Last December, headlines decreed that the digital publishing world was falling apart. After an initial surge, iPad magazine sales were steadily—sometimes precipitously—dropping. According to a report that cited numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, November was a bad month for the iPad and iPad magazines.
Vanity Fair went from an average 10,500 digital sales (August-October) down to 8,700. GQ had its second worse month of sales with just 11,000 digital copies sold. Men’s Health lost nearly 30 percent of its sales, and digital sales of Glamour fell 35 percent from September. Even Wired, once considered the iPad’s golden success, shed 35 percent of sales, dropping from an average 31,000 sales in April to 23,000 sales in November.
Yet, the alarmists might have been sounding their bells too early. The numbers aren’t yet out for December and January, when magazine publishers and media critics are hoping more people picked up iPads as holiday presents. But even without those numbers in hand, it’s safe to guess that sales for magazine apps will stop plummeting—at least quite so precipitously—sooner or later as more users gradually enter the market. And that’s to be expected.
The adoption rate of iPad magazines follows a pattern similar to the adoption rates of most major publishing formats, from the earliest printing presses of the fifteenth century to the birth of the blogosphere in the late nineties. iPad magazines are not stumbling for the exact same reasons that the first books, print magazines, or “web logs” were slow out of the gate—each new platform had and has its own cultural, political, and technological challenges. But there are similarities between how those new technologies were received in the public eye and mind then that suggest the iPad magazine, rather than being in dire straits, is simply following a well-trod path.
The bend in that path that we’re still waiting for is the one where cheaper prices, wider availability, and normalization mean the new publishing platform takes off.
To see the pattern in past action, you might take a look at one very old technology that replaced a different, dustier kind of tablet: paper. The idea of reading on paper was once thought of as much as an elite activity as reading GQ on an iPad—and the pickup rate reflected that attitude in much the same way. Take illuminated manuscripts. These decorative texts were rare, time-intensive to produce, and expensive—paper cost a bundle and the manuscripts were often painted with precious, pricy metals. Low literacy rates meant most people were used to hearing books rather than reading them. Normalization would take time. The adoption rate, if it can be considered as such, was understandably low.
However, as paper gradually became less expensive and rarified, it also became more widespread. It’s a pattern repeated throughout history.
The mentality that paper was precious began to change after Gutenberg came along, and by the infancy of the newspaper age in the 1600s, books and other printed materials were cheaper, faster, and easier to make.* They were no longer limited to the church or political pamphlets, and dissemination and “adoption rates” rose accordingly.
By the time daily newspapers emerged in America—a fluid time span around the turn of the eighteenth century—paper and print weren’t new technologies. They were, however, still somewhat novel. To those shoo-ing off Metro hawkers in the subway, it might be surprising to know that papers were met with excitement; many people shared and read a single issue. Some were even sewn together and offered as wedding presents, says Andie Tucher, the director of the Communications Ph.D. program at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and an award-winning historian.
Newspapers were valuable but limited in scope. It was only when, like paper itself, they became more affordable to produce and more widespread that they took a firm hold in the culture. The introduction of the “penny press”—inexpensive papers geared towards the general public—marked a turning point for adoption rates. “A colonial newspaper would print maybe 200 copies of a particular issue,” says Tucher. “By the end of the 1830s you could print 20,000 copies of the same issue. So it was a lot cheaper and it also meant that a lot more people could read it?”
The penny press made papers widely available to a growing working class that was either uninterested in elitist soapboxing or couldn’t afford a daily paper. Talk of politics and government was mixed with sensationalist accounts of crime and celebrity, broadening its readership beyond niche markets. This, in turn, provoked a cultural sea change. “A lot of people in the working class? who had never read a newspaper before because it had nothing in it for them, they started to feel they had the same rights as everyone else and they wanted to take part in public life,” Tucher says.
Availability, affordability, and gradual reader habituation helped newspapers proliferate.
The story of magazines follows a similar plot. While newspapers focused on the news, magazines were largely considered a frivolity for the leisured middle class. Despite their physical appeal, adoption was limited. What factors changed that? The same factors that helped the printing press and newspaper hit mass market: a cultural shift and increased distribution. People had more leisure time and magazines were able to offer more value—including photographs and illustrations, for example—at a lower cost.
The digital world necessarily overlaps with the history of print and news consumption. Radio took over from the telegraph as a way of instantly receiving information. The new technology was met with both tremendous excitement and an enormously low adoption rate. People were unused to the relatively expensive new platform, but as technology improved, radio broadcasts became more numerous and commonplace and radio became part of daily life. Broadcast, as you can guess, followed a similar line.
Blogs form an interesting middle ground between the world of print media and the world of technology. And I believe they are what iPad magazines most closely resemble, whether they like it or not.
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I'd say that the most important factor hindering the rate of tablet magazine adoption is the entry cost. I seriously doubt anyone but the most well-off gadget fanatics will invest hundreds in an iPad or other tablet expressly for the purpose of reading digital magazines. My guess is that for those folks who just have to have access to digital magazines, a Kindle or Nook is a much more likely option. Another thing I'm hearing is that many people aren't as enamored with the form factor of the iPad as Apple might have hoped, and that it's rather fragile and not as simple to transport as its printed counterparts. Another major question is whether digital mags are even worth the trouble at all. I personally find them to offer a far inferior reading experience than printed mags, so why even go there? Once the novelty of the tablet wears off, I'll bet magazine app adoption will have a very long, slow road ahead before it becomes integrated into our culture as an accepted medium — if it ever happens at all.
#1 Posted by Magazine Design on Tue 21 Jun 2011 at 12:38 PMMagazines on iPad look stunning, the ads, the videos the pictures ... every thing looks so classy. I don't purchase printed magazines anymore. I love reading digital magazines on iPads and iPhones. I use Other edition's newsstand for reading digital magazines.
#2 Posted by Steven on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 06:30 AM
I'm loving reading iPad magazine, current favourite is new scientist! I've found the best place to buy them is here:
Find Digital & iPad Magazines
Thanks,
Chris
I think one thing missing here is that adoption will come with an increase in value perceived by readers/users. What value is the publisher adding for the consumer to make digital magazines more than just a digital copy of the print magazine?
Until publishers really innovate with their digital magazines, they'll be a fairly small part of the magazine ecosystem. Consumers have far too many things competing for their time and money to worry about switching to digital magazines, at least until those digital magazines offer something that current digital mags and print mags can't. The obvious thing to me is to make the digital magazine a portal for engagement with readers - chats/ustream events with authors/columnists, interaction with other readers, etc...
#4 Posted by Kevin Burns on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 11:22 AMComparing the emergence of print to the much talked about tablet revolution is hardly balanced. Print emerged when there was no media at all. Now tablets are coming into a space where media is pervasive--everywhere and in a number of different forms. There will be adoption but not replacement of print media. Just another tool in a large media universe. Hardly the monumental event that the printing press was to mass media. It practically created mass media.
#5 Posted by Mark on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 11:58 AMI work in the field and have read hundreds of emails, and thousands of public comments, on the subject. The overwhelming, nothing-else-matters, reason for the decline in readership was that magazines didn't have well-priced subscriptions available when they launched. In print, if Wired, Elle, Popular Mechanics, The Oprah Magazine and others were newsstand-only they'd be tiny publications. No one was going to pay $50 a year (single-issue price times 12) for a year of iPad access to a monthly. Now that subs are widely available, we'll have to see what happens. Is it too late? Are other reading experiences on tablets more compelling? Or will these apps find a strong audience? The experiment has really just begun.
#6 Posted by Jake Roberts on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 01:48 PM@Mark: I absolutely agree that the iPad won't erase print media. The argument was more about the inevitable progression of iPad magazine sales. A spike of interest, followed by a dip in sales (the pre-holiday stats mentioned) and then gradual acceptance as it becomes accepted as a means of content delivery. The comparison was then how other media followed similar (though not mirror) patterns when they were first introduced.
@Jake Roberts: Interesting point and I think that's a huge part of the puzzle. As far as I can tell, most magazines are not happy about Apple's subscription plan. It will be interesting to see who buckles first: an audience (us) used to iTunes like convenience but with a cost, or Apple who may need to get more people signing up for digital subscriptions.
@Everyone: Thanks for the wonderful comments, looking forward to see where this conversation takes us.
#7 Posted by Zack on Wed 22 Jun 2011 at 02:19 PMI don't know why Zack and Mark don't think tablets and other new digital media won't erase print media. I haven't even written on paper in years, all my writing is on digital devices. The only people who still buy printed publications are old people, who are just used to reading off paper. I have handled a print magazine or newspaper maybe a dozen times in the last 5 years, while I regularly read many different sites online. Look at how many people buy the print edition of the NYT or WSJ versus how many uniques their websites get, it's usually a 1:10 ratio. The writing is on the wall and I find it strange that people seem so reluctant to call the death of an antiquated medium like paper, so much so that they make strange assertions like that.
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