It’s Not the Innovation: It’s the Audience

It’s always exciting when a popular blog like ReadWriteWeb asks: The Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come? And judging by the many comments, there’s a lot of reader interest in the topic.

If there is a criticism to the story, it would only be the writer calling eReader devices the potential "savior" of digital magazines. But if that were true:

1) Millions of people wouldn’t be reading digital magazines every month. Now.
2) Companies like Nxtbook wouldn’t be on the Inc. 500 list. Now.
3) Publishers like Graduate Prospects wouldn’t have been able to successfully kill their print brand three years ago.
4) Publishers like Hearst wouldn’t be bolstering their custom media revenues via digital-only magazines (as they’ve been for a few years now). Now.
5) Publishers like Uptime Magazine wouldn’t be selling out the next six months of their mobile digital magazines. Now.

Make no mistake: eReaders will only help the industry. But waiting for them to do so (while your competition doesn’t) would be very unwise.

A related quote from Penelope Trunk’s blog: Stop talking about good and bad media. Just because you don’t read it doesn’t make it bad.