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Jobs' Mob tries to save print media
PRINT MEDIA MESSIAH Steve Jobs' claim that the Ipad will be the saviour of print media might be the latest in a long line of claims that fail to materialise from the cult leader.
The technology lifestyle magazine Wired, which launched a UK edition last April, unleashed its Ipad application which it hopes will reverse its fortunes. To do this, the firm decided, unlike the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, that it needed to do much more than just slap on the same content from its other outlets into an Ipad-friendly format. Instead, the publication decided to put out "exclusive" content to sweeten a rather bitter pill for its Ipad readers.
The so called exclusive content is merely a thinly veiled attempt to justify gauging on those poor souls who are about to shell out hundreds of Pounds for an Iphone without a phone. The problem doesn't stem from the idea, or even the execution, but rather the combination of price, storage and bandwidth make it a rip-off scheme of Jobsian proportions.
To understand the relevance of Wired's application one must look at just how far a departure it is for traditional print media. Inspired by the deluded pricing strategy peddled by media kingpin Rupert Murdoch, Wired's aim is to offer extras to entice users to download its application, which really is an issue of its magazine priced exactly the same as its print copy. Other publications will be looking to Wired, desperately hoping it can pull off tricking users into continuing the cushy 'old media' way of life.
The hiccup in the grand plan comes when users realise that a download of 500 megabytes or more every month will not only consume the fixed storage capacity of their Ipad at an alarming rate but a significant proportion of any broadband data tariff they may have subscribed to, either at home or on the move.
Putting a 500MB download into perspective, according to figures reported by The INQUIRER, can represent anything up to 50 per cent of a monthly quota priced at £7.50. Even if one were to download an issue on a BT broadband connection, the most common in the UK, and utilise its misleadingly named, "Infinity" service comes with a measly 20GB per month transfer limit, 500MB represents a fair chunk of the quota. After all that, the user has to put up with the fact that a single issue consumes three per cent of storage on a 16GB Ipad.
While three per cent might sound irrelevant, given that this is just one issue and the Ipad, with its impressive screen, is likely to contain video, let alone music and photographs, that 500MB application isn't looking so small after all. As purchasing an issue of Wired costs so much, it's not particularly surprising that users may want to keep previous issues on your Ipad, but thanks to a lack of removable storage, one must assume fanbois will have to make a tough decision, like not buying Wired at all.
No one disputes that publications need to make money, however, while Jobs' tries to fashion the Ipad to media types as some sort of divine creation of godly proportions cultivated by his church, those who embrace it as a content viewing platform should remember that consumers and their wallets can only be pushed so far, as Wired's stable-mate GQ found out. It's Ipad application managed to rack up an impressive 365 downloads and was being offered at the same price as Wired.
Then there's the issue of content itself, looking at the June UK edition, it's hard to think why a true technologist would want to purchase a magazine that devoted less than 200 words on profiling Albert-László Barabási, one of the most celebrated academics of our generation spanning the world of physics, computer science and mathematics, yet decide to lavish seven pages on its "Fetish" section that reads like a glorified advert. Given the multimedia opportunities the Ipad brings, readers can expect more of the same.
Proponents favouring the Ipad magazine distribution will point to Wired as providing more than others before it. It's hard to argue against that given the 527MB download, but a balance between cost and content needs to be met if publications are to survive. While Jobs may view his fanbois as limitless cash cows with nowhere else to go, for publishers, they must remember that there's a free web out there.
If Jobs is so keen to be seen as the saviour of old media then maybe he should take a step back from his pulpit, and listen to Wired, which credits Adobe in helping it create the behemoth application. Though Jobs might, rightly, think he's doing the world a favour by ridding it of Flash, the collateral damage his jihad is causing may incur casualties among those he supposedly wants to save.
For the punter, however, the problem remains, if a single issue of one title consumes an alarming amount of resources, the Ipad, despite Jobs' best efforts to brainwash the huddled masses, might simply prove too expensive to save the ailing print media. µ
Tags: Apple
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"The relatives in question DON'T WANT to be taught the complexities of a modern PC, they want to browse the web and do a little email. The iPad is perfect for that."
Until it all goes awry and then you get "Please, come here imediately and fix this crap!". And it will go wrong, even on an iSlab. And it doesn't have to be a HW error, it could be a wrong adress, script, pop-up or alike.
And then you will HAVE to explain why it happened, and how to avoid it, so you better educate people anyways.
What, you don't have a mother? Figures...
And another thing about "clean things you can use with no geeks around". How do you think your mother will use the iSlab? Like you with washed hands, sitting nicely in an armchair, holding it the right way, and patiently swiping through the interface? YEAH RIGHT XD
She will do it in the kitchen while cooking, or doing something else, putting it on the edge of the table so it will fall a few times, get dirty with vinegar and some sauce, breadcrums, dirt for her flowers etc.
And then it will fail in the exact same sense that you bought it in the first place, simplicity. Because you can't carry standard equipment (PC) around the house, and netbooks/laptops look like serious equipment that you cherrish and look after.
in producing posts that contain even worse analysis than Lawrence's, and have nothing whatsoever to do with either his or my points.
Publishers in general can make money from one of two directions: charging the reader or advertising. Charge the reader too much and they won't buy. Use too much advertising and they won't buy either. Magazine and newspaper publishers mix the two and have to be careful with both.
Freetards like yourself fail to realise that you ALWAYS pay to see commercial content, either in the form of bandwidth, screen space and time to show the adverts, or in cash to remove adverts. Wired are betting that they can charge you AND collect advertising money just like a regular printed magazine, and providing they produce a sufficiently compelling product they may be able to get away with it. They're trying an experiment to see if it works. Its that hard to understand?
As for teaching mother's/elderly relatives etc to use computers, there's a saying that you may not have heard of: Never try to teach a pig to sing, it only wastes your time and it annoys the pig. The relatives in question DON'T WANT to be taught the complexities of a modern PC, they want to browse the web and do a little email. The iPad is perfect for that.
If we all continue to think "my mother cant use a computer because its complicated" are doing a disservice to your mother. Why would you not want to educate your mother on computers?
Why is it beneficial to her to be computer illiterate? What if school went on that aproach? if they started to reform on the oreilly factor of the stupid kids are stupid so just dont educate them, then it creates a perfect ignorance for people to continue to fear technology. Apple products dont make you computer literate or make things easier to use, they just make you dumber. I am also mechanic and it doesn't make any sense to me that a person who relies on a car cant change a tire, check the fluids, or even know where that a car has a jack in the trunk. See there's another opportunity for apple, cars. Dont fix the flat tire (apples battery technique) just buy a new car, you know lets glue to tires to the rims, better yet weld the damn rim to the drive shafts. HECK LETS GO ALL OUT AND WELD THE HOOD SO PEOPLE WONT HAVE TO CHECK FLUIDS.
This is just reaffirming what has already been said over and over again.
The ipad is just another version of cdrom multimedia. The one that was supposed to save the print media, now its a mobile version of this.
Why the heck would people want to spend 500 megabytes of a magazine that has maybe 30 percent of that bulk in ads?
Now that the digital issue doesnt need to be printed, they can surely leave out the ads right?
That model is already working in several sites, you pay money or bandwidth from ads.
I cant say much more about this stupid model because its just so stupid and its already been put so well by this guy
"So what does Marvel(ipad app) do to "enhance" its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney."
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html
and the original one that started it all
http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2010/04/01/cd-roms-and-ipads/
Whether or not you think that Wired is worth the price they are asking (and it's the publishers of Wired that sets the price, not Apple) the remainder of the article is based on faulty reasoning.
In modern terms a 500MB download is't large. It's about the size of ONE TV episode in SD resolution. An iTunes download of a TV episode in HD (which also includes an SD version) will use about 1700MB. Any halfway decent broadband service in the UK these days is marked as "Unlimited*" where the * means some kind of fair usage policy, but 500MB is a drop in the bucket.
Just like TV episodes you don't keep every single book or magazine that you've ever downloaded on your portable player. You keep ones that you haven't read/watched and some of your favourites. Even the base 16GB model has enough space for 32 magazines/TV episodes. That's a LOT of reading/watching material. You could easily spend a fortnight's holiday away from the internet and not exhaust what you have on the SSD.
Apple have nothing against Adobe software being used to create CONTENT (now that DreamWeaver supports HTML5 they've even less objection), they just don't want them creating applications. Some of the reasoning behind that is commercial, some is technical. Holding up a 500MB magazine as a demonstration of Adobe's development prowess doesn't help further your cause.
Whatever you think, Amazon with their Kindle system have already proved that there's a market for automatically downloaded, paid for, electronic editions of magazines and journals. Accept that not all people insist on getting all their content for free. If publishers can convince people that there's value in paying for their products then more power to them. If they can't then they'll find another model or go out of business.
There is a diminishing number of people that want electronic magazines - trendy old people think it might be a good idea to take their traditional print mags and digitize them. The younger generation don't want to be walled in and have a whole bunch of material filtered through a single creator - they use Twitter, Digg, Reddit etc to find single articles they are interested in - you know... the Web.
In the sentence "The so called exclusive content is merely a thinly veiled attempt to justify gauging on those poor souls who are about to shell out hundreds of Pounds for an Iphone without a phone" should "gauging" be "gouging"? Or is this an Anglicism unknown to American linguistics or lexicographers?