iPad expectations for content companies coming down to earth

I was always sceptical that the iPad would dramatically change the economics of digital content. Well, more accurately, I called content execs “delusional”. We’ve now got a few months of data under our belts, and Brian Morrissey of AdWeek comes to many of the same conclusions that I did after looking at some of the early apps and pricing strategies:

Despite the optimism that greeted the new device, there is a danger that publishers are squandering an opportunity with clunky apps, bad pricing strategies and unsustainable ad tactics.

Yes, and unlike when I wrote the post back in April, we now have months of user data, interviews and sales figures.

The first month, Wired sold more copies on the iPad than in print. After that promising first month, the designer was described as a cross between Jesus and Pele. There was lot of messianic talk around the iPad. I still love the line from Mathias Döpfner, head of Germany’s Axel Springer, who said:

Sit down once a day and pray to thank Steve Jobs that he is saving the publishing industry.

I wanted to see what the sales were after a few months, after the early adopters that read Wired had a chance to use it and decide whether static images of print pages was the digital experience that they wanted.

Wired: 100,000 iPad downloads for June; July, August, September averaged 30,300.

It looks like the early enthusiasm is cooling. iPad sales from other titles are even less impressive. When I listened to the magazine and newspaper industry talk about the iPad, they talked about how close it approximated the paper experience. As a digital consumer, I said it then and I will say it again: I don’t want a paper experience. Frankly, on a recent flight, I was frustrated trying to wrestle my print FT into submission in an economy seat. I can’t search it. I can’t flick between sections. I have no problem reading on a screen. I want to save and share what I read. As designer Khoi Vinh says in AdWeek:

The magazine app experience, according to Vinh, is akin to a “remote, suburban cul-de-sac” while the digital world is moving to a real-time chaotic city.

In a lot of ways, publishers thought that the iPad was the future that could take them back to the past of the fat profits of the print era. It doesn’t look like it’s as simple as replicating the print experience and waiting for the money.

It never was going to be that simple, and it’s a bit disappointing that the leaders in the industry believed a single device was going to overturn years of experience and expectation from the web. In the end, it just reinforces that we’re in need of a fundamental rethink. There is no magic technology that will transform print into digital success. Think digitally and commercially and then we can start building sustainable digital businesses.

HTML5, touch and new interfaces for news

I feel like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Woah. When Zee at Next Web posted this HTML5 news timeline from AP Labs, I was blown away. It’s such an intuitive, rich interface for exploring news from multiple angles, and after a lot of years of stagnation in terms of interface design, I’m really excited to see HTML5 and touch interfaces motivating designers and coders to explore some new ideas.

You can explore stories by time, choosing different subjects as you go. The stories drop into the timeline with colours related to their topics.

AP HTML5 Timeline News Reader

Clicking on a story in the timeline opens up a small preview window.

AP HTML5 Story Preview

You can then open the full story that brings up this three-pane window in which you can make adjustments to the text, see additional information about the image with the story and read the story itself.

AP HTML5 Story Preview

Now, as Conrad Quilty-Harper says on Twitter, it “runs like a dog on the iPad”. I was viewing it in Chrome on a four-year old, much-repaired MacBook. It was very fluid on the MacBook. I should probably try it in Safari and see if it has something to do with Safari’s support for HTML5. That might explain why it’s slow on the iPad. However, Conrad has a point. Creating a site in HTML5 should allow it to run on an iPad, but it looks like it might take some optimisation. However, designing the interface is half the battle. As a first effort, it’s an excellent starting place, and it’s very exciting to finally start seeing some experimentation with interface like this. HTML5 might not be production ready, according to the W3C, but it’s very promising to see this level of sophistication at this stage.