It's a question that keeps coming up. No one knows the answer, we are entering uncharted waters. I suspect it won't change the world but might create new business models and more readers.
Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson says the iPad might just do the trick at a time when adverting revenues are falling.
"Magazines are losing ad revenue, but they're not losing readers. In fact most of them are gaining readers – they're just gaining them online, where our eyeballs are poorly monetized. All publishers really want is a platform where they can charge readers for reading. The iPad gives them that opportunity."
Not so, says former analyst turned editor of Business Insider Henry Blodget. The Internet, he says, allows people to read material from thousands of publishers for free all day long, and the iPad is not going to change that.
Reuters reports that Time Warner Inc plans to unveil a full edition iPad version of Time magazine which will cost the same as the print copy and feature advertisers including Unilever, Toyota Motor Corp and Fidelity Investments among others. The Financial Times is working on an iPad application that it expects to be ready around the end of April. USA Today and the New York Times are also heading down this direction.
But as Reuters points out, publishers are betting on a future they haven't even seen yet. Most haven't even had one in their hands yet so it's a massive gamble.
The reality is more people are getting their information free off the web. At the same time, revenue from advertising is shrinking. So the business model for magazines and newspapers based on revenue from subscriptions and advertising is absolutely stuffed. It's dying. As Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive editor, online for the Wall Street Journal says, we can't expect the iPad to save broken business models.
Robert Cringely from InfoWorld says it's too late for the iPad to save print publishing. As he says, most publishers don't want you to know this but the online version is not nearly as good as the print version because there is less quality control. There are more mistakes, howlers and stuff-ups, and fewer people around to check that everything is in order. It's a trade off of standards for speed. Here's a secret for people who don't work in the media: you need more traffic to sell ads, therefore there is less time for copy editing and fact checking. So the question is this: are people willing to pay? Does quality matter? Or have we passed the point of no return?
Print will continue for now. The online and iPad versions will be the back up.
And what about books? As The Economist's Babbage blog points out, books are not about to disappear, "More than three billion books are sold annually in America alone. In comparison, the sales numbers of e-readers and tablet computers are puny. Amazon, the world's biggest online retailer, will only sell an estimated three million of its Kindle this year. The iPad, Apple's touch-screen tablet, which doubles as an e-reader and will go on sale on April 3rd, will most likely do better. But the device's sales will still be dwarfed by those of global bestsellers, such as the Harry Potter tales, of which more than 400m copies have been bought globally."
The iPad will not kill print. But it will create new innovative models like, for example, works that mix text and audio visual content.
No, the technology of newspapers, magazine and books will be around for some time. But if anything, the iPad and Kindle will create more readers. And if that happens, it will be very healthy for society and publishers.
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