The Future Of Magazines? | Steffan Antonas.
I came across this video demo of a digital magazine prototype on Popular Science and was ultra impressed. Hat tip to the developers in Bonnier’s R&D group and BERG Design for their work on this. This year we’ve seen escalating hype around ebook readers like Amazon’s Kindle, as well as a lot of speculation about the looming death of print media,
Continues @ http://blog.steffanantonas.com
Love the concept and believe that as the cost of producing high volumes of electronics at a low cost will make this type of device a reality, I’m just not sure it would ever hit the main stream consumer market, if I am on the tube or train I’d be lucky to see 1 in a 100 people using a Kindle type of device yet they do have printed material that they are reading (I would say the looming death of printed media may only relate to the techies and futurists, not the mass consumer) When we look at newspaper and magazine production we saw a flood of new printed mediums become available that saturated the newsstands as production became even more automated and cheaper to produce, access to assets and metadata made that cost reduce even further, but it introduced fierce competition to attract the consumer.
Each month we receive our subscriptions to our doorstep in the form of Ideal Home and Custom PC, these magazines live in the bathroom on the radiator, I’m sure I don’t need to spell out when they get read, but they do sit on that radiator for a good 20 days with the heating going on and off and the humidity going up and down to the extremes….still readable by the time they are ready for the bin…. I’m not sure that this type of electronic magazine would live upto that. To quote my boss this past week one of his young boys showed him the book he was reading on his Apple Itouch, happy to read it in this format, so my route to market for the digital edition, whether that be magazine, book or newspaper would have to be a device that everyone will actually own…. The mobile phone. Now I’ve just got a new Samsung H1 on Vodafone 360…. unlimited internet, so now rather than a news paper I grab the headlines while I’m on the move…
I do think the future is interesting but unless the publishers are will do give this type of device away then they will never hit the mass consumer. (in my opinion)
I think the difference here is you have to take into account the “cool” factor and if mass produced the cost will drop significantly low as to make it a plausible way for publishers to give them away to subscribers/readers.
Until we get to holographic interfaces from mobile, or indeed reading them through 3d type glasses, the mobile phone readers to do not cut it for that Sunday morning read the papers feel.
I also think, this is a way forward for glossy magazine readers, especially if it can be compacted in such a way as to fit in your pocket, bag or purse.
Publishers, still need to factor in the added value, over and above cool, which lasts until it becomes ubiquitous. However, the long tail of content in a linked data world should change those dynamics.
Whatever, for now I want one!!!… just not in my bathroom