Math Eludes Many Liberal Arts Majors

Strange article over at FOLIO saying that Sports Illustrated plans to hire four additional editors just to create a tablet SI. Favorite twitter response? @jeffdebalko "Makes as much sense as print only editors."

Jeff couldn’t be more right. Some publishers continue to think that the tablet platform OR the mobile OR the Kindle platform will yield huge results. The reality is that each of them will yield some results and you need the sum of those results to equal big results. Your best move: hedge your bets. Get on every device you can, as cheaply as you can.

MPA isn’t necessarily helping this concept, by offering a special page featuring publishers who now offer magazine apps. By acting like an app is the only way to get on these devices, they’re ignoring the hundreds of publishers (Nxtbook and others) that simply have iPhone or Android friendly versions of their product. If you get nothing else from this post, get this: YOU DON’T NEED AN APP TO BE ON THE IPHONE OR IPAD.

It seems like some publishers (who’ve been accused of "silo thinking" before) may be falling victim to the same thing, again. But the problem, these silos are smaller and will each yield lower profits. If not handled properly, some people could start losing money at a faster rate.

Want more proof? In this article, only 25% of people planning to buy the iPad say they want to download apps, while 36% say they won’t. Half of them, however, say they’d use it to surf the web. Truth is, the killer app. for the iPad is the web browser, and you don’t need to buy an app to be on it.