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News & ArtsWednesday, November 24, 2010
Media Every Billionaire's Getting into the iPad Publishing Act
Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 3:25 PM
This month, news that Rupert Murdoch is launching an iPad-only newpaper called The Daily started leaking everywhere. (Murdoch reportedly wanted to call it The Daily Planet, but those killjoys at DC Comics reportedly lawyered up.)
Now Engadget says that Richard Branson is about to get into the iPad-only publishing business with a new magazine called Project that "will cover entertainment, travel, business, design, and international culture." Some are wondering if this means Apple will announce an update to the iPad's IOS that will allow in-app subscriptions.
If you're furiously anti-Murdoch, you might want to read Valleywag's post titled "Why the iPad Newspaper Is Doomed." Here's just one reason of many:
Since The Daily is an iPad app, there will be no inbound links, and reportedly no outbound links to the web, either. And there will be no web version. That isolation instantly kneecaps the paper's ability to promote itself; the web will convert The Daily's big scoops into blog summaries, tweets, Facebook rants and even iPad screenshots — but not into traffic for the publication that generated the buzz in the first place.
I was expecting to see this kind of media wrangling at the iPad's launch, but it seems that magazine publishers and papers wanted to try something closer to the current model to see if they could make it work. Now people are starting to re-envision the way papers and magazines will work on a tablet. The beginning of 2011 is going to be very interesting for media analysts.
1
Valleywag is 100% correct. This kind of publishing on the web is synergistic; your value comes from the web of links that you are a part of. iPad publishing is by definition not a part of ANYTHING. You're getting your content from something that uses internet protocols but isn't the web. Isn't A web. It's almost like going back to before the internet.
No one's going to read it.
Oh, it might still be there, sucking cash out of Murdoch's pockets, in five years, but it's not going to be a part of whatever comes next.
Plus, with Steve Jobs aggressively censoring every inch (see the recent flap over the issue of Esquire that almost wasn't), and the ludicrous pricing, and I think iPad publishing is DOA, period.
See, the iPad is still incredibly popular, in its gee-whiz phase, but most of the Brave New Apps are flops -- ebooks, magazines, now newspapers. And there are other tablet options now. If Jobs isn't careful, his golden goose may start laying some seriously rotten eggs.
No one's going to read it.
Oh, it might still be there, sucking cash out of Murdoch's pockets, in five years, but it's not going to be a part of whatever comes next.
Plus, with Steve Jobs aggressively censoring every inch (see the recent flap over the issue of Esquire that almost wasn't), and the ludicrous pricing, and I think iPad publishing is DOA, period.
See, the iPad is still incredibly popular, in its gee-whiz phase, but most of the Brave New Apps are flops -- ebooks, magazines, now newspapers. And there are other tablet options now. If Jobs isn't careful, his golden goose may start laying some seriously rotten eggs.
2
Fnarf's just upset that Apple won and all your Black Friday sales are belong to Apple products.
Wait until you see the 3D Nintendo-license Apple iPad. That's going to rock your socks off.
(p.s. if you buy Black Friday sales today, like at newegg, you can still boycott Black Friday and get good deals)
Wait until you see the 3D Nintendo-license Apple iPad. That's going to rock your socks off.
(p.s. if you buy Black Friday sales today, like at newegg, you can still boycott Black Friday and get good deals)
3
No links? How can publishers still be this fucking dense? I can barely contain my rage at not seeing linked sources at the bottom of articles actually on the web, and they're going completely linkless? Fucking retards.
4
@3, in addition to no outbound links, there's no way to link inbound: "Check out this awesome article on The Daily -- no, I can't give you a link, but if you have a subscription you can probably dig around and find it there" = FAIL.
5
@4 LOL. Hey, I know! they can succeed by making it into an exciting geocaching experience. "There's a great article in The Daily about _____, & here's the longtitude and latitude of the nearest ipads. Go!"
7
If you want subscriptions, then you dont need an app for that, just charge for web access through a normal paywall. Oh yeah thats right, Safari Mobile wont support Flash, Silverlight or Java, so one is more or less forced into adopting into adopting Objective C. While Apple has loosened that death grip on its requirement for the app store, its a sure bet most billionaires will require Objective C in their hiring.
HTML5 may be the next generation web, but its in its infancy and wont be fully adopted for at least 3 years.
Then theres the fact of pouring a shitload of resources into something you assume will be the dominating mobile OS of the future. In a few years, Android might just kick iOS's square in the nuts.
HTML5 may be the next generation web, but its in its infancy and wont be fully adopted for at least 3 years.
Then theres the fact of pouring a shitload of resources into something you assume will be the dominating mobile OS of the future. In a few years, Android might just kick iOS's square in the nuts.
8
The editors of UW's student newspaper are going to wonder where the sudden deluge in insane right-wing letters to the editor came from. (To the extent that they stand out from the typical breathless, reactionary, ill-thought-out stuff that they normally find in their mailbag.)
10
Jules Verne predicted the telecom newspaper more than a hundred years ago in his futuristic "In the Year 2889".
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