Rob Yoegel Thinks You Type Slow on Your BlackBerry… and Then Thinks Better of It.

Last Friday, Publishing Executive’s Rob Yoegel published a rather one-sided, non-substantive argument against digital editions. The article has been substantially changed since then. Some tidbits of the original:

Yoegel led off the article complaining than an audience development person wanted to promote a digital edition more prominently because a competitor was doing so. At this point, it was curious to see where the writer was going. He could’ve written a piece about how a competitor’s strategy should or should not dictate our own. Alternatively, he could’ve pointed out that digital editions are now often discussed in strategy sessions. Instead, he went down the least obvious road of all, and turned the essay into how people who support digital editions just don’t get it.

Yoegel went on to speculate that those who supported digital editions may be the same people who struggle to type five words a minute on their BlackBerry (because, you know, manual dexterity and digital strategy are entirely intertwined).

It’s hard to say what caused Yoegel to republish the piece: a sudden realization that he’d insulted every publisher with a digital edition or the fact that the essay was devoid of anything resembling research. (There was no mention of any of the great research and case studies which have been published by many sources in the past few years, including Yoegel’s own publication.)

At any rate, the piece has been replaced with what we’re supposed to think Yoegel meant to say: that publishers should think about mobile "rather than being enamored with digital editions" (because, you know, it’s hard to think about two things when you’re banging out those five words per minute). His reasons?

1. The New York Times is considering charging readers for accessing mobile content. In the original version of Yoegel’s story, he wrote that digital editions are little more than desperate measures for publishers trying to stay afloat. As such, this would be a great place to insert an ironic pause.

2. Yoegel reads digital magazine and newspaper content on his Blackberry Storm during his one hour commute every day. He doesn’t say if he clicks on any of the ads, mind you. And perhaps we’re supposed to know that once he’s at work he’s not on a computer, either. Because if he were, then he might have to admit that for eight hours he’s on he same device that people are using to read millions of digital magazines per month while clicking through at a dramatically higher rate than websites, while for two hours he’s staring at a three inch screen with little room for sponsorship images.

Keep in mind, we’re actually bullish about mobile. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t have Nxtbook Liberty. That being said, digital editions and mobile solutions aren’t mutually exclusive. Heck, we use the PDF to make Nxtbook Liberty, even though the final format is the text pages that Yoegel seems to think represent the promised land. And also, if guys like Yoegel would actually use their mobile devices as much as they claim to, they could find plenty of research about revenue generation and audience growth in digital magazines. Personally, I’d recommend they start in the archives of the publications they write for. And finally, we’ve seen our publishers use their BlackBerries, and y’all are WAY faster than five words per minute.