Join the Webinar!

FOLIO’s got a great line-up for their webinar on digital editions this week, including Nxtbook customer Terry O’Hanlon. It’s a great opportunity to learn from some guys who’ve figured out the media and are doing great with it. How about joining us?

FOLIO’s promotional copy: The explosion in PEDs—from e-readers to mobile to tablets—offers digital
magazines a new opportunity to facilitate publisher content with new
electronic outlets. Learn how digital magazine providers are helping
publishers take the next step beyond magazines and web sites to deliver
the personal reading experience anywhere, anytime.

Well, They Can’t All Be Winners…

When you’re a platform agnostic company, one of the requirements is that you need a lot of devices to make sure your product can run on them flawlessly (or be tweaked to run flawlessly). Our development group has a growing stable of e-readers, tablets, mobile devices and more, so that we can build the best products for the best strategy.

So how bad does a product have to be that we send it back? Pretty bad, and for the first ever, it happened this week. The JooJoo was a much hyped tablet device, promising everything the iPad was (fun, zippy, powerful) and everything it wasn’t (Flash). However, the reality is it’s awful. Very awful. A Nxtbook couldn’t run on it, but truth be told, not much else can, either and if we kept it long enough to give it a nickname, it would’ve been "Crash."

Product sales were awful, too, and were made apparent when the manufacturer sent an e-mail to the 90 people that pre-ordered one, including us. Unfortunately, the marketing department for the company didn’t understand the difference between cc and bcc, so now we know who else ordered one. As you can imagine, as string of "reply all" e-mails followed, and the general disappointment of JooJoo customers was quickly aggregated.

As for us, we’re following the advice of this JooJoo reviewer and buying an additional iPad for the stable.

To be clear, you won’t find the JooJoo in the 2010 Nxtbook Guide to eReaders.

I Can’t Read It, But I Like It!

Nxtbook customer Global Sources utilized an awesome interactive Flash cover to allow readers to choose where in the book they want to go. It’s all in Chinese, mind you, so I have no idea where I’m going, but the applications of animation and video throughout make it an engaging experience, regardless of what language you read.

Happy Earth Day!

Because it’s Earth Day, you can expect many of the digital publishing companies to wax poetic about all of the trees we’re saving. You can also expect some very environmentally conscious people to say that since we’re using computers (which require electricity) to make our digital editions, somewhere living things are still dying.

Truth is, I don’t know about all of that. Here’s what we do know:

The Nxtbook is a carbon-neutral product. If you don’t read it, no energy is spent. In an industry rampant with waste, our excesses are nil. And that’s a good thing, no matter how you slice it. In fact, it’s the thing we use to craft our environmental position. Our ticker is based on those who read digital pages, but also on all of the magazines that don’t go unread, as well.

Should You Design a Digital Magazine for the iPad?

Actually, it’s a bit of a broader question. Assuming you were to design a digital-only magazine, what aspect ratio would you use? Curiously, despite the fact that the iPad is barely out of its cyber-womb, the question was posed to us by a publisher looking to do a digital-only magazine specifically optimized for the iPad.

In this particular case, the publisher had already decided to go with a landscape only design. Not a bad idea for a digital-only magazine, except for one thing: the iPad is a product with a 4:3 aspect ratio, not the more trendy 16:9.

Is this awful? Probably not, but it’s worth thinking about. One blogger has gone so far as to say that the aspect ratio of the iPad is an indication that Apple thinks you’ll like holding it in portrait mode more than in landscape mode.

Want more food for thought? Here’s a chart detailing the common monitor sizes. Alongside, we’ve written in the % of the more than two million people that viewed a Nxtbook last month. What’s interesting is that while 1024 x 768 (a 4:3) ratio gets 25% of readership, 4:3 is now responsible for less than half of all readership. NOTE: Wondering why the numbers only add up to 86%? Because more than 2,000 different ratios were used all in all, which is a pretty good justification for our dynamic scaling!

 

All of which goes to say that if you were to design a digital only magazine today, you’re probably better off designing in 16:9, because that’s what most of your readers are using today and what more of them will be using tomorrow. Unless they’re on an iPad.

Interactive Magazines Ain’t Easy.

We’re sorry to see FLYP is going the way of the Dodo.

Since their launch, FLYP did a great job of showing readers what a digital magazine experience could be like. Unfortunately, they failed to show advertisers and in the article in the Times says that while the magazines delivered engagement, they didn’t deliver clicks. You wonder if FLYP or their advertisers didn’t understand the 3 Rules of Digital Magazines.

From the beginning, FLYP hit the ball out of the park w/ great story-telling. Unfortunately, they seemed to not be overly concerned about using their same talents to sell advertising. Coupled with content that seemed to be as niche-less as it was awesome, and it’s easy, if disappointing, to see what happened.

iPad Usage Out of the Gate….

Interesting article that says that iPad internet usage is almost as big as Android and BlackBerry after only two weeks on the market.

As always, we like to transpose that for Nxtbook customers.

The "control" for the report is Windows XP, which is 64.5% of the whole market. Nxtbook was exactly 1% higher, probably indicative of our heavily BtoB audience.

However, the article said that Android and BlackBerry has about a .04% marketshare, the iPad has .03% and iPhone and iPod touch have a combined .6%.

Over the same period, Nxtbook iPhone and iPod touch was half that, .3% of all users. We attribute this mostly to older versions of the Nxtbooks being read that didn’t have the iPhone/iPod touch ability.

However, it’s also interesting to note that our Android marketshare is higher than the average at .06% and our BlackBerry usage is lower at .02%, probably because we charge for our text-based Liberty version that runs great on BlackBerries.

Meanwhile, the iPad had .03% – more than BlackBerry and about 1/10 of the iPhone usage.

OK, what does all of this mean? In a nutshell, the iPad will prove to be a better digital magazine reading experience than any of the mobile devices, but it’s still far to early to know if it will be great enough for you to invest gobs of money into it. Which is why we’re giving it to many of our customers for free.

But you probably already knew that.

Your Guide to eReader Sanity

If you’re a publisher today, you’re being told – regularly – that you HAVE to get your content on every device you can. But is that true? Will your advertisers be happy with the metrics? Will readers be happy with the experience (assuming they’re waiting for you on the devices at all?).

Much as we love a good tech story, what we felt the industry needs right now is a sane way to look at each of the devices in the marketplace and provide you with some basic facts about the products that are catching the buzz right now:

*What the reading experience is like.

*How easy it is to get your Nxtbook on it.

*All in all, how vital it is for you to get on the device NOW.

With that in mind, we’re pleased to present you with our 2010 e-Reader guide. This unique guide will tell you what you need to know about getting your content onto today’s hottest devices. Click here to enjoy!

Our Customers Rock!

Congratulations to Columbia Home & Lifestyle Magazine! They won the Best E-zine issue at the annual Missouri Association of Publications 2010 RANLY Awards ceremony for their March 2009 issue. You can read the winning issue by clicking here.

Congratulations are also in order for non-Nxtbook customer (but faithful blog reader) Michael Grace from Virgin Media. Virgin’s Electric! magazine was recently honored at the Webby awards. You can view the winning entry here. While we wish it had been a Nxtbook, it’s a great example of truly optimizing for an online experience. Well done!

The Syndicator in Invasion of the Ipads!

Have you seen our newest Ad, yet? In this one, the Syndicator shows how easy it is to get your Nxtbook on the iPad. Like, really easy. See the video to see how easy it is.

Coming next month, the Syndicator will face his fiercest foe, yet!

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