Back in January I wrote a post discussing why the iPad would be so significant to the future of publishing where I said the following:
“the reading experience itself is going to change…it’s all about the apps… that’s where the real innovation is going to happen, and that’s where consumers are expecting it to happen. They don’t want a crazy new device they have to learn how to use – they want something they know how to use that does new and useful things. The extra screen real estate is exactly what developers have been waiting for, and it’s all they need to change the way we think about reading.”
I stand by what I said – and I think the upheaval we’re about to see in the publishing market is going to be driven by a shift to tablets in general. Once again, the point is that the significance of the iPad isn’t due to the fact that Apple has created something conceptually revolutionary, it’s that they’re in the best position to create a new market and change consumer behavior on a massive scale with what they’re releasing (feel free to debate this point in the comments ;-)).
This afternoon I found this demo (below) of Wired Magazine’s new iPad Table app that made me pretty confident that the way we consume magazines is about to change in a hurry. I’ve seen similar demos like this for magazine-like reading experiences on a tablet (The Mag+ by Bonnier that was demo’d on PopSci immediately comes to mind), but the fact that this is a working demo for the iPad (which hasnt even been released yet!) is pretty significant. I think Chris Anderson’s bit in this speaks volumes about how publishers perceive the opportunities for rich story telling and revenue that the tablet phenomenon presents (not just the iPad, tablets in general). He says…
“This is what we’ve been waiting for, for 15 years. We’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use all these visual tools at our disposal to tell these stories in a way that is efficient, that is multi-dimentional. But we also think it’s an opportunity to reset the economics. For the first time people might value this experience so much that they’ll pay for it.”
Touch Changes The Revenue Game
Chris’ point about resetting the economics for magazines is an important one. We all know that print is on its way out. You’ll notice in the demo that they make the point that advertising is just as important to the consumer’s experience of Wired as the content itself is….but check out how interactive the ads are. It’s a whole different experience. You know why you haven’t seen ads like that on your laptop? Because we don’t touch our screens, that’s why. When you’re encouraged to touch and explore, ads themselves are much closer to interactive content than they are to an object of interruption. The act of touching is literally creating a whole new category for advertising (as content). Now, you couple the opportunities there with the fact that what you’re touching (the magazine) comes in the form of an application that consumers are downloading (easy distribution) and probably paying as much for as they did for the print version…no wonder these guys are excited.
Considering this is a working demo for a product that hasn’t even been released yet, I’m pretty excited to see what other players are doing. Apple was smart to give developers a window to get going between the official announcement and the actual release date. If this is the beginning, this is a really exciting time to be in publishing.
