The Future of Reading

In Feb this year, Josh Quittner wrote an interesting article in Fortune called The Future of Reading. For those who don’t know Quittner – until Sept 07, he was editor of Time Inc.‘s Business 2.0, which he joined in April 2002 after seven years at Time Magazine, where he served as technology editor and the editor of its spinoff technology supplement Time Digital.  He is considered as one of the magazine industry’s digital drivers.

Allow me to shorten Quittner’s article. Central issue from a (digital) magazine point of view:  will consumers pay for content on a tablet when they can get free web content. Most people still enjoy the printed medium. But they want it delivered in an exponentially more useful way. With the arrival of Apple’s iPad and other tablet computers — touch sensitive, full color, easy to watch video on, network-connected to virtual newsstands and stores — the publishing industry might once again have a remunerative way of giving it to them.

The web is for scanning, not deep reading. People typically spend two minutes or less on a site. Why do you think the killer app is called a browser? It’s hard to make money with online advertising. Today, online ads bring in junk CPMs — about 10% of the revenue per 1,000 views compared with print. No wonder that the Wall St Journal has brought its online content behind a ‘pay wall’ and fighting search engines to make them stop searching and indexing their online content.

While old media can find much to cheer about with the arrival of the Tablet Age, which promises to smooth old media’s transition from paper to digital, the publishing industry still faces considerable obstacles. Key questions raised:

1. Will anyone be willing to pay for content delivered to a tablet when they can get information for free on the web? Steve Jobs proved with that first iPod that people would willingly pay for music when you made it easier to buy than to steal — especially when the media is linked via a store to a cool, fetishistic device. When you’ve invested in a tablet (or an iPhone or a Droid or a Kindle, etc.) and love it, you want to increase its functionality — with media.
2. But aren’t tablets just a better way to browse the web? Jobs pitched the iPad as a better way to access the web, in fact. But with the tablet, there ought to be room for great, downloaded apps that are usable offline too.
3. Reading? Reading is dead. According to the Magazine Publishers Association, 174.5 million people paid to subscribe to magazines in 1970; that number has steadily and consistently risen over the years, to 324.8 million as of 2008. Magazines are just vertical collections of content that feed our individual interests. Like blogs. The trick for publishers will be to figure out how to be compensated for individual articles as well.
4. How will tablet-based ads work better than the web? While I think most publishers will allow you to skip an ad with a swipe of your fingers, a 10-inch full-color touch screen gives the advertiser a rich enough canvas to grab you by the eyeballs and make its case.
5. Can traditional publishing companies reorganize and move fast enough to embrace and serve new platforms? They haven’t reinvented or reimagined themselves so far. That’s because the old way of doing business has been blindingly successful. The biggest mistake they made was in ignoring the people who might have been able to solve their problems in the late 1990s when things went bad: their best reporters. Instead they tapped consultants and strategists. Publishers of the greatest newspapers and magazines should have gone to their very best reporters and deployed them!
6. Conclusion: The model of the magazine as we know it is just outmoded. The publishing industry — books, magazines, newspapers — ought to be approaching the problem of content creation differently. We should be thinking about selling attention. Content creators are battling for a user’s time.