Here is the Thing: Everybody Hates the Wired App
This post is a week or two late, so pardon the staleness. It started off as a Twitter comment which evolved into a Google Reader comment, but it needs to be expanded upon properly so now it’s a Tumblr post. The information about the circulation rules surrounding digital editions of print magazines comes from my wife Antonia, who is a senior editor for the online version of a famous mens’ magazine and has done significant thinking about the problem of digital editions.
The anticipation of the Wired iPad app was pretty crazy — mostly because the Wired brand is synonymous with The Future and Publishing and The Amazing Digital Life We All Lead Now. So everybody was like “oh man, this Wired app is going to show everybody how digital magazines *should* work!”
Then the app came out and despite some rather flashy design and photography and a few clever interactions, there was much disappointment at the decision to render every page of the magazine as an image. Which I absolutely agree was a dreadful move for a lot of reasons, primarily because it renders the text unsearchable, unexcerptable and at half a gigabyte in size, rather unwieldy.
Part of the problem is the Audit Bureau of Circulations guidelines state that the ads and content of a digital issue have to match up with the print edition 1:1 if they want to count digital edition sales against the magazine’s rate base and charge magazine rates for the advertisements. The ABC loosened the rules a bit recently to let publishers have some leeway with the design but obviously when you have to have every word, image and advertisement in your tablet edition it’s a lot more cost-effective to just utilize the same InDesign layouts.
Not to defend terrible decisions like rendering text as images instead of .. uhh … text. But at least it lends some perspective to the decision. I would love to see somebody solve the problem of great interactive design while still adhering to ABC guidelines, but it seems like that might be the same thing as wishing for dinosaurs to grow fur and eat bananas.
My hunch is the first great digital magazine on the iPad is going to come from a publisher who isn’t afraid to cut the umbilical to their print edition rate base. It will let them do much more interesting stuff without the added stipulation of having to reformat every single page of their paper magazine to work on a touch screen.
If I want to participate in levelheaded analysis like my coworker Josh, I suppose I need to get myself an iPad.
