Check out this really cool demo of the upcoming Wired Magazine interface for iPad:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/the-wired-ipad-app-a-video-demonstration/
After a discussion on digital content with a friend, I got to thinking about tablets and the future of media. I think that magazines are going to find ways to evolve and survive - lower prices, interesting navigational layouts, interactive features, videos, advertising. But I think that newspapers are going to lose - because of perception. A newspaper is a quarter. Or free online. Why should I buy an iPad app for a magazine and pay a subscription fee when I can just visit the website? And if they lock it up online, I'll just go to a different newspaper. I think that magazines have more to offer and will survive, just barely, but I can't see newspapers making it.
It's all about perception. A Subaru and a BMW cost the same to make, but a BMW sells for $15,000 more - and if they were sold for the same price as a Subaru, their perceived value (i.e. a high-end luxury car) would be tarnished. Napster screwed over the music industry by teaching our generation that music should be free - we reluctantly pay 99 cents for it and that's good enough for them to not only survive but to flourish. I think the magazines will make it, at least the ones that are creative. I don't think that newspapers will make it very long, at least not after our parents start dying off and our generation gets older. I think that books and textbooks will do well, as well music. I think that if Apple really drops the price of a TV show to 99 cents, that will do extremely well too (impulse purchase price ftw!).
I think e-books should be a lot cheaper. As a publisher and author myself, I'll be selling my products in e-format at not just a lower price, but a
significantly lower price. But not 99 cents - because I think that ruins the perceived value of it, like if a BMW was $16,999 new. In my mind, how good can it be if it's 99 cents? For example, say a New York Times bestseller goes for $14.99. They should sell the iPad version for $9.99 or even $5.99. If it's 99 cents, it loses the perceived value - you have no vested interest in finishing it - but by hacking down the price 50% (or even 75%), you feel like you're getting a better deal on a good product. Currently they hardly mark them down at all - a couple of dollars, thanks to the pricing war the iPad has ignited.
Think of it like games - once the Xbox and Nintendo DS got hacked and you could download and play games for free, it went from "man I just spend SIXTY BUCKS on this game and I GOTTA finish it!!" to "Meh...it was fun for a few minutes". I've seen more than one person go from a serious gamer to a game hacker to a casual gamer, because the perceived value of their games went downhill. Now that more and more things are going digital thanks to great enablers like the iPad, I think that perceived value thing is going to get much more important, especially with digital media that was sold as, uh, analog media in the past.
Anyway just thinking out loud
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