From MIN. Full story here

PopSci Breaks Onto Android Tablet
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Steve Smith

While the iPad gets all of the press love lately, Samsung has had success with its rival 7-inch Android Galaxy Tab. The new tablet ably runs all of the existing smartphone apps in the Android Marketplace, so the device came to market with over 100,000 programs supporting it. Nevertheless,  there are very few apps designed specifically for the format, which is twice the size of most Android phones but half the size of the iPad. Bonnier Corp. is the first major magazine company we have seen venture into the Android tablet field with its newly launched special issue, Popular Science+ Top Tech 2010. Designed specifically for the 7-inch screen, Bonnier's new app reorients the Mag+ engine it used on iPad magazine and special issue apps for the smaller sca.

The special issue includes 100 innovative products from the year in 11 easily-browsed categories. Winning items get full-screen animations that show off the tech innovation. Bonnier says that it employed the Android’s pop-up menu function to house the table of contents. The Android app uses the same display conventions as the iPad version of Mag+ titles: tapping the screen removes the text to allow the background image to show unimpeded and full screen. According to Bonnier deputy director of R&D Mike Haney, the app for Galaxy Tab was an opportunity for the publisher to test new layouts on the 7-inch screen.

A number of Android, Windows 7 and Blackberry-powered tablets will be coming to market in the next few months in this smaller format. Says Haney: “Although the smaller space requires more simplified layouts, we found that the horizontal orientation of the widescreen display gave us the best canvas for easy-to-read, flowing text and big, beautiful images without the screen ever feeling cluttered—preserving that immersive, relaxing magazine experience.”

As magazines try to capitalize on the digital tablet craze, they will be chasing a fragmenting market as multiple operating systems and screen dimensions compete for consumers' market share. A key challenge for publishers will be creating technology platforms and work flows that can support multiple devices at reasonable cost.

The app sells for $1.99.

Shoot This Magazine! F&S Builds an Anti-iPad Print App

They call themselves “The Gun Nuts,” but two of the most popular bloggers at Field & Stream magazine’s Web site are not crazy when they tell readers to go out and shoot the July issue. In a novel attempt to publicize an upcoming TV series as well as the uniqueness of the print media, the July “Gun Nuts” issues of F&S comes with a printed target and an invitation for readers to send in snapshots of themselves shooting the page. The winning entry will win a gun, naturally. “Magazines are supposed to be dying out, killed by the Internet as delivered on home computers, laptops, phones and iPads,” bloggers Phil Bourjaily and David E Patzal write at the “Gun Nuts” blog. “Maybe someday, but for now we are proud to say we have created an app for a magazine that can’t be replicated on a screen.”

The contest is also promoting an upcoming TV show on the Outdoor Channel starring the two F&S gun editors. The duo will give gun reviews and practical hunting advice. The show premieres on June 30.

Despite the lukewarm reviews (see below), Wired's IPad app appears to be doing well:

Wired magazine sold 24,000 copies of its $4.99 app in the first 24 hours of its release, according to a tweet by John Abel, the mag’s NY bureau chief. With the 70 percent revenue split, that means that Conde Nast took away $83,832. It helps that Wired’s tech audience tends to be early adopters, so it remains to be seen if other Conde Nast titles will enjoy that same immediate sales jump.

Not surprising, the Wired app has already shot up to number one among the paid apps, way ahead of Vanity Fair, whose $4.99 app was released two weeks ago and is at number 90. The Wired app number is impressive, especially since Conde Nast has already counted about 63,000 paid app downloads across both the iPhone and iPad since November, all of which go toward its total circ, under the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The publisher is planning a few additions to drive paid downloads further.  For example, unlike Conde Nast’s GQ app, there’s no automatic subscription notice for the Wired app yet, but execs told paidContent earlier this week that this feature is coming soon.

From paidcontent.org. Full story here

 

By John Herrman

I'm Still Waiting for a Great iPad Magazine

With the new Wired app, Conde Nast has built, unequivocally, the best magazine for the iPad. And yet I find myself asking, is this it? And will it cost this much?

I love Wired. I love magazines. But with the launch of the magazine app, Wired's much-previewed, profoundly hyped and unexpectedly controversial claim on the future of the magazine, the uneasiness, and the pit in my stomach that I felt during the first wave of iPad magazines—dominated by PopSci's ambitious re-imagining of the title, but comprised mostly of blatant halfassery—has only grown deeper.

Consider the facts:

• Wired's app is $5. I could buy a subscription to the magazine, for a year, for around $10. A year of Wired purchased from the App Store would cost $60. Conde is apparently working on a unified pricing scheme across print and digital for the New Yorker, so maybe it'll filter over to Wired? Who knows. I know it must have cost a ton to develop this thing, but readers don't care about that: They care about the words. These words cost too much. (Also, it's not like this magazine doesn't have ads. It's got a fucking ton of ads.)

• It's over 500MB. Don't get me wrong, the graphics are lovely, and the videos look great. But in the time it took me to download and install this app on my iPad, I was able to walk to a bodega, take out cash at an ATM, get a cup of coffee, come home, and send a few emails. Hell, I could have picked up a copy of Wired while I was out; I spotted a few copies in a stand next to the counter. (Last month's issue, but still.)

• It's still quite obviously a magazine. It may seem like a fine distinction, but with this app Wired hasn't reinvented the magazine, they've just reinvented Wired. Wired's graphic design is legendary, and I'd hate to see it sacrificed for the iPad app. But some of these magazine conventions don't really work—in this app, I never feel like I've truly tucked into an article, as I do with the print edition, or even an Instapaper bookmark. PopSci had this problem, too, and it's worrying that none of the mag world's stars have figured out what to do with it. (Interestingly, the best handling of long-form writing I've seen in an iPad app came from Vanity Fair, which is published by the same company as Wired.)

• The little things! For example, you can't copy and paste, or share an article. (Some of this is coming in the future, apparently.)

And then, well, there's the experience, the look, the feel—there's the app itself. We saw the demos before launch, in Wired Reader, and we gushed. Rightfully! Even watching them now, I'm impressed. But in my hand, it's... emotionally underwhelming? Visually overwhelming? I don't know. It doesn't really click—the layout and design are to my eye impeccable, and the interactive infographics are objectively impressive, but I find myself wishing for a web page, some flat text, or something.

But man, those early demos! Magazines were going to be interactive, y'know? There was much talk of the future, of revolution. And following the buzz, there was execution. This is that app, minus about, dunno, 15 experiential percent?

The video, the diagrams, the interactivity—it's all here, but in my hands, it doesn't capture the magic it had before, on that video, and more importantly, in our eager imaginations. Wired didn't break their promise; we just bought too far into it.

Wired's app is a broad step toward the ideal of an interactive app. Sure, it's a pain to swipe through all those ads—I don't know why digital mags should adhere to the same ad conventions as paper ones—and there's still a lot of tuning to be done, but I guess I see what they're going for, vaguely. It's attractive and flashy, impressive, but expensive. It's aspirational.

The alternative ideal for digital magazines is a stripped-back approach—either scanned PDFs, or near-bare OCR scans of the current issues, more or less like web content. These cost very little to make, so—and this is why I call it an ideal—publishers could give readers their entire archives, on tap, for almost nothing. But that's only attractive for a certain category of readerly, word-heavy magazines, and again, it's unclear how you'd sell that, either: Is it a bonus to the regular mag? A separate subscription?

These aren't new questions—they're the same ones that more cynical observers have been asking since the first eruptions of iPad hype around the press. It's just that with Wired, the uber mag app, they still haven't been answered. [Wired]

 

From MIN Online.

When GQ magazine recently became the first major consumer title to put all of its content into an ABC-certified iPhone app no one knew quite what to expect. Condé Nast says today it is pleased that more than 18,000 copies have sold across the first two issues. Is that a good number? Who knows for sure? But Gartner says the app market is already showing hockey stick growth. 

If I were a GQ advertiser, I would say an additional 18k is a good number. 

GQ's "Man of the Year" issue will be available for download through the IPhone App Store. What is interesting is that the download will include, not only all of the content but all of the advertising from the issue as well. Full story here

"As Condé Nast tries to move beyond its restructuring issues, the company is pushing ahead with several attempts to ramp up its digital business. In conjunction with the December GQ “Man of The Year” cover, the publisher will sell app version of the entire issue, including the same ads and articles, in the iPhone App Store, the company told paidContent.

Clearly, Condé Nast hopes that more than reproducing its magazine in digital form, it can reproduce the kinds of circulation and ad dollars that print has commanded for so long. So far, the GQ app has gotten the nod from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which says that sales of the e-reader version qualify for the mags rate base. That means in ABC’s eyes, downloading the for $2.99 will count the same as a buying a $4.99 copy of GQ at the newsstand."