The pitch is simple and intuitive: All the magazines you want, delivered digitally to your tablet, for a flat fee of either $10 or $15 a month.

There are catches, of course, and we’ll get to them in a minute. But the thrust of what NIM and its publishers are trying to do here is heartening, because it shows that they’re willing to experiment, for real.

They’re keeping their core business model — curated bundles of content sponsored primarily by advertising. But they’re making a key concession by not requiring consumers to make a commitment to any particular title and letting them swap out magazines at will.

Not a coincidence: Two years after the iPad launched, consumers have only shown a mild interest in tablet magazines — digital represents just 1 percent of the industry’s circulation. Publishers need to do something.

Now, on to the catches. The good news is that most of these are solvable. The bad news is that there are a few, and for now, they’re big:

• The digital magazines require an app that will only work on Android tablets running Honeycomb. Next Issue says it will submit a version to Apple soon and hopes to have it available this summer. No word on Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which run earlier — and heavily modified — versions of Google’s operating system.
• You can’t get any magazine you want: Just 32 titles from the four magazine publishers in Next Issue’s joint venture: Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and Conde Nast. (News Corp., which also owns this Web site, is a Next Issue backer, but hasn’t put anything it owns into this offering.) That said, the list includes lots of the publishers’ best-known titles: Sports Illustrated, Fortune, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Elle, Better Homes and Gardens, etc. Next Issue says it will add more “later this year,” and also plans to bring outside publishers into the offering.
• If you like reading magazines in both print and digital form, this offer won’t work for you. While publishers have recently started bundling print and digital subscriptions for the same price — essentially giving away digital in exchange for full-priced print subscriptions — these deals don’t include any print issues at all.

But for all of that, there’s plenty here to be optimistic about, whether you’re a magazine maker or a magazine reader.

Publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of the iPad and other tablets, and for now they’ve ended up with something that looks and works almost exactly like a paper magazine, with a couple digital bells and whistles.

That’s not a terrible thing — some of the tablet issues work well, and publishers tell me they think they are selling them to new readers, which is a good thing.

But for two years there haven’t been many compelling reasons to pick up a tablet issue instead of a print one. Changing the basic subscription proposition, though? That makes things very interesting.

It’s also very much an experiment, which is the word every publisher I talked to about the launch used in the last couple days. “No one has done this before, and there are lots of practical reasons for that,” says Hearst’s John Loughlin, who oversees the publisher’s tablet efforts.

And publishers still have basic stuff to figure out, like how they’ll get paid for their titles. The rough idea is that they’ll get a share of revenue based on the amount of time consumers spend with their magazines, but they still need to hash out details.

The same goes for conversations about circulation and advertising. Right now, for instance, the magazines you read when you give Next Issue $10 a month (if you want monthly titles — if you want weeklies like the New Yorker, it’s $15 a month) won’t be counted in publishers’ official totals.

But all of that sounds good to me. It sounds like an industry ready to try some stuff and see what works. Just like all the start-ups that insist they want to disrupt it.

“Anybody that tells you that they have the answer, or that their model is the model that would be successful 5 years from now — they’d be suspect,” says Loughlin. “We’re very much in a learning mode.”

It’s not the New Yorker, but it’s built using the magazine’s intellectual DNA. And instead of the $60 a year the magazine charges for its primary app, this one is 100 percent free.

The “Goings On” app, which will work on both iPhone and Android handsets, is pretty much exactly what you’d expect: The magazine’s weekly listings of New York art exhibits, concerts, etc., tethered to an interactive map.

There are a few extra goodies, too, like audio recordings from New Yorker authors that will work as walking tours: Food writer Calvin Trillin will lead listeners through his favorite eateries and stores, and architecture critic Paul Goldberger navigates the city’s amazing elevated High Line park.

All of which sounds cool, if not groundbreaking. I got a very brief demo last week, but have no idea how it will work in the real world.

It’s worth noting that this is another example of a magazine publisher experimenting with an app that isn’t a straightforward replica of one of its titles. Instead, the app leverages the New Yorker’s brand and its intellectual property to create a new standalone product.

In this case, the magazine is turning that into revenue via an ad deal — MasterCard will be the app’s sole sponsor, via a package deal that also gets the brand into the print magazine — but Conde and other publishers have tried charging customers for standalones, too.

Very good bet that we’ll see more of these from Conde and its competitors, and that they’ll continue to play around with price points. Encouraging experiments.

Hearst will be using a platform built for big media publishers by Group Commerce, a New York-based company founded by former Google and DoubleClick executives David Rosenblatt, Jonty Kelt and Andrew Glenn.

The offers, which will start rolling out later this summer, will primarily target the male-dominated audiences of the two magazine brands. Later, Hearst will expand it to other demographics through such well-known magazine properties as Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

So far, Group Commerce has launched with other major media outlets, such as DailyCandy, Thrillist and the New York Times. It has raised $18.5 million in capital and grown to 75 employees since officially launching in March. In all, its network of publishers is already reaching 15 million subscribers who have signed up to receive deals.

Rob Houghlin, the publisher and chief revenue officer of Car and Driver and Road & Track, said they’ve been looking at doing something in the social commerce space over the past four or five years.

“It’s a brand new way to connect some of our advertisers with our most trusted asset — our users,” he said. “Advertisers are looking for new ways to talk to current and potential customers. They don’t want to move distressed products, but they want to offer special products to consumers who want it. It’s a platform of credibility first and value second.”

The deals will be promoted through the magazines and through other online experiences, such as newsletters, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and mobile applications.

Some of the initial offerings include a custom product bundle from Gladiator Garage, which sells workbenches and storage units for garages, and an exclusive Corvette driving school package at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Nevada.

Kelt, who is the CEO of Group Commerce, said the company will be working with Hearst to get all of its magazines up and running with deals by the end of the year. He said the magazines serve perfect niches that can be catered to.

“The whole premise of our business is that relevance is really important,” he said. “The media companies have strong vertical titles and know who their reader is.”

Kelt said there are two distinct advantages to partnering with publishers: The cost of acquiring customers is much lower because they already have the readers and combining offers alongside content can be particularly powerful.

If you think about it, newspapers have always had content and advertising — from classifieds to display ads — that people have been interested in. That will likely be the company’s only hope if it wants to contend with the massive marketing machines already assembled by Groupon and LivingSocial.

“Great content is really powerful, but great content with great commerce is even more powerful,” Kelt said. “You’ll be more engaged and more valuable than if you just had content from that brand.”

Here’s a mock-up of how the deals will look on Road & Track. This is not a final version, obviously:

But there’s another way for magazines to approach the iPad: Sell apps that aren’t magazines.

The idea is to take the publishers’ powerful brands and intellectual capital, and make something that isn’t a digital replica of a print publication.

We’ve started to see these over the last six months, and I think we’re going to see many more. Today’s example: Esquire’s “Hardest Puzzle Ever.”

The app springboards off some brainteasers the Hearst magazine has run in the past, but it’s an entirely new product–half Rubik’s Cube, half trivia game. It’s free, but after the first level you’ll need to shell out $4.99 (once) to keep going; there’s also a free minigame sponsored by Lincoln.

I only got a few seconds with the app the other day, and found it awfully frustrating. But I’m also one of those people who has never, ever solved a Rubik’s Cube without breaking the thing apart, which isn’t really solving it. So maybe this one isn’t for me. (I do like trivia, though! Maybe I needed a “Not the Hardest Puzzle Ever” version.)

In any case, I like that Hearst is taking a crack at this, and that it plans to do other one-offs. It’s easy to imagine an Esquire drinks app, fashion app, etc.

Starting Wednesday, some Samsung Galaxy tablet users will be able to buy app versions of seven magazines, as single copies or monthly subscriptions. The deal comes via Next Issue Media, the “Hulu for Magazines” consortium five big publishers put together to build their own digital newsstand.

This is a cautious first step, with lots of caveats, and Next Issue is taking pains to play down expectations, calling it an “early preview.”

And by my calendar, it’s a bit behind Next Issue’s previously announced plans to have something in the market early this year.

But it’s still something. And you could argue that while the digital magazine market formally kicked off last year when Apple introduced the iPad, it’s been moving pretty slowly since then. So Next Issue really hasn’t missed that much.

Details:

• Four of the consortium’s partners are selling titles: Esquire and Popular Mechanics from Hearst; Fitness and Parents from Meredith; the New Yorker from Conde Nast; and Fortune and Time from Time Warner’s Time Inc. News Corp., the other partner, doesn’t publish any print magazines (they do own this Web site, though).
• Prices are set by publishers, who will be able to offer existing print subscribers free digital editions. For now, though, they can’t offer new subscribers print + digital bundles like the ones that Conde Nast has started selling via iTunes. Next Issue CEO Morgan Guenther says that’s coming, along with the possibility of more interesting offers, like Netflix-style subscriptions that let customers swap titles in and out.
• The titles are only available to Galaxy owners who have bought a model with wireless service from Verizon, which sells the titles through a single app available in its Vcast app store.
• Next Issue plans to offer more magazines, on more devices, in the fall. CEO Morgan Guenther says that by the end of the year the consortium will be selling at least 40 titles, and should also have a version of its app available for HP’s WebOS.
• Apple gives publishers 70 percent of each transaction, and Guenther says magazine publishers will get “at least” that much; device-makers or carriers will split the rest with the consortium.
• Crucially, the publishers will get full access to all subscriber information, including credit card numbers. Apple won’t do that.

Again, these magazines will only be available to a subset of a subset of Android tablet owners, which isn’t that big a market to begin with, for now.

But it is a working demonstration of the concept the consortium promised way back in 2009: A single place to get magazines from multiple publishers, controlled by the publishers themselves.

And theoretically, selling magazines on the terms they want on Android will give the publishers more leverage to get what they want from Apple. But they’re a long way from getting Steve Jobs to back down from his terms–let’s see how sales play out on the two different platforms first.

Hearst is the latest publisher to show up on the iPad, with a tabletized version of Esquire.* As always, you’re better off checking it out yourself then reading about it.

Still here? Okay:

• As promised, Hearst is selling the app at the same price as the paper-and-ink version: $4.99. Squawk all you want, but “we have to reshape expectations” for digital pricing, says Esquire publisher Kevin O’Malley.
• Hearst has talked about offering subscriptions to its iPad titles, but you can’t get one right now. And O’Malley doesn’t sound hopeful that he’ll be offering one through Apple’s (AAPL) store anytime soon. Join the club.
• Like every one of its peers, Esquire on the iPad looks like the print magazine, with some multimedia bells and whistles. Unlike many apps, Esquire doesn’t provide a literal translation of the print copy. So it can’t count app sales as newsstand sales, but O’Malley seems fine with that. The upside for the reader is that Esquire doesn’t need to include every ad from the print edition, and instead features just two ads from a single sponsor–Lexus.
• Many of the multimedia features are low-key grace notes, but that’s okay: You buy Esquire on the iPad because you want to read Esquire on the iPad, right?
• But there are plenty of clever touches, like animated illustrations and a clip of Javier Bardem reciting poetry in Spanish. And, pretty much for giggles, a copy of Ivan Turgenev’s “First Love,” a 76,000-word novella published in 1860 (I didn’t know, either).
• Some apps let you read their magazine in horizontal and vertical modes, while Time Warner’s (TWX) Sports Illustrated only works in horizontal mode (for now). But Esquire only works in vertical mode, and that feels just fine.

*This is Hearst’s first full-fledged iPad magazine, but if you want to be a stickler you can: The publisher has some of its titles available through Zinio’s PDF-reader service, and earlier this year it put out a partial version of a Popular Mechanics issue.

That’s because the magazine giant has been unable to get Apple to let it sell and manage subscriptions for its iPad apps–much to Time Inc.’s surprise.

Last month, the publisher was set to launch a subscription version of its Sports Illustrated iPad app, where consumers would download the magazines via Apple’s iTunes but would pay Time Inc. directly. But Apple rejected the app at the last minute, forcing the Time Warner (TWX) unit to sell single copies, using iTunes as a middleman, multiple sources tell me.

Since then, Time Inc. executives “have been going nuts,” trying to figure out how to get Apple (AAPL) to approve a subscription plan. One of the more desperate suggestions, which apparently didn’t get traction: Pulling the publisher’s apps out of the iTunes store altogether.

Subscriptions, whether they’re for ink-and-paper magazines or their digital editions, are a big deal for Time Inc. and every other magazine publisher. They value them in part because they provide recurring revenue, but primarily because they provide a treasure trove of data.

The ability to control digital subscriptions also gives publishers the ability to make their existing print subscriptions more valuable, by bundling the two together. Imagine a scenario where existing Time or Sports Illustrated subs get the digital version free, or at a very steep discount.

No other magazine publisher has approval sell their own iTunes app subscriptions, either. But Apple and Steve Jobs had made a point of reaching out to Time Inc. executives and editors before the iPad’s launch, and encouraged them to build digital editions for the platform.

And Time Inc. executives tell me they had been communicating with Apple throughout the spring as they developed their subscription plans, and had been told that Apple approved.

So what happened? The Time Inc. insiders I talked to don’t have a clear answer, presumably because they can’t get one from Apple itself. One theory: Apple is concerned about the publisher’s plans for the consumer data it would collect with each subscription. A darker one: Steve Jobs loves the idea of digital magazines and wants to control the market for himself.

Time Inc.’s official comment on the topic is oblique: “We are working with a number of partners and potential partners and hope to offer in-app subscriptions some time later this year.” And so is Apple’s: “We have two platforms that we support for apps of all types, including magazines: HTML5 provides an open platform for developers to create and distribute whatever they want, and the App Store which is a curated platform offering customers the largest offering of apps for any mobile device with over 225,000 apps and 5 billion downloads.”

Confusing the issue even more is that Apple already allows a handful of app makers–like Amazon (AMZN) and the Wall Street Journal, which like this Web site is owned by News Corp. (NWS)–to bill customers directly. Amazon itself, meanwhile, has been sparring with publishers over subscriptions for its Kindle platform. Jeff Bezos keeps most of the data and money that those transactions generate, too.

Industry trade magazine Folio: first reported on the Sports Illustrated app’s rejection.

As far as I can tell, Time Inc.’s competitors have yet to even submit subscription apps to Apple. Hearst says it plans to sell iPad subscriptions to its Esquire and Oprah magazine apps when they debut later this year, but they’re not really subscriptions in a conventional sense. Instead, the publisher will sell a bundle of magazines as a one-time purchase, and iTunes will keep 30 percent of the purchase price and all of the billing data.

Hearst Magazines Executive Vice President John Loughlin says he’s not happy about the arrangement, but says it will have to do for now. He hopes that competition from the likes of Google (GOOG), which has announced plans to sell its own magazine apps, will force Apple to relent.

Condé Nast, meanwhile, hasn’t talked about subscription plans except to acknowledge that it has some. Newly appointed President Bob Sauerberg says the company may have more to say about the matter within a month. But others at the company say the problem is a vexing one. One executive at the publisher offers this summary: “Don’t get me started.”

But don’t tell Hearst. The publisher says it will charge at least as much for the iPad versions of its magazines as it does for its paper and ink version. And in the case of at least one title, it may ask for more.

Hearst says that when the full version of its Popular Mechanics app launches in the fall, it is considering charging a dollar more for the digital magazine than the $3.99 the title fetches at the newsstand. Meanwhile a demo version of the app, which doesn’t contain everything in the magazine, is now going for $1.99.

What gives? John Loughlin, Hearst Magazine’s executive vice president, makes two arguments:

• True, Hearst doesn’t have to pay to print and distribute copies of the app. But it’s still spending money on it, both for app-specific features like new interactive graphics and videos, and for digital overhead costs.
• At least as important: Hearst thinks everyone else who sells their digital stuff at a discount–or worse yet, gives it away online–is dead wrong. “I think publishers have learned a huge lesson from our cousins in the newspaper world,” Loughlin says. “I think we’ve got an opportunity to reset the right expectations out of the gate.”

Philosophically, Hearst isn’t alone. Nearly every publisher I’ve talked to imagines that the iPad will give them the ability to reverse the price-eroding effects of the Web. But the digerati squawked when Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. and Condé Nast charged the same price for their first magazine apps. And even though Condé’s Wired app debut sold 100,000 copies at offline prices, the publisher has since shaved a dollar off the price.

Loughlin doesn’t expect to charge a premium for every magazine app Hearst puts out. IPad editions of Esquire and Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, due out in August and November, respectively, will have fewer bells and whistles than Popular Mechanics. So there, he’ll be willing to charge the same price as the print edition.

And Loughlin says he’ll follow the same pricing philosophy when Hearst begins selling subscriptions to its iPad magazines, which it plans to start with Esquire at the end of this summer–digital subscriptions will be priced at or above the price that print subs pay.

Meanwhile, a word on iPad subscriptions, which Hearst’s competitors are also planning on rolling out but haven’t done yet: Hearst doesn’t like the current plan, which involves selling bundles of issues for one-time payments via Apple’s iTunes store.

That’s because that method gives Apple (AAPL) 30 percent of the transaction, and more importantly, it doesn’t give the publisher access to crucial subscriber data. But since that’s the only option Apple is offering for now, Hearst will take it.

Ideally, Loughlin says, Apple will relent and allow it sell iPad subscriptions directly. If not, he’s hopeful that iPad/iTunes competitors–most likely Google and its Chrome and Android platforms–will give Hearst the terms it wants.

We chatted about all of this yesterday, after a show-and-tell session where Hearst laid out its digital road map for the rest of the year (short version–lots of apps!):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100715/is-there-an-ipad-premium-hearst-says-its-popular-mechanics-app-may-cost-more-than-the-print-version/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20100504/the-esquire-interview-carol-bartz-does-a-great-impression-of-carol-bartz/ http://allthingsd.com/20100504/the-esquire-interview-carol-bartz-does-a-great-impression-of-carol-bartz/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 12:35:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27959

Simply put: As a quote machine for eager reporters, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is the proverbial gift that keeps on giving.

Mostly, a very quippy, always slightly potty-mouthed gift, but a gift nonetheless.

Last week, for example, Bartz pontificated to the BBC about how Google (GOOG) needs to get its act together and that Facebook was not all that.

Now BoomTown has gotten some good ones out of Bartz since she went to Yahoo (YHOO) at the beginning of 2009.

But this interview, just published in Esquire magazine in its “Women We Love” issue, is the mother lode of Bartzisms.

Some of the choicer quotes, among many (please go here to experience the whole shebang):

On her childhood:

“My mom died when I was eight. My grandparents took my brother and me onto their farm when I was twelve. So for four years, between eight and twelve, I was mom, housecleaner, cook–and guess what? The little shit doesn’t get to you anymore, it just doesn’t matter.”

On being a cocktail waitress:

“One night I had a trayful of drinks, and I had on black fishnet stockings and a garter, and the next thing I know I’m like getting air. Somebody had lifted my little skirt up. So I go to look over and it was my high school principal. I can’t remember his name now. I said, ‘Mr. — !’ and he went, ‘Carol!’ And you know I didn’t tolerate any of that kind of stuff and that wasn’t the kind of place it was, but he’s coming from this shit-bum little town and he’s in the big time, Madison [Wisconsin], and here comes the cocktail waitress and he’s going to show off.”

On the memos (leaked to me!) and drop-kicking Yahoos to f*&%ing Mars for doing so:

“Yahoo! had a huge problem of all kinds of internal documents getting out to the press. Terrible timing. And what I was trying to explain is, all we’re doing is hurting each other. You know we can’t have a family conversation without you running and telling the neighbors? So I was just explaining that it was a bad thing to do, and if I found them, that’s what would happen to them. If I found out who was leaking this, I’d just drop-kick you to Mars. You have to have some passion. What am I going to say? ‘Oh, please don’t…’? You think my employees would remember it? No. Did I do it because of that? No. I did it because at the moment I got myself all riled up. You know, everybody thinks I do it consciously. People actually ask me: ‘When are you going to drop the f-bomb?’ I say, ‘What do you think, put a dime in my ear and then it comes out? No, but get me worked up about something and who knows what’ll come out.’”

On key hiring criteria:

“What do I look for when hiring? Well, let’s get past the assumption that they can do the job. There has to be a no-asshole rule.

We’ll go through the whole interview, and I’ll say, ‘I have one last question. I don’t work with assholes. Are you one?’”

On making a still really wrong–but marginally better–comparison of herself with the Apple (AAPL) god:

“Apple was down for the count before Steve Jobs returned. I’m not trying to compare myself to Steve Jobs in any way–for good reasons and for bad reasons–but think about it. What was the name of that computer before the Macintosh? Apple II. I mean, it was going nowhere.

Everyone likes to think about iPod days, but it took Steve a long time, even knowing the company, to get it turned around after he came back. So of course it’s been done.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100504/the-esquire-interview-carol-bartz-does-a-great-impression-of-carol-bartz/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100330/found-a-magazine-guy-who-yawns-at-the-ipad/ http://allthingsd.com/20100330/found-a-magazine-guy-who-yawns-at-the-ipad/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:33:57 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17890 The magazine industry has placed tremendous–very likely, unrealistic–hope in the iPad. One exception: Magazine god George Lois.

Lois influenced generations of art directors during his 10-year tenure at Esquire, which spanned most of the 1960s. You can see several examples of his iconic covers below, and a bigger collection here.

It would be nice to think that Lois is excited about the possibilities creative types could explore with Apple’s (AAPL) new gadget, too. But he’s not. From a New York Observer interview this month:

And what does he think about reading a magazine on the soon-to-be-released iPad? “It’s okay, I guess,” he said. “But magazines will never die because there is a visceral feeling of having that thing in your hands and turning the pages. It’s so different on the screen. It’s the difference between looking at a woman and having sex with her.”

UPDATE: If nothing else, Lois is consistent with his magazine vs. tablet metaphor. Here he is talking to Wired creative director (and tablet enthusiast) Scott Dadich. He also says something quite similar in the newest issue of Wired itself, as Robert Quigley notes.

Conversations with Mr. Lois PART III from SPD Videos on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100330/found-a-magazine-guy-who-yawns-at-the-ipad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091218/conde-nast-with-help-from-a-nearly-naked-rihanna-takes-another-step-toward-digital-magazines/ http://allthingsd.com/20091218/conde-nast-with-help-from-a-nearly-naked-rihanna-takes-another-step-toward-digital-magazines/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:33:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=14250 Condé Nast has taken another small step into the future of digital magazines: The publisher has put a second edition of its GQ magazine up for sale on Apple’s iTunes Store.

Plunk down $2.99 and you’ll  get you the January issue of the magazine, featuring a nearly naked Rhianna, for your iPhone or iPod touch.

Aside from the almost nude pop star on the cover, this one mimics GQ’s first digital issue, which it described as an experiment, in every way. Same price, same treatment of ads and content, etc. The publisher says it’s going to start putting out every issue of the magazine on iTunes going forward, though some stuff could get tweaked down the road.

Starting with the March 2010 issue, for instance, you’ll be able to buy new copies of the magazine “in app,” meaning that you won’t have to download a new app from iTunes every time a new issue comes out. GQ may also tweak pricing and/or offer a subscription instead of one-offs.

Condé says it is gearing up to put out another title in the same format, though it won’t say which one (Do you know? Drop me a line, please.) I should note that Hearst’s Esquire rolled out its first iTunes issue/app today as well. No coincidence that both publishers are starting with aspirational dude-centric titles.

This stuff doesn’t seem as sexy as the plans the publishers have for much heralded but little seen tablets that Apple (AAPL) and others are supposed to be cooking up. That’s probably in part because it’s always more fun to think about things that could exist, as opposed to ones that are already extant.

But I think this is as important, in its own way, as the tablet demos we’ve seen from Condé, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc., Bonnier, etc. And as relevant as the “Hulu for Magazines” consortium the publishers have finally announced.

Because Condé’s iPhone app is a pretty good proxy for the stuff the magazine guys want to eventually produce. And if people are buying this one (Condé won’t release numbers yet, but says it will eventually), then that’s a hopeful sign for the more advanced stuff we’re supposed to see one day.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091218/conde-nast-with-help-from-a-nearly-naked-rihanna-takes-another-step-toward-digital-magazines/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091029/esquire-flirts-with-digital-reality/ http://allthingsd.com/20091029/esquire-flirts-with-digital-reality/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:00:17 +0000 Shira Ovide http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17193 Hollywood stars are going virtual, in the latest effort to jazz up the printed word–and wake up consumers who have become inured to traditional ads.

Hearst Corp.’s Esquire magazine will pepper its December issue with markers that trigger interactive video segments featuring cover subject Robert Downey Jr. and other actors, as well as an ad for Lexus. In doing so, Esquire is taking advantage of an emerging technology called augmented reality, which mixes real-life images with graphics or other effects. TV networks use AR to make the yellow first-down lines on football fields.

The cover and several pages of the Esquire issue include square stickers with black-and-white designs. People can hold the magazine up to a Web camera to trigger the video segments, which are similar to some video-conferencing technologies in their lifelike quality.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091029/esquire-flirts-with-digital-reality/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091019/the-book-that-contains-all-books/ http://allthingsd.com/20091019/the-book-that-contains-all-books/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:00:32 +0000 Stephen Marche http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=16725 On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text. The question is how. And the answer can be found in the history of earlier book forms.

Most literate people are familiar with at least some of the consequences of the print revolution of the 15th century, but far fewer are as aware of the much more profound change that occurred when rolls were replaced by codices–pages bound between covers–in the late Roman period.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091019/the-book-that-contains-all-books/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091012/geeks-in-black-barry-sonnenfeld-comes-out-from-behind-the-camera-to-vlog/ http://allthingsd.com/20091012/geeks-in-black-barry-sonnenfeld-comes-out-from-behind-the-camera-to-vlog/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:26:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=19313

For many years now, one of our regular attendees at the D: All Things Digital conference has been award-winning movie and television director, producer and writer Barry Sonnenfeld, who is–as it turns out–a not-so-closeted geek in his spare time.

(He also appeared onstage in 2006 at D4 in an interview with Walt Mossberg, which you can see here.)

In fact, the man behind movies like “Men in Black” and TV shows like “Pushing Daisies” (and who likes to sport a Stetson and cowboy boots 24/7) does a gadget review column for Esquire magazine called “The Digital Man.”

Now he is branching out to a vlog about his geek passions on Crackle, which will appear every two weeks from wherever he is–either from his homes in East Hampton, N.Y. or Telluride, Colo., or from movie or TV sets.

And, compared to the cinéma vérité style of BoomTown (translation: shaky filming and bad sound), Sonnenfeld’s vlogs are pretty high quality, although they are not too overdone as those from Hollywood types always are, and it’s hard not to admire the editorial use of a martini.

Here’s his intro video vlog below, as well as one about a cross-country trip Sonnenfeld and his “analog” dog, named Lucky, took in a 2010 Ford Taurus SHO (super high output) and another about his experience helping his wife, Sweetie, cook for some film industry friends using the Traeger Professional Wood Pellet Grill.

Next week: A chain saw, although I hope Sonnenfeld will go light on the martinis for that demo.

From Crackle: The Esquire Digital Man Preview:

From Crackle: Ford Taurus SHO:

From Crackle: Traeger Professional Wood Pellet Grill:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091012/geeks-in-black-barry-sonnenfeld-comes-out-from-behind-the-camera-to-vlog/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090227/do-magazines-need-their-own-kindle-yes-says-hearst/ http://allthingsd.com/20090227/do-magazines-need-their-own-kindle-yes-says-hearst/#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:54:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=4690 If Amazon’s Kindle is the iPod for books, do we need a Kindle for magazines and newspapers? I’d say no. But publishing heavyweight Hearst disagrees and is going to come out with an e-reader of its own, according to a published report.

Fortune says Hearst, which publishes magazines like Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and, for the time being, newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the San Francisco Chronicle, is working its own Kindle-like device.

“I can’t tell you the details of what we are doing, but I can say we are keenly interested in this, and expect these devices will be a big part of our future,” Hearst digital head Kenneth Bronfin tells the magazine. Some more vague details, which don’t include a launch date:

Insiders familiar with the Hearst device say it has been designed with the needs of publishers in mind. That includes its form, which will approximate the size of a standard sheet of paper, rather than the six-inch diagonal screen found on Kindle, for example. The larger screen better approximates the reading experience of print periodicals, as well as giving advertisers the space and attention they require.

…the Hearst reader is likely to debut in black and white and later transition to high-resolution color with the option for video….Downloading content from participating newspapers and magazines will occur wirelessly….

What Hearst and its partners plan to do is sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. The company will, however, leave it to the publishers to develop their own branding and payment models. ‘That’s something you will never see Amazon do,’ someone familiar with the Hearst project said. ‘They aren’t going to give up control of the devices.’”

Intriguing? Yes. But I don’t have high hopes for the Hearst reader.

That’s in part because building consumer gadgets is a lot harder than it looks–remember all those awful MP3 players that predated Apple’s (AAPL) iPod? And I’m particularly worried about consumer gadgets designed with publishers in mind instead of consumers/readers.

But I’m also skeptical because I don’t really see how a dedicated magazine/periodical player does much for readers, period.

You can debate the pricing and feature set on Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, but at least there’s a use case for the device: It’s designed to let you read for long stretches of time, which is pretty hard to do on iPhones and BlackBerries.

But I can easily plow through newspaper stories and magazine articles on my relatively frill-free BlackBerry 8830 (if you do the same, let me recommend Instapaper.com and/or Handmark’s FreeRange Reader). And bear in mind that Amazon’s device is also designed to let you hoover up newspapers, etc., as well; the New York Times says it is already selling a “modest” number of subscriptions to Kindle users.

So if Hearst’s Kindle Kopy is going to take up space in my gadget array, it’s going to have be something pretty special.

[Image credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090227/do-magazines-need-their-own-kindle-yes-says-hearst/feed/ 0