The ease with which you can write software for the web is an anomaly. It’s an incredibly forgiving medium and the barriers to entry are unnaturally low. It hardly takes any craftsmanship at all to connect a web form to a database and have it work well enough to publish content.
Outside of this anomaly, software development is generally hard. Magazine and newspaper publishers around the world are finding out just how hard as they all rush to bring their wares to native apps on iOS, Android.
These magazine apps completely suck, generally speaking. They suck in the same ways that the CD-ROM rush of the 90s sucked. They suck for all the reasons poorly written native software sucks: They’re slow, they crash, they get stuck.
It’s like every magazine is reinventing HTML and programming their own browser for it. Of course that’s going to end badly!
The solution when it hurts to hit yourself is to stop hitting yourself. Custom app development to publish a magazine is just nonsense.
Apple should save its customers from these cruddy experiences by either putting out something like iMagazine Creator (ala iBooks Creator) or find a better way to get existing HTML magazines on the iPad.
Reading magazines on the iPad is too good of a use case to have it screwed up by this rash of crappy native apps.
Scott
on 26 Nov 12+1
DHH
on 26 Nov 12Further more, the argument that publishers just aren’t hiring good enough developers is bollocks. If it takes such high quality programmers to produce magazines that don’t suck, then the process is just wrong.
Benjamin Welch
on 26 Nov 12Completely agree. Have you seen Marco Arment’s The Magazine yet? It’s fast, elegant, and looks great. As a reader, I love it.
Ben
on 26 Nov 12Amen. Some publishers are doing this right – evo magazine and wired are good examples. But most of the stuff out there are either glorified PDFs or some bastardisation of scaled images.
Patrick
on 26 Nov 12The Economist is a great magazin App on the iPad. Indeed an exception. Even if I have the print editon around, I somehow prefer the App on the iPad. It has the distinctive feeling of “The Economist” and feels native to the iPad. However, it’s still laking. I can’t copy or lookup words and it loses the page I had open when the app shuts down.
Adrien
on 26 Nov 12I prefer information to eye candy. Publishers want their users to enjoy a slick experience, and they also want to differentiate themselves with a unique UI, which is what drives all those mobile device apps. A clean, elegant web page interface is easier to develop.
Mezza
on 26 Nov 12As someone who comes from a small publishing background, I agree with you completely, but coming up with a well executed application – like The Economist – is expensive and beyond many small publishers. Ever tried to find a cost-effective CMS that can hookup to professional DTP packages well? Please do share if you find one.
Personally, I’d love to have a standard platform we could publish to, since it might even mean that we could expect more of our readers to consider getting tablet X, Y, and Z and save us a fortune on ever increasing printing and distribution costs.
WRT HTML5 apps, it was interesting to see The FT move from a native app. I hardly ever use it now, as it’s so painful compared to the original user experience.
drawtheweb
on 26 Nov 12A similar phenomenon exists in the Annual Report space. Companies are rushing to have apps to display annual reports or investor relations info. They’re so horrible that as an investor I would rethink my investment in a company that so frivolously throws away money while simultaneously butchering a brand image.
Mishra
on 26 Nov 12Probably, Open Source can help in this. I mean if Flipboard or alike can make the core framework opensource and then (Open Source) community helps in this. Something similar on the ecosystem developed by iOS and Android. Collaborative development can really be an attempt worth the try. No doubt with tons of data getting generated every week, there will be a requirement of something like this in future.
I wish, I can come up with some idea worth writing about it on my idea blog http://syncfin.com
Julien Ricard
on 26 Nov 12I work in publishing and I can explain, at least in our case : it’s because of .. advertising. We HAVE to publish crappy ios/android apps because the advertisers want to display ads on mobile, because their marketing director told them that mobile is the new www, etc. If you don’t have a (crappy) ios/android app, advertisers will give their budget to a competitor. So, we have to develop a crappy API for the mobile app to consume, and build a dumb mobile reader just to display these fullscreen interstitial-with-video ads on mobile platforms.
I really wish it could be the other way, developing a mobile-friendly website (responsive or not) seems of course logical but it’s not what the advertisers want.
The solution is to build 1) a website, 2) a mobile website, and 3) a mobile app… for advertisers.
Jason
on 26 Nov 12So would you say companies like Inkling are on the right track (for books, not magazines)?
Devan
on 26 Nov 12One of the main problems is that magazine publishers are simply NOT app developers. They just syndicate the content and then outsource the app side of things to a third party, which they hope knows what they are doing.
Case in point is one of my favourite magazines – Permier Guitar. They have fantastic content, and the mobile platform is a fantastic vehicle for this style of magazine (embedded video/sound clips, links to gear sites etc.). However, they have been crippled by choosing the wrong engine for their content – Texterity. The usability is beyond bad, which is a shame, because all that great content is locked away behind an uninformed decision someone in their middle management made.
Joe Casabona
on 27 Nov 12How can you say that? It totally discredits what good programmers can do. I assume people (perhaps even the people at 37signals) were saying the same thing about Project Management software and then you guys made great software. For the magazine apps you listed that suck, there are great ones out there, like Entertainment Weekly’s on top of what other commenters said. The problem isn’t that the process is wrong- it’s that programmers should program.
And if they want a platform, nothing is preventing them from using iBooks Author to create a magazine, or Zinio.
Eckhard
on 27 Nov 12two posts in a row on this topic on SvN, and I recall you will be launching a new product soon… maybe it will be a platform to publish on tablets?
Tim
on 27 Nov 12Great article and completely agree.
I run a cycling travel website and have hundreds of articles and am now moving to monetisation of these. On Wordpress you are limited to plugins (like WPMU’s Membership, or any other number of plugins) that don’t do the job properly.
Or, you can send people off to MailChimp (which as an Aussie I can’t use to charge for content for, as they only support Amazon payments and Aussies can’t get paid out of Amazon – yet) probably via some intermediary (like DPD Cart or something else that can ping mailchimp when the user has paid).
TinyPass and MediaPass just don’t work (and take huge comms).
I’d LOVE – LOVE – to kick people off (after a more tag or whatever) to somewhere that can handle the payment and fulfilment of articles.
By the way, reading this article (LOVE Kepler STD!) was a joy aesthetically. Kepler STD my new web font and publishing font.
Tim
on 27 Nov 12@Julien Advertising is the problem. Publishers are fitting into the old models. Why should the need for ads limit this?
Answer: they shouldn’t.
And in fact, with APIs in place, you could easily serve ads inside a magazine (I see drag and drop, spots/widgets for ads, with some code pointing to the ad, similar to how you place ads in Wordpress widgets).
And some people don’t need/want ads. I want to charge for ad free content.
Tim velonomad.com
Linan
on 27 Nov 12Looks like a solid argument at the first glance but you might be completely wrong. when internet first came to mainstream, publishers didn’t understand the difference between printed media and digital media but most of them still rushed into the web bubble. by now, 95%+ of publishers’ websites still sucks, but rarely one without. The rule is very simple: either jump into it, learn it, and put resources into it just to get a chance, or out of the game.
From the programming side: When web first came out, it was so freaking difficult to work out a functional site. Need to work with database, html, CGI (written in C/C++)... so many things just impossible to get them right. guess what, after 10 years, folks figured out conventions, things to ignore and best of all, various of frameworks/toolchains like ROR.
Don’t worry, relax. It seems now that mobile app is the direction. if it really is, we will be there!
Tim
on 27 Nov 12Just checked out TapEdition and Zinio
TapEdition at 7k/year (12 issues) is so far outside most people’s budget as to render it irrelevant for small publishers (if I had 7k spare I’d be buying a zero turn mower for my coffee orchard!).
Zinio suffers a major flaw – publisher sign up?
Seems to me there’s a major gap here.
Tim
GregT
on 27 Nov 12+1 for The Economist. Matter of fact, I started reading it again solely on the basis of JF’s heartfelt recommendation of their iPad app on this very blog, a couple of years back. It perfectly replicates the L&F of the magazine. Though I find the ads more annoying, especially in such an expensive magazine.
JaredCC
on 28 Nov 12Methinks a writing/publishing application is in the works.
Arjend
on 28 Nov 12Or other companies (not publishers, not Apple) have to develop beter (lean) publishing tools: http://craigmod.com/journal/subcompact_publishing/
Arjend
on 28 Nov 12Sorry didn’t read the next post first, exactly about that article.
Richard
on 29 Nov 12I agree with the article.
Try It
Joel
on 29 Nov 12Apple updated its RSS podcast spec in March to support the use of ePub files as enclosures, and it’s my hope that this becomes an option for publishing to Newsstand.
I envision that CMSs will eventually allow you to automatically create an ePub or PDF versions of your content (just as they already create HTML versions). Perhaps they would also allow you to supply your own, if you wanted more control over the appearance. These ePub and PDF files could then be used as enclosures in a separate RSS feed which publishers sell to subscribers, whose devices would use the feed to automatically download new content. I think the model of “free on the web, pay for automatic download to your Kindle/tablet” is a fantastic one that would give good self-publishers a chance to really thrive, and we’d all benefit from the resulting wealth of great content.
I just posted my thoughts on Kindle & ePub Publishing Methods for Periodicals – see especially the last section.
This discussion is closed.