iPad Only Publications

A story on NPR this morning stated that (Sir) Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines, etc.) is going to publish a new magazine for the iPad only. This follows just a little while after Rupert Murdoch announced he was starting an iPad-only newspaper. Other publications, such as Time Magazine, have offered subscriptions to readers through the iPad, and some have offered essentially PDF versions of their publications either to subscribers or the paper editions or on a per-copy basis, without a lot of success. According to the story, this will be sold as an app because iPad users are wary of subscriptions.

In my opinion, whether the magazine or the newspaper apps sell is completely dependent on the user experience with them. I think people's expectations are being raised as the "there's an app for that" concept becomes truer each day. If the user experience with a magazine or newspaper app is "ho-hum, nothing new here," then it is likely to fail. The competition for user attention is already there as there are tens of thousands of apps available for the iPad. And, the ability to custom-make "magazines" already exists with apps such as Flipboard, an app that lets the user build a "magazine" with feeds from their Facebook, Twitter, Flickr accounts, as well as feeds from aggregators, such as the Huffington Post, and "traditional" news sources, such as the New York Times and the Associated Press.

There's almost a self-perpetuating speigel im speigel (mirror-in-mirror) mind-bending phenomenon going on when individual users can custom-make their own aggregations out of aggregations and social media, as well as other sources of news and information. It isn't an exaggeration, in my opinion, to stop and think that this must be what it feels like to be to be a pioneer starting out to explore a frontier—at once both excited and fearful.

Don't forget the iPad Demonstration/Workshop presented by Dan Senstock of Apple, Inc., on December 8th, from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. in Room 213 of the K-State Union.