Getting Into An I Pad-dy: Newspapers

I Pad, U Pad, Wii Pad. We all Pad together.

Unfortunately, for Apple and for newspaper and magazine publishers, we don’t. We may in some distant future. But for now, we pad as a small minority.

The publishers are ambivalent to this future. They would happily dispense with one of their biggest cost bases – printing – but they are no nearer creating a business model that satisfactorily digitalises and monetises hard copy into oblivion. Ah but the iPad will be that model. Some might think so; some, like Steve Jobs, would hope so. But the mere newspaper-reading mortal continues to be a Steve Unjobsworthy who hasn’t become an Apple organisation man and hasn’t been commanded by the contemporary tablets of stone, the ostentatiously styled modern miracle of the iPad tablet and its peers.

There’s bad news for newspaper publishers; good news for publishers of magazines. PriceWaterhouseCoopers have reported that whereas revenue from digital magazines is set to “sky rocket”, thanks to the iPad, sales of subscriptions of newspapers in this digital form will not be sufficient to offset the fall in print sales.

The iPad is many things, but essentially, for many of its products, its newspaper products, it is merely a digital replacement of the hard copy. The hype, and that also for the iPhone, the Android and any other current-day trickery you care to mention, outstrips the reality. There are many, many users of course. But this doesn’t mean that newspapers will suddenly disappear. As pointed out by the UK firm Enders Analysis: “Ten million pay for a daily newspaper in the UK. They spend roughly 30 pounds a month each. There will not be 10 million people spending 30 pounds a month on the iPad any time soon”.

In a way, the iPad is an experiment, as is much digital and internet publishing. It is worthwhile playing with, but it is only one aspect of the digital future. Newspaper publishers who see it as the only holy grail of a prosperous non-print new world are seriously deluding themselves. Experiments need to be conducted in different ways, and one is to create a wholly new product (or products) with its own revenue stream. It’s thinking out of the box, but the fear is that publishers will be seduced into boxing themselves solely inside the iPad tablet box.

All of which brings us to the “Majorca Daily Bulletin”. It is now iPad-able, online in full. At a price. Part of a service under the non-snappy moniker of Kioskoymas, through which we are told “the most complete offer of press of quality” is available, the Bulletin is the only English paper in what is an online iPad-oriented system for Spanish newspaper and magazine publishers. A bizarre aspect of this service, were you minded to want to subscribe to the paper, is that you would need to read Spanish. Obviously you would. They’re not going to have an English version to guide you through the online registration and payment process when the service is meant to be for Spanish readers.

And subscription is a not unimportant element. Getting the punter to buy a month or more ahead does wonders for cash planning in the uncertain digital world but it runs counter to consumer psychology. Subscriptions to hard-copy newspapers have only ever been a small part of publishers’ businesses. Readers habitually buy daily, a truism for a daily publication. Why would you stump up in advance when you haven’t in the past? News International is facing this conundrum along with other more pressing matters.

A solution is an incentive. Yet from what I can make out, unless you have a multiple subscription, i.e. to at least more than one title through Kioskoymas, you pay the going rate. And unless you, as an English reader, are inclined to also read Spanish papers or even able to, then you are not going to have a multiple subscription. Moreover, a month seems to be the minimum subscription period, this being unlike other services which enable you to pay daily.

And one of these services is Orbyt. This was launched last year and features “El Mundo”, “La Razón” and other Spanish papers as well as magazines. So Kioskoymas is a rival and a less elegant one than Orbyt, if the websites of the two services are anything to go by. The competition with Orbyt is probably quite significant. The Bulletin is part of the Grupo Serra stable, of which “Ultima Hora” is its biggest-selling paper. And “Ultima Hora” is a competitor with the Balearics version of “El Mundo”. For it to have an iPad presence as a rival makes sense, and you wonder if this is the main reason why The Bulletin is now iPad-able; it has been bundled in, but it is “Ultima Hora” that really matters.

The Bulletin might gain from this service, it might not, but fundamentally it cannot be seen as the be all and end all, and this is the message for any newspaper publisher. The iPad is basically a means of cannibalising the product. It is a replacement technique more than it is a new-product technique and it is the latter that publishers need to work on.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Read You Like A Book: Literature, culture and technology

A week or so ago there was some navel-gazing going on. It was at a literary gathering known as Conversaciones de Formentor. Book publishers, Spanish and Mallorcan, were bemoaning what they see as the impoverishment of culture and lack of demand for more serious literature.

Books and their reading do not escape the obsessiveness with which statistics are presented on almost every aspect of Mallorcan life. Suffice it to say that reading is down, this in a wider Catalan society that can produce something as massive as the Sunday book market in Barcelona. There are all sorts of explanations as to why, one of them being media companies which contribute to what the publishers perceive as the increasing banality of local culture.

The publishers accept that new technologies can be enriching, but they worry – as many others worry – about children not growing up being “imbued with the experience of the book”. But are they right to be so concerned? They might be right in being uneasy at the proliferation of the inane, an X Factor winner’s fascinating autobiography for example, but technology might actually be the saviour of the book – serious or otherwise – and of children’s (and adults’) reading. At least this is what Amazon and Apple would like us to believe. When the publishers argue that “educational reform should not be limited to facilitating children’s use of a computer”, they overlook the potentially powerful symbiosis between technology and literature.

A recent book, assuming anyone’s read it, has advanced the theory that the internet is changing the way we think. Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” has provoked a debate as it argues that the net has altered how we read and use our memories. Carr himself has said that “the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”. I can sympathise, when it comes to reading online. A mistake newspaper publishers are making in hoping for a mass migration to paid-for online newspapers is that they neglect the distractions of the internet. You can be reading something and suddenly the urge takes you elsewhere. Where do you want to go today? Why pay for something if you realise you’re not going to read it?

Apple, with its iPad, offers a potentially whole brave new world for book reading. The iBooks application is but one part of the iPad, which, by coincidence or perhaps by design, an official video from the company described as feeling right “in the same way it just feels right to hold a book or magazine or newspaper”. But the iPad is sold on the basis of its multiple applications; the distractions to go somewhere else, other than the book, are enormous. Amazon’s Kindle is more straightforward. A promo video for the latest Kindle features a far from unattractive young lady sitting on a deckchair on a sunny beach, tucking into what may or may not be Jane Austen. Go anywhere, download anywhere, read anywhere is a seductive argument, but just how popular is it? Amazon claims millions of sales; an independent estimate suggests they are not as strong as the company would have them. Nevertheless, there may be more than just wishful thinking to Amazon’s advertising which portrays the product’s coolness for youngsters and for those who had never previously read a book.

But you still come back to the banality that the publishers were complaining about. The iPad or any computer hooked up to the internet doesn’t overcome the greatest banalities of all – those sometimes perpetrated in the name of social networking via the likes of Facebook, recently described by the president of the Balearics’ division of the Spanish consumers assocation FACUA as – and I am quoting him out of context – “the greatest evil that has been invented in the world”. It isn’t that (he was specifically referring to some more unpleasant aspects of Facebook), but it does contribute to a growing sense of abbreviated communication, part of a wider issue of a failure to concentrate, which is the product of what Carr is saying.

Mallorcan literary heritage is hardly a thing of international acclaim, but book reading locally has long been taken seriously. Whether what is being read is serious or not, if the publishers are concerned as to a decline in reading (and the statistics would bear this out), then they should perhaps be embracing, if they haven’t already, the new technologies. Whether these really work though is still very much an unanswered question.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.