Category Archives: Technology

Should B2B Get Excited about the Digital Magazine Consortium?

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For B2B publishers, how big a deal is the recently announced digital magazine consortium?  Does the participation of industry titans Condé Nast, Time Inc., Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp., mean our magazines will all soon be read on cool e-reader tablets? Or is it just more hot air?

For me, the answers to these questions came from an unexpected source. Regular readers of B2B Memes will know that I have mixed feelings about digital magazines.  Likewise, my feelings are mixed about the one blog on the subject that I follow, from digital magazine producer Nxtbook Media. Like many corporate blogs, it’s a mix of lightweight stories about company activities, tales of customer success, and criticisms of anyone that doesn’t like their product. Last week, though, I remembered why I follow it: Sometimes it offers some excellent insights.

It’s unfortunate that the PR bulldog instinct came over the author, Marcus Grimm, in headlining last week’s post “Lies, Half-Truths and Other Innuendos About Digital Magazines.”  The inflammatory choice of words made me suspect it would be a hack job, but in fact it was a well-reasoned and sensible discussion of the consortium’s effort. (I suppose it’s too late now, but why not use a key phrase from the post as the title: “Top Five Things You Need to Know About the Forthcoming Digital Magazine Consortium”?)

If you’re interested in the topic, you should read the entire post. But here I will cite three key points Grimm makes in casting doubt on the relevance of the consortium.

First, as Grimm notes, “there’s no reason to believe this will be a solution for trade publishers.” The consortium is all about charging for content, not growing an audience. Hence, he says, “if you’re interested in the latter, there’s nothing here to indicate a better future for you, or even a different future.”

Second, he argues against the strategy of producing a dedicated device for digital magazines: “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 [they’re] on.”

Third, he points out the silliness of the magazine industry trying to build a tablet: “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.”

Now, I suppose there may be some behind-the-scenes politics or unspoken resentments at work here I don’t know about, and as a Nxtbook employee, Grimm is certainly not an objective observer. But he’s persuaded me that the consortium is not likely to hit a home run.

Personally, I hope someone is successful at forging a viable, widely-accepted approach to porting digital versions of B2B magazines to portable readers. For me, no matter how cool the technology, digital magazines on a computer just don’t cut it. But put them on my Kindle, add some color and better performance to the device, and I could be sold on digital magazines at last.

Earth to Esquire: Get Real

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Last year it was an e-ink electronic display on the cover; this year, it’s 3D special effects—if you have a webcam handy, anyway.

As I learned this morning from Mashable, Esquire magazine’s December issue will feature something called augmented reality (AR). The way it works, as I understand it, is that you can hold the cover and a few other pages in front of a camera connected to your computer and see a nifty 3D, animated version of it on your computer screen.  As an Associated Press story notes, “it may be the future of print or just a dying medium’s last desperate grab at attention as the Internet swallows more of peoples’ time.”

Augmented reality as a concept has been around for more than a decade, as outlined in Wikipedia. The technology is just starting to be realized, in fairly clunky ways. As observed in ReadWriteWeb recently, venture capitalist money is not exactly pouring into AR startups yet. Someday something really earthshaking may come of it, but that seems several years away still.

Even if AR thrives, can it really do much to help print? You have to admire the Esquire staff for trying just about anything to keep their print franchise going, particularly if it can get them lots of publicity. But realistically, it’s hard to see their use of AR as much more than a gimmick.

As I’ve noted in a comment on the Mashable article, Esquire’s use of AR reminds me of the great CueCat debacle of 2000.   The brilliant idea was to distribute bar code readers to magazine subscribers, who would use them to scan bar codes in ads to take them to related Web sites. The problem, of course, was that no one wanted to go to all that trouble to visit an advertiser’s site when you could just type in the URL by hand. Needless to say, the Cue Cat was a Titanic flop.

Holding up a magazine cover to a webcam is, I grant you, easier than scanning a bar code, and the results are presumably more entertaining than an advertiser’s Web page.  Here’s an example of how it might work, using baseball cards rather than a magazine:

I guess that’s cool. But still, how likely is it to become a routine for readers?  I don’t know about you, but I don’t read books or magazines while sitting in front of my computer.  That’s the enduring beauty of print—I can read it almost anywhere, without the aid of technology.

Will I buy a copy of the December issue of Esquire? Absolutely. Will augmented reality save print? Not so clear.

Can Printcasting Print-on-Demand Work for B2B?

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One of the memes at work in the new-media transformation involves the way print can play an ongoing role in the increasingly digital world of publishing. Last week I covered two options, print-on-demand from Magcloud, and digital editions that try to recreate the print experience. Both of these efforts have been marketed heavily to traditional magazine publishers.

Those publishers are less likely to be aware of a similar experiment being developed in the newspaper world, called Printcasting. Driven by Dan Pacheco of the Bakersfield Californian, Printcasting aims to allow virtually anyone to produce a PDF magazine from one or more hyperlocal blogs or other online sources. The Printcasting project was kicked off last year with a grant from the Knight Foundation. While it started as a project for the Bakersfield area, it has now expanded around the world.

As Pacheco explained last year in an FAQ on the project, Printcasting is a do-it-yourself form of publishing:

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Keep an Eye on Google Wave

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Now that the first user invitations to Google Wave have been released, it’s not surprising that blogosphere and twitterverse alike are buzzing once again with comments about Google’s nascent communication system.

As you may guess from the way I just described Wave, I’m not quite clear about exactly what Wave is.  (Both a “conversation and a document”? Uh, okay. . . .)

My befuddlement may be a good sign. It’s been my uniform initial reaction to revolutionary technology, from spreadsheets in the early 1980s and the Web in the early 1990s to Twitter a couple of years ago.

Now, it worries me a bit that B2B savant Paul Conley, who once came close to expressing actual enthusiasm about Wave, has apparently given up on it. So at least I conclude from his latest blog post and its fin-de-siècle, nothing-new-under-the-sun lament that the Web 2.0 revolution is over.  Okay, maybe Twitter is just a big bore. But doesn’t Wave deserve a brief, hopeful mention?

The clearest picture I’ve gotten of Wave’s revolutionary potential, at least for publishing, has come courtesy of Chicago Sun Times columnist Andy Ihnatko. I find myself going back repeatedly to his first column on Wave, in which he speculatively describes how it could remake the editorial publishing process.  It does not take much of an imaginative leap from his scenarios to see how Wave could either displace or be integrated into many current content management systems.

Will Wave live up to Ihnatko’s hopes for it? Even he is hedging his bets. Several years will no doubt pass before we know how Wave turns out. But it’s worth watching, and may yet revive Paul Conley from his Web 2.0 ennui.