A quarter of a century ago, the publishing industry was revolutionised. The Mac, the laser printer and Aldus PageMaker made what previously required huge investment available to almost anyone. For publishing houses, it meant dramatic reductions in cost and increases in flexibility. For the rest of us, it meant we could make magazines just like the big guys.
As a student, I still couldn’t afford a Mac or a laser printer or Aldus PageMaker, but trickle-down technology came to my rescue. The Atari ST was a bit like a Mac, Timeworks Desktop Publisher was a bit like PageMaker, and a Star dot-matrix printer was… well, nothing like a laser printer, but once I’d designed all my typefaces from scratch and hand-rendered them as bitmaps at every point size required, you wouldn’t know the difference, if you squinted.
So I hoarded cash from part-time jobs to buy the kit, teamed up with a highly networked mate to pull together the content and every fortnight (I have this thing for fortnightly magazines), we’d trudge round to the print shop with our 24 pages of camera-ready copy. The printer didn’t charge much, we booked a few ads, we sold a fair proportion of our run of 500, and we generally broke even. Our little magazine was one of thousands that began to appear.
That was desktop publishing. It was fun, it was creative, it was ground-breakingly democratic, and I hope you enjoyed it, because it’s over.
With my computer and software, I was ready to go. I didn’t need anyone’s permission. I didn’t have to sign a contract or commit to a monthly fee. If I sold enough copies, I made my money back; if I didn’t, such was life.
But now there’s another change afoot in the industry; and if what happened back then was a revolution, this is the counter-revolution. Tablet publishing is the next big thing, and while it’s not for everyone – your copy of MacUser, for example, will continue to be delivered primarily as a coffee-table-compatible glossy analogue artefact for the foreseeable future, and we know you wouldn’t have it any other way – it’s an important and exciting development. And to take advantage of it, publishers large and small require nothing more than the software they already own, with some clever plug-ins to create apps instead of PDFs.
With the release of InDesign CS5.5 next month, Adobe – the company that bought PageMaker from Aldus and created the Mac OS add-ons that meant we didn’t all have to hand-render our fonts as bitmaps any more – will provide these tools. Quark’s equivalents are already announced. Other vendors, including Aquafadas and Mag+, are set to release alternatives.
And what all of these have in common is that you can’t just buy the kit and make your magazines. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying.
Adobe, in many ways the front runner, charges for the software upgrade; imposes a fee for every edition; takes a cut from every copy; and demands a minimum investment before you can publish anything. The barriers to entry that once kept publishing exclusive are back with a vengeance.
Apple, of course, is partly to blame. It makes the only tablet that anyone so far is actually interested in, and its new rules not only insist that subscriptions are offered via the App Store, with 30% of the cover price retained, but also require smart hosting of users’ purchases, which Adobe, Quark and their rivals say is the service for which they’re asking users to pay through the nose.
We call shenanigans. Hosting is trivial. These charges are prohibitive. Repeating fees and long-term commitments cut out amateurs, startups, non-profits, and anyone who just wants to make a magazine, without a business model and a burn rate.
It’s fine for me. I’m with the big guys now. But this new medium should be open to all, not just us. We should thank the companies whose technologies are making it possible – then knock their heads together.
