Bada… BING!

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, launched last month and while it’s going to be tough to out-Google Google, early returns are interesting.

Already, Bing is the number three search engine referrer to Nxtbooks and if you google "see Des Moines summer getaway" (with or without the quotation marks), you’ll see Bing’s doing a nice job of indexing Nxtbook content. For what it’s worth, Google continues to do the "best" job. Visitors from Google read far more pages and stay way longer in the content from those from other search engines.

 

Nxtbook 3.0 - Starring… Nxtbook Media!

As part of our upcoming 3.0 release, we’re revamping the corporate video. Designed to show all of the features of 3.0, this version takes place at Nxtbook Media headquarters. While this is a rough cut (with more edits and features coming), we hope you enjoy it!

 

Dan Blank is on a roll….

If you do nothing else this week to help your magazine succeed do this: read Dan Blank’s latest posts. He’s doing a great job of helping B2B publishers not just understand how their jobs are changing but how to transition through the changes. Here’s a snippet:

Editors do an incredible amount of work for each article and feature they produce. However, they often lose the return-on-investment by focusing on a single product (an article), instead of building multiple revenue generating products that can sustain the business, and target the many ways their audience can consume the information that the editors are producing. A single effort can easily be extended to create several products, each with their own sales channel.

 

Nxtbook 3.0 is Here (Almost)

NOTE: This is a re-post from last week. I don’t think we’ve ever done a re-post, but it’s important. If you read it last week, skip it today. But if you didn’t, please read it now:

Later this month, the official version of Nxtbook 3.0 will be released. You’ve heard us blog about it, watched the videos and probably have even seen it, but now it’s your turn to treat your readers (and advertisers) to the coolest Nxtbook, yet.

To bring you up to speed with 3.0, we’re please to announce a special clients-only webinar where you’ll have the ability to see everything you’re dying to know about 3.0, including:

* What you can expect to hear from your readers regarding the new interface

* What new revenue generation opportunities are available to you

* How to utilize enhanced tracking

* How to grow circulation specifically with 3.0

* What you need to do to ensure your files look awesome in Nxtbook 3.0

* Much, much more!

The webinar will be held Wed. June
24th, at 2pm (EDT). Though we’ve done dozens of webinars, this one’s a
little special: it’s the first clients-only one, and the first
opportunity you’ll have to ask questions surrounded by other Nxtbook
customers. It’s going to be great! Register for the webinar here.

 

Hedging the E-ink Bets

So if the past year was all about devices: the Kindle, the iPhone, the Sony Book Reader, the PlasticLogics Reader (which isn’t even out, yet), will next year be about platform agnostics?

Evidence piece #1: Google doesn’t think you want a reader. Or at least, not a specialized reader. They’re going to start selling books right through the browser, recognizing that browsers go pretty much everywhere.

Evidence piece #2: The 3Qi monitor wants to merge what we love about LCDs (color and animation) with what we love about E-ink (low light, easy on the batteries) into a single uber-monitor. Sounds expensive, but then again, it sounds wholly useful right out of the box, too.

Meanwhile, are you aware that the new Alias 2 cell phone uses E-ink? For $79 bucks, you can be texting away on tomorrow’s technology today.

Upping the Interactive

There’s some Twitter-chat this week about SEED Magazine’s very cool interactive interface. In many ways, this is more of a website interface than a digital magazine interface, as the user controls what they see when and can’t really tell when they’re done looking. Those aren’t judgment calls, mind you, just facts. At any rate, we love different ways to visualize data and if you’re looking to drive engagement, you could do a lot worse.

Kindle DX Announced

The next generation Kindle was announced today - the first Kindle to allow publishers to maintain their graphics on the device’s screen. While not close to perfect, it’s a dramatic improvement, and publishers can be certain we’ll find ways to help get their content on the Amazon store.

Quicksilver Replaces Nxtbook Toolbar w/ a Sharpie

Seriously, I’m not kidding. Don’t miss the draggable, rescale-able video player on this page - which is standard from Nxtbook.

Hearst Launches Latest Digital Only Custom Magazine

From the people who brought you Project Analog comes Project Test, Hearst’s latest digital-only magazine. Optimized for the screen, using video and pulling in dynamic RSS feeds, this one’s a winner.

Mine Magazine - The “Digital” Review

There are many reviews about the Mine Magazine project from Time, Inc., though most of them focused on the print issues of the magazine. Because we’re digital guys, this review will focus on the digital edition technology which was used. Our review is based on this issue of Mine.

Surprisingly (or not), Time, Inc. didn’t use a traditional digital magazine company for this project, but instead used a custom design house. While built on new Flex technology (like the new Nxtbook 3.0), there are more than a few basic features missing from the digital magazine:

1) Spreads of the publication are a fixed size. Make your browser bigger, make your browser smaller - Mine doesn’t care. In doing so, there’s a ton of wasted real estate and it’s impossible to read the magazine when a spread is open.

2) Zooming in automatically moves the viewer to single page mode, rendering it impossible (once again) to pan or move about the spread.

3) When they say, "Mine," they mean "Mine." While you can share the link to your magazine, you can’t find the link to any page of the magazine, which is rather 2005. Don’t bother looking for Facebook or Twitter integration, either. (Think of that: Who wouldn’t love to upload MY magazine to MY Facebook page?)

4) But the zoom level isn’t your’s. Go ahead and zoom, but if you don’t like the level you get, you’re out of luck. Mine uses JPEG images, NOT vector images, which means that the Zoom level can’t be customized to the level the user wants.

5) Click on the back cover. We dare you. The only outbound sponsor link to Lexus is on the back cover of the magazine (let’s hope Lexus cares more about branding than web traffic). However, the entire back cover of the magazine is linked, which you can only tell because of the subtle change in the mouse-over tool tip. This means that a user who clicks on the back cover hoping to zoom in gets bounced to the Lexus website. Whether this was poor programming or intentional is anyone’s guess, but it’s the kind of linking only seen from those who don’t think through how readers will engage with the content.

6) If it’s MINE, why can’t I read it? Though our digital issue of Mine came last week, loading the magazine was impossible at the time, and we were greeted by silent screens and curious error messages. Today, Mine loaded cleanly, finally allowing us to get under the hood for this review.

All in all, what’s a bummer about the digital edition of Mine is that while it does give the reader a somewhat "customized" experience, content-wise, it totally failed in using features standard in many of today’s digital magazines, let alone a "break through" experience. In doing so, Time helped neither itself nor the digital magazine category.

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