Archive for the ‘Digital Magazines’ Category
B&N offers discounts on Nook with NYT & People subs no comments
Barnes & Noble is currently offering a free Nook Simple Touch ereader or a Nook Color for $99 (regular price $199) with the purchase of a one-year Nook subscription to the New York Times. The Nook version of the NYT costs $19.99 per month and includes access to The Times’ website.
With the purchase of a one-year Nook subscription to People magazine comes a $50 discount on a Nook Tablet, bringing the price down to $199. People is a weekly publication and the digital subscription price is $9.99 per month. The digital version does have some exclusive content not included in the print version of the magazine.
Both offers start today and run through Mar 9, 2012. The subscriptions can be initiated online at the links above and the Nook will then either be shipped out or can be picked up at a local store.
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Disney to sell FamilyFun mag no comments
Meredith Corp has signed an agreement to buy the popular FamilyFun magazine and related assets from Disney World Publishing. FamilyFun magazine has a circulation of 2.1 million.
Meredith is already a leader in the parenthood magazine space and with the acquisition of FamilyFun its share of the advertising revenue in the category will approach 60 percent, this according to data from Publishers Information Bureau.
Disney made a digital version of FamilyFun for the iPad and iPhone available at iTunes almost a year ago. Besides iOS editions, a number of Meredith’s magazines are also available in digital format at the Nook and Kindle
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PressReader for iPad gets major update no comments
NewspaperDirect has released a major update for its PressReader for iPad app. PressReader 3.0 includes a number of new features including:
- Zoomed in view of article automatically positions itself at the beginning of the article.
- Tap and hold to enable contextually driven actions including: Printing of pages or articles, copy and paste, share on Facebook or Twitter, turn on text to speech and more.
- Pinch to adjust font and image sizes.
- Choice of font sizes.
- Keyword search across multiple publications.
But the biggest new feature is called SmartFlow, a new landscape reading mode that gives the user the ability to view articles as a continuous stream of stories that are optimally formatted. SmartFlow also eliminates the need to jump to the page where a story is continued as is required in the page replica viewing mode.
PressReader is a free app at iTunes and new users receive seven free newspapers with the app. Additional newspapers and magazines can be purchased on an a la carte basis or via a monthly subscription option. NewspaperDirect offers over 2,000 full-content newspapers from 95 countries.
NewspaperDirect has released the promotional video below which shows off some of the new features.
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Kindle Fire to get Zinio no comments
Zinio announced today that its digital magazine app will be available at the Amazon Appstore for the Kindle Fire. Zinio offers more than 5,000 different magazines in 33 languages. So even if the mags you want aren’t in the Kindle Newsstand you will likely still have access to them on the Kindle Fire.
Ziniois running a promotion through March 2012 in which new customers on any device will get a $25 credit that can be redeemed for any of Zinio’s digital magazines. The Zinio app is now available on almost all tablets and over 50 different smartphones.
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PressReader will be available for Kindle Fire no comments
NewspaperDirect’s PressReader for Android app has landed at the Amazon Appstore for Android and will be available for the Kindle Fire. NewspaperDirect offers over 2,000 newspapers from 95 countries and in 51 languages that are fully reproduced in full color. 
The PressReader app itself is free and new customers receive seven sample issues for free. Individual issues of newspapers and magazines can be purchased (usually for $0.99 each), or you can pay a monthly subscription fee starting at $29.95 that lets you download a number of issues per month.
Some of the PressReader apps features include:
- Creation of monitoring alerts to notify you when a particular topic has been written about.
- Subscription to automated downloads of favorite titles.
- On-demand audio narration.
- Flip, pan, rotate and zoom articles and photos.
- Text-only view for easier reading of articles.
This definitely adds to the amount of content that will be available on the Kindle Fire. The Zinio for Android app is also available at the Appstore and brings thousands of digital magazines to the table. So far neither of these apps are available for B&N’s tablet.
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Kindle Fire Newsstand will offer over 400 full-color magazines & newspapers no comments
One area in which the Nook ebookstore has enjoyed an advantage over the Kindle Store is digital magazines. B&N has had not only a larger variety of digital magazines available, but thanks to the Nook Color B&N’s magazines are faithful reproductions of the paper versions with all of the color that readers expect when reading a typical magazine. Kindle magazines are usually optimized to be read on e-ink devices and contain relatively few of the graphics found in their paper counterparts.
The days of B&N’s supremacy at the digital newsstand may be numbered. Amazon announced today that over 400 full-color magazines and newspapers will be coming to the Kindle Fire Newsstand. To promote the launch of Amazon’s tablet and its accompanying newsstand full of colorful new publications, Conde Nast is offering Kindle Fire customers a free three-month trial of 17 of its digital magazines until March 31, 2012.
I am a big fan of the way in which mags are presented on the Nook platform. It remains to be seen if the full-color digital magazine reading experience on the Kindle platform matches what B&N has developed over the time it has had the Nook Color in play.
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Nook scores a Real Simple exclusive deal no comments
Recently, after Amazon signed a deal with DC Comics to bring the publisher’s graphic novels to the Kindle Store exclusively for four months Barnes & Noble, in a fit of retaliatory pique, told DC to pack up its toys and go play somewhere else — a bunch of DC’s paper edition graphic novels were removed from B&N’s stores and presumably won’t be welcome back until the exclusivity deal with Amazon is finished. 
Today B&N announced an exclusivity deal of its own. For a limited time the digital version of the bestselling magazine Real Simple will be available only at the Nook Newsstand.
Real Simple is one of Time Inc’s 21 magazines, which the publisher promised would all be available digitally on all of the major platforms by the end of the year. Some of Time’s digital magazines are already available at the Kindle Store and the paper editions are all available at Amazon. Will we now see a tit for tat removal of these by Amazon in reaction to this deal? I don’t think so.
I have to say that I’m generally not a big fan of this type of exclusivity deal. Forcing consumers to buy a particular brand of hardware if they want to access a particular media franchise does not strike me as being very consumer friendly. I deliberately try not to let this type of marketing strategy force my own buying decisions. Yes, I would like to watch Avatar 3D at home, but the fact that I will have to buy a Panasonic player to do so is, in my book, a major mark against that company’s products.
The Kindle Store gets a lot of exclusivity agreements, and I’ve written about a number of them here. When it comes to digital publishing this type of tactic does seem less of an issue, probably because most of us by now have some sort of device on which we can access any of the major ebookstores’ wares via an app if we don’t have their actual ereader. It also helps if the period of exclusivity is brief, which seems to be increasingly the case.
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Amazon and Hearst Corp expand business relationship no comments
Amazon announced today that it and Hearst Corporation have expanded their business relationship and have “entered into an expanded, multi-faceted consumer marketing, e-commerce and content relationship.”
Amazon will become Hearst’s single-largest third-party seller of print subscriptions for its magazines via digital channels and will work with Hearst in e-commerce. The deal gives Amazon customers access to content from one of the world’s largest publishers of monthly magazines and provides Hearst access to Amazon’s growing and evolving e-commerce platform.
"Hearst is one of the world’s leading diversified media companies and we are delighted to work with them on this multi-pronged deal," said Steve Kessel, senior vice president, Kindle.
David Carey, president, Hearst Magazines, commented: "This bridge between one of the best platform and technology companies and our premier media and content company gives Hearst and Amazon a launching pad to take both our businesses to the next level. Amazon values exceptional content and we are excited about the possibilities. We look forward to working with the Amazon team."
To date, Hearst has sold more than four million magazine subscriptions via the Internet and expects to increase its sales via this expanded agreement.
Amazon needs to juice up the magazine selection at the Kindle Store’s newsstand for its incoming tablet. Presumably we will now see Hearst’s magazines offered there. Hopefully when the Kindle Tablet is released Amazon will not only offer digital magazines that are optimized for the Kindle ereaders as it now does, but will also offer versions for the tablet that are faithful reproductions of the print editions. Otherwise B&N or Zinio will remain my first choices for digital magazines.
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Interactive auto ads in digital magazines more effective than print ads no comments
According to Affinity’s American Magazine Study, consumers are more likely to take an action — such as visiting an auto manufacturer’s website or going to a dealer for a test drive — as a result of viewing an auto ad in a digital magazine rather than after viewing traditional print ads.
On average, consumers are 42% more likely to take an action as a result of an auto ad delivered via a magazine app than those appearing in print. This according to Affinity’s VISTA Service, which measures the effectiveness of both traditional print ads and magazine ads delivered through iPads, Zinio and other mobile platforms. In addition, digital magazine readers are almost three times as likely to visit a dealer, and almost twice as likely to visit a car maker’s Website, as a result of exposure to an ad in the electronic issue of a magazine. When it comes to brand building, digital magazine readers report that they are 44% more likely to have a favorable opinion about an automotive brand after seeing the advertiser’s digital magazine campaign.
As would be expected, the study also finds that including interactive multimedia in an ad makes the experience more enjoyable and educational. Consumers are also much more likely to consider the advertiser more innovative if interactive elements are included in their ads. 87 percent of the readers polled in the study reportedly believed that interactive auto ads "enhanced their overall magazine reading experience."
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A few factoids from Affinity’s AMS Spring 2011 study:
- Print magazine readers are 46% Male and 54% Female
- Digital magazine readers are 49% Male and 51% Female
- Digital magazine readers tend to have a somewhat higher average income (70.4 K vs 63.5 K for print readers) and are a little younger (39.8 years old vs 46.4 for print).
According to Affinity’s metrics the 10 most popular magazines are:
|
Top 10 PRINT Magazines: |
Top 10 DIGITAL Magazines: |
| AARP the Magazine | ESPN the Magazine |
| People Weekly | People Weekly |
| Better Homes and Gardens | Food Network Magazine |
| National Geographic | WebMD the Magazine |
| Reader’s Digest | Time |
| Good Housekeeping | Money |
| Time | Fortune |
| Woman’s Day | Sports Illustrated |
| Family Circle | Forbes |
| Sports Illustrated | TV Guide |
The most recent AMS also finds that dedicated ereaders are most popular with Boomers, Tablets are most popular with Gen-Xers and Millennials prefer smartphones. Not sure where I fit in — I love all three devices.
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Publishing not the only industry to be affected by digital reading no comments
According to RISI, a research firm specializing in the global forest products industry, media tablets (in which category RISI includes e-ink based ereaders)
are becoming a ubiquitous mass-market consumer product around the world faster than any previous consumer technology device. This has repercussions not only for publishers and brick and mortar bookstores as consumers switch away from reading dead-tree books to ebooks, but for the paper industry as well.
A new RISI study, citing such recent developments as a Morgan Stanley survey that found 42% of US tablet users plan to cancel their newspaper subscriptions and Amazon’s announcement a few months ago that it now sells more Kindle books than pbooks, predicts that the publication paper market could see significant impacts on demand by as soon as 2012.
The study, The Impact of Media Tablets on Publication Paper Markets, finds that by 2015 the use of paper for publishing in North America will fall by 12-21% compared to 2010 levels — which were already low thanks to the recession. Over the next 15 years RISI expects the use of paper in books and periodicals could fall another 40-50%.
RISI expects European paper markets to be similarly affected, but perhaps to a lower degree — thanks to fragmented media markets and a slower tablet adoption rate (so far, anyway).
Just speaking from my own experience, I have happily (sorry paper industry)
canceled all of my paper magazines and newspapers and re-subscribed to the digital versions. The only exception is Wired, to which I get free access to the iPad version along with my paper copies (which I don’t need and give to a neighbor).
I don’t have time to keep up with all of my mags and they were starting to make obnoxious piles in my office. I still don’t have time and they now pile up on my ereaders, but at least I’m not tripping over them. I actually get to read my magazines more in digital format because I always have them with me for when I have a couple of minutes to kill.
Incidentally, Ziniotoday announced that its iPad app is now one of the top 3 grossing iPad apps. In 52 countries Zinio’s digital magazine app for iPad is the number one news app. The Android version of the Zinio app was released a couple of months ago and Zinio says it has 300,000 installs so far.
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