After letting the Internet slip away from them and watching electronic readers like the Kindle from Amazon develop without their input, publishers are trying again with Apple iPhones and, especially, tablet computers.
Although publishers have not exactly been on the cutting edge of technology, two magazines — Esquire and GQ — have developed iPhone versions, while Wired and Sports Illustrated have made mockups of tablet versions of their print editions, months before any such tablets come to market. Publishers are using the opportunity to fix their business model, too.
“It may help them reassert some, not just control, but reassert themselves and not be in the death spiral that some were in in the last years,” said Ned May, director and lead analyst for the research firm Outsell.
When the magazine industry first made iPhone apps, the approach resembled how it had tiptoed onto the Web. The apps were free, the features were a little weak compared to what independent developers could do, and the rich design of print didn’t translate to a touch screen.
But the iPhone edition that Esquire expects to release alongside its January issue will offer robust interactive features, and it won’t be free. The price, $2.99 a month, is small, but it is a big statement.
“Throughout the magazine industry, with very few exceptions, we still charge too little for our products,” said David Granger, editor in chief of Esquire, referring to both free Web versions and cheap print issues. In recent decades, publishers have discounted subscriptions to gain bigger audiences, assuming they would make it up with advertisers drawn by the big readerships.
“The situation’s changed. We all kind of regret that our ancestors gave away the magazine for too little money,” Mr. Granger said.
The new approaches depend on two assumptions: that consumers will finally embrace the tablet computers that manufacturers have promised for years, and that they will want to read magazine-style content on them. Publishers are creating magazinelike products for these devices, but different mediums lend themselves to different reading styles, as the Web showed.
Thomas J. Wallace, the editorial director of Condé Nast, said he expected the design of the magazine app to evolve, reflecting how people used it. “As time goes on, we’ll find our way with this, but we need to have the thing — we need to have the consumer using the thing — to tell us what’s best. So we start with who we are.”
In the Esquire app, articles are recreated in documents that the reader scrolls through. A tap calls up more photos or video, a navigation screen or a search box. Because Mr. Granger has a sponsor — Axe — for the first three issues, he hasn’t had to figure out how to incorporate and measure print ads.
The developer, ScrollMotion, translated magazine layout into the app by, for example, replacing a sidebar article on cars with a small button inside an article. When the reader touches the button, the sidebar page appears. ScrollMotion includes the digital equivalents of turning a page, tearing out an article or circling a favorite quote.
Say a quotation in the “What I’ve Learned” interview with the biographer Robert Caro tickles someone’s fancy: “There’s no sense in asking me about the recession. I don’t understand the world of finance. Would you like a chocolate-chip cookie?” The reader can copy that quote to a Favorites locker, or e-mail it, or export the text to Facebook. (ScrollMotion will limit how much of an issue someone can copy.)
Other magazines are creating iPhone versions, too. GQ created an app version of its December issue, and it and other Condé Nast magazines plan to create more. At Time Inc., Entertainment Weekly is working on an iPhone edition. They all plan to charge. “I don’t want to take that risk again,” Mr. Granger said of giving away content.
Publishers like the iPhone, but it has drawbacks, especially its small size. That’s where the tablet is expected to come in.
Few tablets are on the market today. (Mr. Wallace keeps a 10 1/2-inch piece of foam and paper on his desk, his best guess at what a tablet will look like.) Hewlett-Packard and other hardware companies are developing touch-screen tablets that are expected to look like a much larger iPhone. Apple, too, is rumored to be working on one.
“The technology will allow these magazines, and these advertisements, to look as good as they look on the magazine page,” said Louis Cona, senior vice president of the Condé Nast Media Group.
As good — or better. Wired’s mockup has elements like interactive graphics, links that take the customer to a floating window rather than a new page, and the ability to play video and audio. “You can put as many pyrotechnics in there as you want to,” Mr. Wallace said.
Sports Illustrated’s demonstration version — developed with the Wonderfactory, a design firm — lets readers organize the magazine by subjects like baseball or football. They can circle photographs or articles and use a toolbar to e-mail an article, print it, view comments, view related items, see relevant Twitter posts or save the article to a favorites file. They can rearrange the order of the issue, see dozens of photos that don’t make it into print and pull live scores from all the teams they follow.
Advertising potential with the tablet is also big, publishers say.
You can read the rest of this feature on the New York Times website.
