AllThingsD » publishing industry

Condé Nast's iPad Apps Are Too Portly. Blame Adobe.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:37:48 +0000

The Wired iPad app has a weight problem.

The first one came in at about half a gigabyte of memory, and it hasn’t shrunk that much since.

And Condé Nast’s newest iPad app, from the New Yorker, isn’t much better: It takes up 173 megabytes–but that’s for a weekly issue. If Condé can’t slim the app down, a month’s worth of New Yorkers will be much heavier than the first monthly Wired app.

And at that rate, a year’s worth of issues would consume more than seven gigabytes–that’s close to half of the smallest iPad’s 16-gig memory capacity.

No problem, says New Yorker Deputy Editor Pam McCarthy, who oversaw the production of the new app. She says it’s going on a diet, soon.

Both the New Yorker and Wired have the same weight problem for the same reason: They are built on the back of an Adobe (ADBE) program that essentially functions as an image reader.

That is, each page of the magazine is turned into the equivalent of several big photos. Which means an image-rich layout at Wired or a page of text at the New Yorker both consume a lot of memory.

The New Yorker could fix that overnight by presenting the text using HTML code, McCarthy says. That would use much less memory and allow the magazine to do things like resize the type. But for the moment, Adobe doesn’t have the ability to break up HTML text into individual pages. Instead, the text scrolls down the screen, a la the popular Instapaper app.

That sounds pretty good to me, but McCarthy says it’s not a good way to read the very long pieces her magazine is famous for. “It’s pretty clear that when you have a 10,000-word story, smooth scrolling is not a good option,” she says.

So for now, the New Yorker presents small items, like its “Talk of the Town” pieces, via HTML, and presents its long stories on individual pages. Once Adobe figures out how to break up HTML text into individual pages, McCarthy will make the switch, she says. Perhaps in a month.

“The goal is to be all HTML, and we will be,” she says.

Great!

But take note, grumblers: You probably still won’t be able to download the magazine wirelessly. Apple caps wireless app downloads at 20 megabytes, and the app is unlikely to shrink that much soon, which means you’re going to need a Wi-Fi connection to get your hands on the app.

And the fact that Condé Nast can’t yet sell subscriptions for its mag apps, which would let it knock the $4.99 issue price down considerably, has nothing to do with tech limits. That’s an issue between Apple (AAPL) and the publishing industry, and that may still take some time to sort out.

QOTD

John Paczkowski — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:10:13 +0000

“A lot of people have suggested that the iPad is a new and significant inflection point for the publishing industry. I think it’s a case of when you are a drowning man, everything looks like a lifesaver.”

–New York Times columnist David Carr

The Chapter And Verse on E-Bookstores

Geoffrey A. Fowler — Thu, 27 May 2010 01:14:49 +0000

As books go digital, much of the focus has been on which gadgets offer the best approximation of old-fashioned paper and ink on a screen. But there’s another choice that’s just as important for readers to weigh before they make the leap to e-books: which e-bookstore to frequent.

Reading devices like the iPad, Kindle and Nook will come and go, but you’ll likely want your e-book collection to stick around. Yet unlike music, commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It’s as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?

[ See post to watch video ]

Much of this problem stems from the publishing industry, which has demanded that e-bookstores embed digital rights management software in most best sellers to keep them from being stolen and swapped, free, online. The music labels once asked the same from digital-music retailers, but eventually agreed to open up.

The e-bookstores share in the blame. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Apple Inc. (AAPL), Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) and Sony Corp. (SNE) all want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores. For example, purchases from Apple’s new iBooks store can be read only on Apple’s own iPad (and soon the iPhone). Even though Apple said it would support an industry standard format called ePub for iBooks, in practice your iBooks purchases remain locked on Apple’s virtual bookshelf. (So I hope iBooks customers like Apple’s light-brown wood paneling.)

Browsing Amazon.com on the Kindle

Many of the biggest e-book providers fall short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections, but they have begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.

Amazon, which jump-started the shift to e-books with its Kindle, lets customers read its e-books through apps on at least six kinds of devices. Amazon custom-built the free apps for gadgets that include the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and (later this summer) devices running Google’s (GOOG) Android software. If a device has an Internet connection, the apps automatically load Amazon e-book purchases from the company’s website, saving you the fuss of keeping track of files and transferring them between gadgets with cables. In many ways, this is more convenient than the way we manage our digital-music collections by manually adding and deleting files from iPods through a computer.

Amazon’s apps are slick and work on many of the most popular devices today, but Amazon buyers should know that they’re likely stuck using the retailer’s software forever. While Amazon says it plans to keep making apps for more devices, the list of potential devices for reading grows longer every day. Moreover, Amazon sells its e-books in a proprietary format, so there’s no way to open those files on another device without an Amazon app or without resorting to cumbersome (and potentially illegal) third-party conversion software.

The Nook with Barnes & Noble store

Barnes & Noble, too, adopted an Internet-connected app approach, providing a seamless way to shift its e-books between the Nook, PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone, WindowsMobile for the HTC HD2 and soon iPad. Barnes & Noble has been integrating its e-bookstore into niche e-reading devices, like those by Plastic Logic, Irex and Pandigital. It also, uniquely, offers you the chance to “loan” some e-book purchases to a friend for 14 days. But its bookstore requires a somewhat annoying step: Each time you download a book to a new device, you must enter your name and the credit-card number that was used to buy the book in order to unfasten the digital lock on the book.

Beyond the apps, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Apple and a few smaller e-bookstores all promised they’d put their weight behind the industry standard format ePub, which is the e-book version of music’s Mp3 and can be read by almost every reading device (except the Kindle). That sounds great in theory, but in practice, the ePub files either can’t be transferred or doing so is cumbersome.

The problem is each company adds digital rights management software to an ePub book. A copy of “Moby Dick” I bought from iBooks delivered just blank pages when I opened it on the Nook. A Barnes & Noble e-book produced an error message in Sony’s PC ePub reading software. Barnes & Noble says its books will be compatible with devices like the Sony Reader after a software upgrade.

An iPad showing Apple’s iBooks store.

There were two notable exceptions: Purchases from Sony’s e-bookstore and a Borders Group (BGP)-backed store called Kobo could open on the Nook and other ePub-reading devices if I used a free program from Adobe (ADBE) called Digital Editions to transfer it. That’s a nice insurance policy but the process is far more complicated than it should be.

There may yet be a third way. Google, which plans to launch an e-bookstore later this year, says customers will be able to access its books through apps on popular devices and through a Web browser on any device—including a phone or computer. Google’s argument is that we shouldn’t lock ourselves into one bookstore if it is going to offer titles that are dependent on special apps or devices. Google’s existing free out-of-copyright books service works under this same general premise, but it isn’t yet ready for prime time. It requires you to always be online to read a book and its pages aren’t well formatted for reading on small screens or mobile devices. Google executives say they will fix both issues when the commercial service launches.

For now, the e-bookstore choice comes down to which compromises readers are willing to accept. Anybody who just wants a simple way to carry digital books around might be happy with an app-based approach. But readers intent on building an e-library may want to either invest in an ePub-based collection, or hold off until the industry figures out a better solution.

Walter S. Mossberg will return June 10.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

Book Publishers Beware! At iTunes, Expensive Music Equals Slower Sales.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:56:14 +0000

After years of complaints, last year the music labels finally got what they wanted from Apple–the ability to raise prices on their songs. Last April, iTunes introduced a “variable pricing” scheme, which gave the labels the ability to move prices from 99 cents a song to $1.29 (and for some tracks, down to 69 cents).

The result? Music sales are slowing.

Warner Music Group (WMG) said this morning that it has seen unit sales growth at Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes decelerate since the price increase: Industrywide, year-over-year “digital track equivalent album unit growth” was at five percent in the December quarter, down sequentially from 10 percent in the September quarter and 11 percent in the June quarter.

And since iTunes sales make up the majority of Warner’s digital revenue, growth is contracting there, too. In the last quarter, digital revenue at the label was up eight percent compared with a year earlier, when that number was 20 percent.

The positive spin here is that music downloads are a “mature” business anyway. So by raising prices, the labels are simply extracting whatever value they can.

And indeed, Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. argued that the pricing change has been a “net positive” for Warner. But he also suggested that in hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t a great idea to raise prices 30 percent during a recession.

So here’s the question for the book industry, which has been working very hard to boost the price for its digital goods: Which lesson do you learn from this?

My gut is that the industry will see this parable the way Bronfman apparently does: If you can move prices up early in the digital adoption cycle, you’re much better off.

During the earnings call, Bronfman sounded a bit wistful as he noted the book industry’s apparent success, with the help of Apple, at raising prices above the $9.99 floor Amazon (AMZN) had set. “It’s interesting that the book publishing industry, on the iPad, has much more flexibility than the music industry had,” he noted.

The counter here is the one that seems obvious to everyone else: Lower prices and you can sell more stuff. Looks like we’ll be getting another real-world test of this economics lesson soon.

Apple Announces Jan. 27 Special Event: "Come See Our Latest Creation"

John Paczkowski — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:05:59 +0000

Confirming a date first reported by Digital Daily, Apple (AAPL) this morning announced an invitation-only special event to be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco on Jan. 27, a Wednesday. “Come see our latest creation,” the invitation reads.

Hmm. Wonder what that might be? The invitation, below.

Given the invite’s theme, one wonders if the “creation” to be unveiled is touch and pressure sensitive and might, perhaps, come accompanied by a stylus or other input tool that could be used by illustrators and designers. Wild speculation, I know. But worth mentioning.

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Major Apple Product Announcement Set for Wednesday, Jan. 27

John Paczkowski — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:13:21 +0000

So, that rumored Apple event everyone has been jawing about these past few weeks? It’s on and it’s going to be a big deal.

Sources in a position to know tell me Apple (AAPL) is indeed planning a media event later this month at which the company will announce a major new product. The gathering is to be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, a space Apple often uses for media events like this. According to other sources, it will occur on Wednesday, Jan. 27, not Tuesday, Jan. 26, as had been rumored.

No definitive word on what that product is, but I think we all have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal offers some details – it cites people “briefed by the company” who say Apple plans to ship the tablet in March, and that it will feature either a 10 or 11-inch touch screen. The paper also cites analysts who “currently believe” the machine will cost $1,000, which may include a Kindle-like built-in wireless plan.

Incidentally, this won’t be the first time Apple has scheduled a special event on a Wednesday as opposed to Tuesday, which it has historically preferred for such things. The “It’s Only Rock and Roll” iPod event held last September, which was also rumored to be scheduled on a Tuesday, was ultimately held on Wednesday, Sep. 9. Evidently, Wednesday is the new Tuesday.

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Apple Pitching Tablet to Publishing Industry; Spring Launch Expected

John Paczkowski — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:34:17 +0000

Apple will ramp up production on its long-rumored tablet in February with an eye toward a spring launch.

That’s the word from Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Yair Reiner, who says his checks into Apple’s supply chain indicate that “the manufacturing cogs for the [device] are creaking into action.” According to Reiner, the tablet will have a 10.1-inch multitouch LCD display and a price of $1,000.

Apple (AAPL) plans to produce as many as one million units per month. So assuming Apple needs to build five to six weeks of inventory before launch, we can expect the tablet to arrive at market some time in March or April 2010. In preparation, the company has evidently been evangelizing about the device to the publishing industry.

“Contacts in the US tell us Apple is approaching book publishers with a very attractive proposal for distributing their content,” Reiner wrote in a note to clients today. “Apple will split revenue 30/70 (Apple/publisher); give the same deal to all comers; and not request exclusivity. We believe the typical Kindle/publisher split is 50/50, rising to 30/70 if Kindle is given ebook exclusivity.”

Noting dissension in the ranks, Reiner adds, “As innovative as it is, we believe the Kindle has disgruntled the publishing industry (book, newspaper, and magazine) by demanding exclusivity, disallowing advertising, and demanding a wolfish cut of revenue. The tablet is set to change that. It should also make ebooks more relevant for education by simplifying functions such as scribbling marginalia.”

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Google Launches Service to Flip Through News Articles

Jessica E. Vascellaro — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:01:25 +0000

Google’s (GOOG) experiments to help the publishing industry adapt the Web continue.

In April, the company introduced an interactive news timeline, newstimeline.googlelabs.com, that displays summaries of news articles chronologically and allows users to slice and dice their view by source.

Last week, it disclosed its plans to help publishers earn money, saying it was working on improving its payment service to help publishers charge for their content online.

Monday, it was “Fast Flip.” Unveiled at a conference in San Francisco, the service allows users to scroll through screenshots of news articles page by page.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Sony E-Book Links Readers With Libraries

John Paczkowski — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:00:17 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

New Amazon Device Debuts Wednesday

Peter Kafka — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:21:56 +0000

The last time Amazon held a press conference in New York City was in February, when it introduced the Kindle 2.0. Now the company has scheduled another one for Wednesday morning at Pace University in lower Manhattan.

Expect a new large-format device that’s optimized for reading newspapers and magazines.

Here’s the full text of the invitation that just showed up in my inbox: “We’d like to invite you to an Amazon.com press conference scheduled for Wednesday, May 6 at 10:30 am ET. The press conference is scheduled to take place at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, located at 3 Spruce Street, New York City. Doors will open for registration at 9:30 am ET.”

Say this for whoever’s organizing Amazon’s product announcements–they’ve got a nice sense of whimsy. Amazon (AMZN) showed off Kindle 2.0 at the Morgan Library. And Pace University, located just next to the Brooklyn Bridge, sits on the site of the New York Times’s (NYT) 19th-century headquarters building. The Times, according to the Times, is partnering with Amazon on the new gadget.

UPDATE: There is another, more obvious, reason to have the event at Pace, according to the Wall Street Journal. The university is one of 6 schools that will be working with Amazon to test textbooks on the new devices, the paper says. The others: Case Western, Princeton University, Reed College, Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State University.

Amazon currently sells a subscription to the Times for $14 a month. That version has fewer features than the paper’s free Web site–no video, no color photography, and just one update a day–but some of the early-adopting Kindle users seem to like it. In February, the paper said Kindle subscriptions were a “modest” business.

Amazon is one of several players with plans for a new, large-format device that’s supposedly optimized for newspapers and magazines. News Corp. (NWS), which owns this Web site, has said it’s interested, and fellow publisher Hearst is already working on its own. And here’s a list of entrants you haven’t heard of.

Can a new Kindle–or any other device–reverse the fortunes of the print publishing industry? Nope: It doesn’t matter how you deliver the information if you can’t afford to generate it in the first place. And the industry’s more sober executives understand that.

But if Kindle-like devices really do take off, they will be a natural platform for whatever version of the publishing industry survives. The question facing publishers: Do you try to create your own platform from scratch so you can control your own distribution? Or hop aboard the industry leader and accept that you may end up in the position the music business is in, where one outlet–Apple’s iTunes (AAPL) store–dominates the business?