Lies, Half-Truths and Other Innuendos About Digital Magazines

It’s been quite the week for digital magazines, with various big named publishers saying they’re working together on something big. Exactly what it is, however remains to be seen, which is why we tend to agree with Mashable writer Andrew Ostrow who wrote, "Given there’s no name, no site and no devices or software to speak of, it’s far too early to judge whether or not this represents the future of publishing or simply a desperate alliance that ultimately won’t do much to keep print publications afloat."

But when your press releases are vague, writers are left to fill in the details themselves. Thus, here’s a list of Top Five Things You Need to Know About the Forthcoming Digital Magazine Consortium:

1) There’s no reason to believe that this will be a solution for trade publications. All indications are that this solution is aimed at charging for content. When you couple that with the fact that the Kindle and Nook haven’t welcomed free pubs, yet, you realize that this is about trying to sell content, not grow audience. If you’re interested in the latter, there’s nothing here to indicate a better future for you, or even a different future.

2) Even if this consortium fails, it doesn’t really matter. The group has stated as one of their goals is to "to create a robust publishing platform that’s optimized for multiple devices," but we’ve been doing this already for years. Today, a single Nxtbook link can deliver people to the PC, iPhone, Blackberry or Kindle version of your magazine. In addition, they wish to "create a selection of advertising opportunities," which we’ve included with every format we’ve designed for. Finally, the group plans to "create a digital storefront offering an “extensive selection” of reading options," but Nxtbook already can be offered or sold from anywhere  – your website or a digital newsstand like eMagazines.com. As a minor point, we DON’T agree that you should make readers choose a format. Instead, let them choose the content and have the format adapt to the device their on. In short, you can wait for the big guys to invent this stuff, or you can get it from us today.

3) The SI Tablet is not real. It’s cool, but it’s not real. Curious point: It was made in Adobe AIR. As of today, there’s only one commercially available digital magazine product built in Adobe AIR, and that’s the offline Nxtbook.

4) Rex Hammock is right. He wrote, "But I doubt the folks sitting at the table today will get it right. They need mass audiences for their business models to work. For the next few years, we’re in the era of niche and quick-response guerilla media. In other words, not these guys’ forte. A long, slogging, trench war fought in content niches will likely win this war." We can taste the napalm already!

5) I don’t know if I want one eReader, but I definitely don’t want ten. It’s been interesting to see all the the forthcoming eReader devices. The reality is that most of these won’t live to see the age of two. The fact that the consortium is working on an eReader device is further proof to me that they don’t fully get what industry they’re in. Hint: it’s not hardware.