conception of what a “magazine” is that they are stuck trying to recreate a “paper” experience on a digital device. As a result we have a slew of publications essentially taking their printed format and sending it as PDF or Flash or some combination of the two to readers via some digital channel (email or download).
That may be a practical stop-gap, but it is not going to get the job done in the long run… readers don’t want a paper experience per se, they want a meaningful experience. In print that means (among other things) four colors not two… in a digital world that means an easy to use, easy to carry, cool looking, reasonably priced multi-use device displaying compelling content that is flexible enough to take advantage of all the things that the device can do. It means awareness of and interaction with other applications on the device and, more importantly, on the network.. It means enhancement of pass along via social applications and buddy lists. It means aggregating content elements from a variety of sources… reading a review from your favorite music mag, getting real-time prices from all music retailers online, and buying a download instantly, concurrently, effortlessly.
So what’s a publisher to do? Decouple yourself from the whole idea of paper… break free of the stagnant, still notions of issues, pages, and covers. Make paper just another channel in your stream, not the defining one. Atomize… let your information live and breathe and run and jump… embrace and understand XML and its variants… redesign your design staff… revolutionize your production processes… and above all else study and know what’s happening in the consumer electronics market. They are your new printer. The devices they are building are the going to be the way your work meets your readers in the digital world.
If all of that isn’t enough to get you sweating try this… you also have to do the impossible… you have to stop thinking about your advertisers. If you obsess over how to fit advertisements into these new processes you’re going to end up building clunky, print-like digital products that don’t resonate with end users. Your ads will stick out like ugly, sore, swollen, throbbing thumbs and you will alienate your most valuable asset… your reader. Have faith that if you build a compelling experience for your readers your advertisers and sales and marketing people will figure out how to piggy-back on to it. To borrow an over-borrowed (but so appropriate) line from one of my favorite movies… if you build it they will come.
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