Speculative Post: What Apple’s Newsstand Means for Magazine Publishers
June 7, 2011 by Marcus Grimm
First and foremost, I don’t know, any more than anybody knows who claims to know. All we know is what we heard yesterday: that Apple’s iOS 5, coming this Fall will include a special iBookstore for Periodicals.
At this point, few people know anything else: what formats will it include, how can I get my content there, etc. But because I enjoy giving my opinion whether it’s asked or not and because one of our competitors has already been named as being "threatened" by Apple’s upgrades, I thought it best to offer a few thoughts.
The best thing of all that you can’t disagree with is that this will make it easier for people to browse for your content. While magazines currently appear in the App store, so do games, calculators and farting noise makers. It’s kind of like looking for magazines in Wal-Mart when you’ve never been to Wal-Mart. This will help and will somewhat lessen (though hardly eliminate) the need to actively promote your content.
That’s the good news. But here are the two questions that we are all up in the air about and will be asking over the next few months:
1. How do you get your content onto the iBookstore for Periodicals? You might be thinking you just upload it and away you go, but that’s not how the iBookstore works today. Instead, your content gets submitted through an approved Apple aggregator. There are costs to become one and notice how few there are for all the books in the world? Quite possibly, the iBookstore for Periodicals will work the same way. And keep in mind that many of these aggregators don’t like to work with free content, which makes up a lot of controlled magazines.
2. What formats will they accept? This is particularly interesting. Keep in mind that the iBookstore accepts only ePub and PDF formats, which do not allow for interactive content and have very strict video specifications (each video must start and end with a black frame, must use a specific compression technique, etc.). Whether or not highly interactive digital editions will fit in the iBookstore will be a big question. It’s quite possible that the iBookstore for Periodicals might become the place where static content goes, but more highly engaging interfaces will continue to exist in the App store. Or, in a perfect world, that content will still be promoted in the bookstore, but will allow the reader to download a magazine app, with all the goodness cooked in. We won’t know for a few months, at least.
The saying goes, "May you be blessed to live in interesting times." I’d say yesterday we were all blessed a bit more!
I think you’ve missed the point. The Apple newsstand simply offers publishers of branded apps the opportunity to be included. It’s not restrictive in terms of format or content. It seems like a very sensible and non restrictive solution from Apple to help publishers sell their content/magazines. As a regular magazine reader I’m keen to see how this works on my iPad and it seems to be a very logical and considered solution to the problem of visibility for magazines in the app store.
Jenny,
Thanks for your comment. You could be right.
However, as I pointed out in my post, the iBookstore – in its present form – is a specific format of content. The player, the features and the experience are limited in scope.
One of two things will be happening on the iBookstore for Periodicals. Either, like you suggest, Apple will allow any app, with any feature, and any interface onto the newsstand. OR, all magazines will need to conform to a specific format and feature-set, just as they do now in the iBookstore. And at this point, it’s too soon to know for sure.
On a related note, I would definitely expect that the same restrictions on content currently present in the App store would carry over to the iBookstore. Not saying that they should or shouldn’t; only that I’d expect they will.
Marcus
[...] calculators and farting noise makers,” as Marcus Grimm so eloquently puts it on the NXTBook Media blog. But what does this mean for “traditional†digital magazine [...]