How iTunes Can Help The Publishing Industry
A few weeks — maybe it was a month? — ago, Kirk started talking about PDF files and iTunes. Was I aware that I could download PDFs from iTunes, he asked. I had to admit that I wasn’t. This is, he noted, the answer to a whole lot of e-book problems.
iTunes, we agreed, was the perfect vehicle for delivering e-books to consumers. Heck, iTunes is the perfect vehicle for delivering reports, articles, and publications like magazines. They have the technical infrastructure, they have the market share, and one digital file is pretty much same as another, when you get right down to it.
This week, the Detroit Free Press tells us about The Fader, magazine that has published its summer music issue in PDF format and made the whole thing — ads and all — available via iTunes. There’s even a bonus podcast highlighting the music mentioned in the issue. Price? Free. Which is pretty darn cheap, if you want my opinion.
It’s an interesting experiment with much to offer. I’ve cut back on print publications in my life, mostly because they tend to collect dust without the side benefit of being read. When it comes to downloading e-books, much less e-magazines, one of my issues has always been the dodgy shopping carts employed by the various publishers/services. I like a clean, logical process when it comes to doing online money stuff.
How can this experiment be improved? So glad you asked…
- Make it easier to find “print” versus audio media on iTunes (this is an iTunes thing, not a publisher thing, but you never know who’s paying attention out there). Right now, this content is mixed in with podcasts.
- Remember that PDF files, especially those filled with graphics are big files. Think of breaking content into usable, logical chunks.
- Make it easy to subscribe to specific content — like, oh, the wine column in Sunset magazine. I’d rather go the micro-payment route for specific items than manage lots of little scraps of paper.
- Make your links to the iTunes store prominent on your website.
- Advertise your experiment like crazy — look at how much exposure The Fader is getting just because they were the first magazine to do this.
Technorati Tags: ebooks, electronic books, electronic magazines, the fader, itunes
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4 Comment(s) so far
1. Booksquare » The Daily Square - Ashes Of American Flags Edition wrote on July 4th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
[...] Medialoper » How iTunes Can Help The Publishing IndustryWhat? A music (and video) store can do something for publishing? Mais oui, mai oui. [...]
2. Medialoper » The Weekly ‘Loper - July 9, 2006 wrote on July 9th, 2006 at 8:40 am
[...] How iTunes Can Help The Publishing Industry - Simple: combine the ubiquity of the seemingly indestructible Portable Document Format with the ease of iTunes. [...]
3. Times emit » Blog Archive » eBooks: further update wrote on July 25th, 2006 at 8:16 am
[...] At the same time, as Medialoper points out, iTunes is already delivering PDF files. [...]
4. 5th Estate · Flash, spin and the future wrote on October 30th, 2006 at 9:40 am
[...] Use iTunes as a means of distributing extracts from books. An exclusive extract PDF from The Long Tail is offered by Random House in such a way for free, but has anyone explored distributing full text for payment? [...]