Digital editions of print publications don’t work
I see that PC Magazine is following other tech publications like InfoWorld and PC World Australia in ditching the print editions. The reason is cost apparently: it’s too expensive to produce paper magazines and get them to customers, according to PC Mag’s Editor in Chief, Lance Ulanoff.
Production and delivery costs are probably not the only reasons for ditching print editions of tech magazines however. There’s fierce competition from web-based publications that offer multimedia material and more importantly, have the new stuff out there almost immediately. Tech readerships tend to go for very specific information, so they’re not likely to read everything in a paper magazine but just the bits they’re after.
Also, the web-based stories, videos, whatever are free. Print mags are not.
PC Mag will live on as a group of websites, and it’ll do really well I reckon. What surprised me though is that PC Mag has decided to take the print edition and make it into a digital one, delivered by Zinio. The point of creating digital editions of printed publications elude me, to be honest. Sure, some people will subscribe; 12 issues for US$15 is an OK deal, and advertisers can see their ads that they spent big money to produce almost as they’d look in print. Will the cost of producing the digital editions really be offset by subscriptions, or is the Zinio move just to wean people off print and get them used to reading online instead?
Then there are the physical issues: On my 24″ monitor, magazines delivered by Zinio look OK. I get two pages on the screen and the type is pretty legible overall. There’s no need to scroll around on the pages.
Try Zinio mags on lower resolution 17 and 19″ 4:3 screens, and you won’t like it very much. On smaller notebook screens the result is even worse.
I guess you could print out the digital edition pages you want to read, but would you really want to waste ink or toner on doing that? Print out the ads? Nah. Also, are the digital editions really anymore portable than paper ones, as you need to be at the end of an Internet connection to read them in a browser, or carry your laptop (with a hi-res screen) with you? While I’d bring a paper mag to the beach (it’s summer here, whee!) I’m not going to bring a laptop there, for goodness sakes.
Zinio’s Reader doesn’t seem to scale text very well, and I wonder why PC Mag went with that particular technology instead of say Microsoft’s WPF-based one that works great in that respect. Then again, while there was plenty of initial interest in WPF reader, it doesn’t appear to have taken off, maybe due to it being Windows-centric (I thought Microsoft was going to make WPF run on Mac OS X and Open Source platforms?)
I think we’re still a long way off finding a physical medium that’s as easy to handle and pleasant to read as print on paper, while offering the mixed media advantages and ease of distribution that the Internet does. E-ink anyone?
November 20th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
“I thought Microsoft was going to make WPF run on Mac OS X and Open Source platforms?”
Nope, they never said ANYTHING like that. They are - and have - made Silverlight run cross platform, but silverlight != WPF. Silverlight is a subset of WPF (well, of XAML, the markup language used for WPF), with the .NET CLR behind it (in 2.0), so you could do a nice reader with it, but it’s not full WPF, which is what was used for the NY Times reader.
I agree, tho - making a “digital edition” is just stupid - just publish it out as normal articles, then atleast google can find it. If it’s in some kind of weird format, then google can’t touch it, and the world doesn’t know about it.