September 8th, 2004
The intersection of print publications and the Web
Despite reports of declining readership, print isn’t quietly slipping away into oblivion, a victim of the omnivorous Internet. Magazines and newspapers provide a level of comfort, familiarity, consistency and portability in our chaotic information-driven world. At the other end of the spectrum are Web sites, blogs and other digital media that leverage the capabilities of the Internet continue to morph assiduously.
It seems counter-intuitive that a company can make a business out of creating digital replicas of print titles. Why not just go to the companion Web site? Apparently enough investors believe in this concept to fund several companies. Olive Software just received $6 million from Sequoia Venture Capital; Newsstand Inc. received $7.2 million from VCs and The New York Times Company; in 2002 Zinio received $8.4 million in funding from VCs, such as Apax Partners, Inc., Intel Capital and New Enterprise Associates. A group of former publishing executives have started qMags, which offers many print titles in PDF format.
I’ve tried out Zinio, which has print titles from publishing stalwarts including Hachette, McGraw-Hill, IDG, Time Warner and Ziff-Davis. The Zinio Reader, a free download, displays the contents and has hyperlinking, zoom, search, archiving, highlighting, and sticky note features. It’s basically a high fidelity duplicate of a magazine with hyperlinking. It take a few tries to get used to reading the content by moving the structure print page replica around within the screen, but it gets the job done. *
According to Peter Longo, Zinio president and a colleague from my print publishing days, there are 2,500 magazines with an aggregate paid circulation of 400 million subscribers. Less that one percent of subscriptions are delivered digitally today. For publishers, digital distribution is far cheaper than using the postal system, but it’s hard to imagine that digital print replica publishing will take off unless people lose the paper habit but continue to want the structured magazine or newspaper format.
“This is the horseless carriage stage. You have backlit computer screens to display ads and content, hot links and archiving for storage,” says Longo. “These are all incremental improvements over the current magazine format. The future of magazines and newspapers is full-motion video, audio and instant updating. You can cache Web pages under the ad or edit content, and offer virtual walkthroughs in a car advertisement. It’s the best of what the Web publishing model offers, combined with the familiarity of the tradition magazine or newspaper format.”
New screen technologies—a tabloid- or magazine-sized screen that you fold up and put in your pocket, for example—will eliminate the bothersome movement of pages within a screen that is too small to display the full page in all its glory. s a platform for any content presentation
But the real question is whether the traditional print format and subscription model will survive in this century, as it has in past millennia, or whether the digital medium will dictate new information consumption models that finally lay the legacy of the printing press and stone tablets to rest. Just as Apple (with the help of Xerox Parc) redefined the computer-human interface—from command line to graphical user interface–the convergence of video, audio, text, animation, 3D graphics and even holograms will dictate new interfaces to content, as well as devices.
The Zinio’s of the world will likely persist in an anachronistic way, but they can also take their delivery model and work with content providers to create next generation information consumption interfaces. Perhaps the print format (which underlies many popular Web sites) appeals to some primordial human information processing algorithm, but my guess is that just the capability to interconnect and link information will necessitate radically new user interfaces. On the other hand, it’s hard to image the New York Times or Wall Street Journal without their familiar column layouts, in print or online. What’s your take?
