Archive for the ‘Digital Magazines & Newspapers’ Category
Classics Illustrated digital graphic novels no comments
Publisher Trajectory, Inc. is re-releasing the iconic Classics Illustrated and Classics Illustrated Junior series of graphic novels in digital format. These two related series of comic books, originally started during WWII by Albert Kanter, adapted world literary classics into graphic novels, making them more accessible to younger readers.
To date, Trajectory has released over 120 comic books from the series in digital format. Earlier this month they became available at the Nook Comics Store and iBookstore. Today Trajectory announced the series has landed at Kobo for use on the Kobo Vox. Next will be their arrival at the Kindle Store, which is ‘coming soon’ according to the publisher.
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Digital Manga sale at B&N no comments
Barnes & Noble is running a promotion on digital manga this month. Every Monday during the month of May a selection of digital graphic novels are on sale at the Nook store for 40% off of the regular price.
Today there are five digital manga titles in the sale for $2.99 each:
- Death Note, Volume 1 by Tsugumi Ohba – The Death Note movies were a major hit in Asia; if you like Japanese horror films you should see these.
- Dragon Ball Z, Volume 1 by Akira Toriyama
- Bakuman, Volume 1 by Tsugumi Ohba
- Rosario+Vampire Season II, Volume 1 by Akihisa Ikeda
- Toriko, Volume 1 by Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro
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PressReader for Android gets major update no comments
NewspaperDirect has updated its PressReader digital newspaper app for Android. The new release brings to Android similar features that the iPad version got at the beginning of the year, including:
- Improved rendering: PressReader now includes a completely new rendering engine that’s optimized for newspapers and magazines.
- SmartFlow: An article view mode that formats the display in a manner that is optimized for reading articles. User can scroll horizontally through different articles and scroll vertically to read individual articles. View can be toggled between SmartFlow and Replica View modes.
- SmartZoom: Automatically starts the view at the beginning of an article when zoomed in.
- Text-to-Speech capabilities.
PressReader is a free app at Google Play. A monthly subscription is required to access more than a limited number of articles – NewspaperDirect offers several plans and individual issues can also be purchased. The PressReader service currently features full content digital replicas of over 2000 newspapers and magazines from 70 countries in 37 languages.
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NYT posts earnings no comments
The New York Times posted diluted earnings of $.09 per share for Q1 2012 compared with $.02 for the same quarter of 2011 (or $.08 compared to zero cents excluding items). Operating profit was down for the quarter ($19.6 million vs $25.9 million), but excluding depreciation, amortization and severance would have been higher ($57.2 million vs $52.3 million).
In spite of the criticism and skepticism that the NYT’s original decision to put its digital content behind a paywall (which it did about a year ago) engendered, the company’s digital strategy seems to be working:
“We continue to execute on our strategy and our improved results reflect the ongoing digital transformation of our Company,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and chief executive officer, The New York Times Company. “We expanded our digital subscription base and further developed a robust consumer revenue stream as demonstrated by the 10 percent increase in total Company circulation revenues, led by the 13 percent growth at The New York Times Media Group. Operating profit before depreciation, amortization and severance grew 9 percent in the first quarter.
“Paid subscriptions to all of the Company’s digital packages, e-readers and replica editions totaled approximately 472,000 as of March 18, 2012. This confirms once again the validity of our digital strategy, which has provided a successful model for the industry. Our readers have embraced digital subscriptions and we expect to build on this strong start as we embark on our second year of digital paid subscriptions.
“At the same time, the uneven U.S. economic environment and uncertain global conditions continued to present challenges to the advertising marketplace. Print advertising revenue trends were similar to those in the fourth quarter of 2011, while digital advertising revenues at the News Media Group were under pressure in the first two months of the year, resulting in a decline of 2 percent for the first quarter.
This month the NYT tightened its paywall, reducing the monthly free access limit to just 10 articles from the previous limit of 20 articles per month.
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Next Issue digital newsstand arrives for Android tablets no comments
Next Issue, which is the digital magazine publishing consortium made up of Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time Inc., has finally launched its digital newsstand app for Android tablets. This has been in the works for at least a couple of years and is probably at least partly built on the software that is all that remains of the Skiff ereader that never was. Next Issue has launched first on the Android platform and an iPad version is said to be coming soon, but judging by how long the Android version was in development I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Next Issue’s newsstand is a bit unique in that readers can choose to either purchase individual copies of magazines, subscribe to individual magazines or choose from a couple of plans that provide access to multiple titles:
- Unlimited Basic: Includes titles published monthly and bi-weekly for $9.99 per month
- Unlimited Premium: Includes all titles in the catalog, including weeklies such as Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, TIME for $14.99 per month
- Individual magazine subscriptions range from $1.99 to $9.99 per month
- Individual magazine issues are available from $2.49 to $5.99 per issue
Next Issue is offering 30-day free trials and print subscribers can add the digital editions for free or for a nominal cost. Digital subscribers also have access to back issues in the digital catalogue.
The digital newsstand launches with 32 titles: The Unlimited Basic catalog includes: All You, Allure, Better Homes and Gardens, Car and Driver, Coastal Living, Conde Nast Traveler, Cooking Light, ELLE, Esquire, Essence, Fitness, Fortune, Glamour, Golf, Health, InStyle, Money, Parents, People en Espanol, People StyleWatch, Popular Mechanics, Real Simple, Southern Living, Sports Illustrated Kids, Sunset, This Old House and Vanity Fair.
The Next Issue Unlimited Premium catalog includes those in Unlimited Basic plus all weekly titles such as Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker and TIME.
The Next Issue app is available free at Google Play. It is designed for tablets, so don’t expect to use it on an Android phone. My favorite digital magazine reading app at the moment is the Nook app on either the iPad or an Android tablet – it will be interesting to see how this compares.
Update: I’ve been playing with this app on my Xoom and I really like the concept but think it needs a little more polishing – I guess two years in the oven weren’t quite enough.
Unlike most magazine apps, landscape seems to be reserved for viewing multimedia in the Next Issue app – reading is done in portrait. This is okay, the pages are presented nicely and are comfortable to read, but it might take a few minutes to get used to after other digital magazine apps. When reading an article you usually scroll down to keep reading and then swipe left to proceed to the next article, but some articles require side scrolling and this inconsistency can be a bit confusing at times.
My main complaint is that the app is sometimes a little balky and does not always perform really smoothly. I don’t think this is a problem with my hardware because other digital magazine apps seem to work fine on my Xoom. I also got a number of force closes when trying to open a particular magazine (Popular Mechanics) before it would download. Of the several magazines I tried, this is the only one I experienced that particular problem with, and after it finally downloaded it worked fine.
All of the magazines I sampled provided access to back issues going back to the beginning of this year. When you first log in you select the titles that you are interested in and these are added to your bookshelf. You can add to or remove your selections later. You can ‘pin’ individual issues, which stores them on your device until unpinned and enables you to access them when you can’t connect to the Internet.
Next Issue provides several ways to easily navigate through a magazine:
- Tapping on a headline shown on the magazine’s cover takes you to that article.
- Tapping the center brings up a navigation bar at the bottom of the screen with a scrollbar that lets you page through the magazine. Incidentally, the navigation bar on my Xoom is not at all as shown in the ‘How to use our app’ page at the beginning of each magazine, but it works well enough.
- Tapping on the center of the screen also brings up several icons at the top of the screen. One of these takes you back to your bookshelves and another unleashes a very nice vertically scrolling table of contents with a thumbnail of each article’s page.
I’m definitely a convert to Next Issue’s all you can eat for one subscription price concept and in general I like the presentation. If you are a fan of the mags offered here then this could very well be a good deal for you. I probably won’t keep my subscription because there are not enough titles here that I find all that compelling. More titles are said to be coming later in the year, but Next Issue’s focus is on magazines with the most mass appeal – I tend to subscribe to magazines that are related to my hobbies and so I guess I’m out of luck.
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NYT to tighten free access no comments
Beginning next month the New York Times will be tightening the free access allowance to its digital platform from 20 articles per month to just 10. Readers without a paid subscription who arrive at a NYT article via a link in an email or from elsewhere on the Internet will still be able to access the individual article linked to, even if they have reached their access limit for the month.
One year after putting its digital content behind a paywall and launching its paid digital subscription service the NYT says it has around 454,000 paid subscribers to its various digital packages.
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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.
