David Jacobs: I don’t think it’s fair to say the app is dead – rather the app was never alive. (This question nearly answers itself!) What we have learned is that the replica will never be successful. Consumers have soundly rejected them: digital subscriptions make up only 3% of total subscriptions. But I am of course optimistic about the future of magazine apps, since the industry has an opportunity for a reboot.
There is a challenge (and an opportunity) since the mainstream conception of a magazine app is what amounts to a photo gallery of pages of a magazine, with the occasional widget or animation. But that’s not a transformation that is going to happen overnight.
Joe Zeff: I wouldn’t say that magazine apps are dead, but that they are in dire need of a transfusion. I continue to be optimistic because there’s no stopping the proliferation of tablets. There will continue to be a market for applications built specifically for these devices. The industry needs to shift its focus toward brand extension.
Let’s face it, if consumers can get the same content in their mailbox, newsstand and browser, there’s little justification for downloading a 250-megabyte magazine. Instead, excite them with new products that come to life on tablets: experiential content, utility applications, multimedia delivered offline. The going rate for a digital magazine is zero, as publishers have made them free with print subscriptions. The average price for an iBook is $9. There lies an opportunity to monetize content — one of many.
Mario García: I am optimistic, first of all. I think the state of magazine design for tablets is still in its infancy. It has not helped that the economic climate for publishers has not been up to par with the ambitions of editors and designers. Having said that, there is much that could have been done already, three years after the first iPads rolled out of the Apple factory.
We still see a lot of static, turn-the-page-type of magazine apps. We need to begin to look at the tablet’s peculiarities, to what it can do, and then exploit that. It is not a print publication per se. It is a combination of book, film documentary, a little TV, some radio. It is multisensory, and we have not explored that fully yet. It is also the closest we can come, so far, to a digital experience that matches a lot of the intuitive movements that we are familiar with via print.
Jeremy Leslie: I’m very disappointed by the current state of magazine apps, but it’s not as black and white as you portray; we’re still only at the beginning of a longer experiment in the form. The initial excitement across the industry, from publishers and creatives, has subsided as the reality of making apps hit home.
From a business point of view the promise of easily slipping app production into the print workflow was foolishly naive, while editors and designers who were keen to experiment soon found themselves stretched too thin. On top of this, sales have been disappointing so most apps have reverted to simpler replicas as a holding pattern while publishers work out next steps.
Whether or not paid apps downloaded to tablets is the way forward for editorial content remains to be seen. But what they have done is demonstrate to the print-is-dead fundamentalists that digital content can’t just be raw information. Instantaneous access to content is becoming the norm; we’re now seeing that the need for differentiation in digital presentation is becoming desirable. How does my content look different to my competitors? How will a subscriber distinguish The Guardian from The New York Times?
