A quarter of a century ago, the publishing landscape looked very different. Producing magazines was vastly more difficult and expensive than it is now, and as a result there were significantly fewer publications on newsagents’ shelves.
Three things revolutionised the process of making magazines: the Mac, desktop publishing software and the PostScript printer. Credit Apple, Adobe and Quark for the fact that you’re reading this magazine now. The next revolution in publishing magazines, we’re told, is digital platforms. Where the web and email have failed to reproduce the experience of reading a magazine, yet at the same time eaten into the advertising and sales revenues of publishers, platforms such as iOS and Android should provide a way for them to offer digital versions of their magazines in a way that allows them to generate the kind of revenue necessary to keep those publications going.
Companies such as Zinio and Pixel Mags do a decent job of providing publishers with an easy way of making magazines available on those platforms, but they don’t in themselves allow full creative control over how the digital editions look or function.
The revolution requires that publishers create magazines specifically for iOS or Android – such as Richard Branson’s Project and Dennis Publishing’s iGizmo – that include content that couldn’t be produced in any other format. The video cover of the first edition of Project may have been more about the mag making a statement and the designers showing how clever they are, but it’s an indication of the way that digital magazines need to differentiate themselves from their printed brethren.
There are two options for a publisher who wants to produce an iOS or Android mag: code it from scratch or use the tools announced by Adobe and Quark. Coding from scratch provides the most flexibilty and control; it’s also expensive and time-consuming. So most publishers have been pinning their hopes on Adobe and Quark. Oops.
Adobe spent much of 2010 trialling its Digital Publishing Suite with various publishers, including CondZˇ Naste in the US, which used it to produce Wired on the iPad, and in the UK with Dennis Publishing, which published iGizmo on the iPad. (Dennis also publishes MacUser.) The Suite, which dovetails neatly with CS5 and makes it easy to take InDesign pages and repurpose them while adding extra content, seemed the obvious solution for publishers already using InDesign to produce magazines.
Then came the bombshell. Adobe announced that not only would it charge $699 (about £437) per month for the Digital Publishing Suite, but it wanted a per-issue royalty, too. That immediately put the system beyond the reach of small publishers and made even those with the deepest pockets wonder just whether it would be worth the investment. However Adobe dresses it up, it’s difficult to escape the notion that it’s trying to exploit its position in the print market to get as much revenue as it can out of digital publications as quickly as it can.
With Adobe dead set on squeezing publishers until they squeak, attention turned to Quark. Would it take the opportunity provided by its rival’s own goal to come up with a reasonable pricing structure for its tools? Nope.
Quark’s tool for publishing magazines on the iPad, the catchily named App Studio for Quark Publishing System, is only available for users of – yes, you guessed it – QPS. That immediately excludes the vast bulk of Quark’s customers. Fortunately, a new version of QuarkXPress can’t be too far off, and I’d be astonished if it doesn’t include similar tools. In the meantime, Quark offers a service that essentially does the QPS part on QuarkXPress 8.5 users’ behalf. We’ll look at it next issue.
Again, though, the devil is in the pricing. The up-front cost is £2500. That’s on top of the cost of QPS. And Quark also wants a fee for every edition published, starting at £309 for a single issue and decreasing as the number rises. Helpfully, Quark’s press release says it ‘does not require a monthly subscription nor take any margin from App Store sales’. Which is just as well, because after startup costs are written off, Quark’s fees deducted and Apple’s App Store cut subtracted, there’d be precious little left to pay writers, designers and production staff. (Quark has told us it understands these concerns and is looking at pricing models.)
Unless publishers can produce magazines on digital platforms profitably, they won’t do it. And while Adobe has included analytical tools to help target advertising, ad revenue will only come when easy-to-use, inexpensive tools are widely available to publishers so they can take the measured risk that engaging with any new technology involves.
The floor is open. There’s an opportunity for someone else, with the vision and imagination to see what could lie ahead, to produce the kind of tools that will show Adobe and Quark how it should be done this time.
Kenny Hemphill
