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Wired Launches iPad Magazine App with Help from Adobe

According to an earlier article about some company releasing a magazine for the iPad, I think it was GQ, they said it costs nothing to make and all sales were basically profit.

So, if these magazine publishers want their apps to sell a lot, then they should lower the price for the iPad version. Don't make it cost as much as the print version!
 
Consultant said:
They have no idea how in this generation people either are used to either paid no ad, or free ad supported.
=p
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??? What world do you live in? It's very different from mine.

Almost everything I pay for is partially offset by ad revenue. The only place paid/ad free vs free with ads ever comes up is in DVDs and shareware/commercial software.

In the rest of the world, ads offset the cost of goods to the consumer almost everywhere:
cable tv - subscription with ads
magazines
theaters - used be called previews now they're just commercials
sports events - pay for ticket, stadium blanketed with ads
transportation - buses, trains, airplanes all have ads
grocery stores - pay for placement, in-store advertisements
retail stores - same

"This" generation is trained to expect ads everywhere and encourages it by expecting the lowered cost of goods that comes along with that.
 
Just fully went through the app.

Quality is amazing. Interactivity is ok. Not very intuitive. I didn't know somethings were interactive at first glance. This will probably be improved once a standard set of symbols are developed across all interactive magazines that indicate interactivity. Kind of like the underline on a web page or cta (button) on a web banner. Gotta do something about the file size though. 500+ mb... Jeezzz

I think this while very well done but could have easily been a pdf. I know this will send some people in this tread into a "tizzy" but if this were in Flash the interactivity would have been sooooo much better and the file size so much smaller. And yes Flash does support multi touch gestures.

All that said, this I think is the first so lets see how far other publishers can push the envelope
 
Review:

65/100

Pros:
Digital, flexible, eye-catching, animated. I like how the mag moves sideways like a regular mag but the articles move vertically.

Table of contents. I should have gone here first (see below)


Cons:
Ads. I didn't realize there were that many ads in the print version (this appears to be a digitzed version of the print layout). If they want to 'improve' this they need to bring the meat closer to the front and spread out the ads. As it was it seems like the first 20 of the 30 pages were ads, literally. By the time I finally got to the meat, the good articles, I put it away before I got to reading since I was so disgusted by this point lol; "ANOTHER freaking ad!"

$5 for such an ad heavy mag? Puhleeeeeease.

500mb per issue? Nuh-uh.

Minor: No tap to turn. Its tap then tap arrow to turn. Otherwise you're flicking sideways (or vertically for an article) and 50% of the time you end up doing the opposite of what you wanted; flick sideways but instead it goes down to the next page in the article, etc.


What I should have done was hit the meat first by way of the Table of Contents lol


But yeah ............. the ads (or at least their placement) pretty much ruined it.
 
bbydon said:
I downloaded it. They still don't do enough. Its still a magazine and not an experience. Maybe it is asking too much to have some interactivity with each article. I was expecting alot for 4.99.... instead i got a magazine for newstand price.

A couple video's of toystory.... really, thats all. why not a 3d landscape to move around. There was more they could have done to make it more interesting.
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I agree. just finished the mag, I was expecting more and they could have done more, though a good start. Novelty of "touch here and it spins around" wears off pretty quickly.

As to all the comments regarding the price, the market will eventually determine what the price ends up being, if anything at all. There're were A LOT of adds in the magazine, some with touch-through links and video. Why is it that advertising supplements the price of print mags, but not e-mags, I don't know.

One more thing, it looks gorgeous on the screen.
 
It appears that many feel that the new media apps for the iPad, and some games, have created their own greedy app stores within the app store. One poster suggested paying for a subscription, which seem like a no brainer. If these are all profit, with ad revenue going into their pockets, they are not being savvy, they are just being pigs. Same goes for teh Marvel comics app. If you have an online subscription, why is it not working to view comics on teh app? We spend a premium for the device to get price gouged on the content. I am not saying give it to me for free, but there is no excuse for these magazines, comic books and iBooks to be so expensive. It sickens me to open my kindle app and see that my wife has paid $7.00 for a Nora Roberts book that cost $4.00 in hard copy. Mind you, both the price and the fact it is a Nora Roberts book sickens me equally...
 
It appears that many feel that the new media apps for the iPad, and some games, have created their own greedy app stores within the app store. One poster suggested paying for a subscription, which seem like a no brainer. If these are all profit, with ad revenue going into their pockets, they are not being savvy, they are just being pigs. Same goes for teh Marvel comics app. If you have an online subscription, why is it not working to view comics on teh app? We spend a premium for the device to get price gouged on the content. I am not saying give it to me for free, but there is no excuse for these magazines, comic books and iBooks to be so expensive. It sickens me to open my kindle app and see that my wife has paid $7.00 for a Nora Roberts book that cost $4.00 in hard copy. Mind you, both the price and the fact it is a Nora Roberts book sickens me equally...
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I agree 100%.

I don't find it necessary to pay more for an electronic copy. Less resources are being used such as paper, cardboard, ect.
 
I love reading Wired and I've been looking forward to a digital version of it on a device like the iPad for 5, or more, years. It really is my dream Wired-reading experience.

But I have to agree with the sentiments expressed by most others in this thread — physical issue price? It's just downright wrong.

Anyone who has come into contact with full-color printing costs knows how incredibly expensive a magazine like Wired costs to manufacture. But it's not even the manufacturing, it's the retailer margin and the distribution. I can almost guarantee that Wired make no money from the $4.99 you pay in a store, they get everything from the ads.

And they're now in the ideal situation where they can rid all those eco-unfriendly costs and make it a 100% free magazine; earning, not just the usual revenue from their advertisers, but substantially increased revenue due to the fact that they could likely double, if not quintuple their readership numbers by the fact the magazine would now be free.

I sincerely hope the price is experimental. Otherwise, I can't ever see myself moving over to the digital versions. (Yes, even despite it being my dream of five years, that dream included digital magazines all being free and we'd all have a better world because of it.)
 
And I just got a subscription to Wired thru my nephew's school magazine fund raiser... and got that mag yesterday in the mail. Anyway I can transfer that to a digital subscription on my iPhone? :D

**added**
EssentialParado said:
I love reading Wired and I've been looking forward to a digital version of it on a device like the iPad for 5, or more, years. It really is my dream Wired-reading experience.

But I have to agree with the sentiments expressed by most others in this thread — physical issue price? It's just downright wrong.

Anyone who has come into contact with full-color printing costs knows how incredibly expensive a magazine like Wired costs to manufacture. But it's not even the manufacturing, it's the retailer margin and the distribution. I can almost guarantee that Wired make no money from the $4.99 you pay in a store, they get everything from the ads.

And they're now in the ideal situation where they can rid all those eco-unfriendly costs and make it a 100% free magazine; earning, not just the usual revenue from their advertisers, but substantially increased revenue due to the fact that they could likely double, if not quintuple their readership numbers by the fact the magazine would now be free.

I sincerely hope the price is experimental. Otherwise, I can't ever see myself moving over to the digital versions. (Yes, even despite it being my dream of five years, that dream included digital magazines all being free and we'd all have a better world because of it.)
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Yes. I just went through my magazine and counted 80 pages, yes 80 full pages with advertisements on them. That's half of the paper used in the magazine. They get most if not all of their revenue from advertisements than from the sales of the magazines themselves.
 
swarmster said:
1 year of Wired on Amazon: $10

This is the best e-magazine I've seen yet and I would gladly pay as much as $20 for a "Wired 2010" app that updated with a new issue every month. And I'd pay it again in 2011, 2012, etc.

$60? For who knows what kind of issue management (ability to delete/re-download issues to save space, stored all in one app)? No thanks.
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+1

i'm a wired subscriber and i would like to have a digital edition as well, but not for the prices they are currently asking
 
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DanielSw said:
So this means you know absolutely nothing about the iPad and its design, nor a thing about iTunes and how its properties are distributed. Time to do a wee bit of homework there, bud.
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Um, what? I'm saying there's no reason they couldn't put together a Mac app that does the same thing as this iPad app. What are you saying?
 
Consultant said:
Adobe charges its viewer also (to system makers), mainly to embedded systems, and also to mobile devices.

Adobe hides its Flash earnings over multiple business units so people can't tell how much money Adobe getting for Flash.




"Adobe's rates were widely considered to be prohibitively high, and it was this issue[citation needed] that led Apple to design their own system, TrueType, around 1991."

Apple also designed its own PDF reader because Adobe's version takes a long time to open.

Thanks. Fail again.
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Preview Kicks Ass Baaadly. If I occasionally want to mess up with some pdf, I fire up Illustrator :) Acrobat isn't gonna make it into my hard drive :D
 
BoulderBum said:
I found it interesting that Adobe helped Wired with the project.

Wouldn't it be interesting if Adobe developed a tool that converted Flash code to Objective C instead of interpreting it at runtime? Would Apple let developers use such a tool since it's compiled in native code? Could Apple even tell if a given app used such a converter?
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We've been through this already countless times (and reached nowhere). Let's just see what Ballmer has to say at WWDC.
 
Adobe and the Digital Magazine Publishing business

steviem said:
This looks like Adobe is thinking about a bigger picture than just Flash Player, and I'm pretty happy that you posted that link :)
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:) Indeed.
All in all, as this article states, the Digital Magazine Publishing business is a great opportunity for Adobe. It's a great fit.

And it's interesting how they are developing new tools that plug into InDesign CS5 to create a better workflow for Editorial Designers
and exploring a standard for navigational metaphors which, I hope, may provide a great reading experience:
 
Morky said:
Adobe makes nothing from content viewers such as Flash. They earn all their money developing content creation tools, such as, er, Flash. Watch for Flash to become the tool for creating canvas animations and for Adobe to be the king of HTML 5 content development. This whole Flash argument will be a non-issue in a few years.

This from last fall: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/10/sneak_peek_ai_fl_dw_canvas.html

steviem said:
This looks like Adobe is thinking about a bigger picture than just Flash Player, and I'm pretty happy that you posted that link :)

el-extranjero said:
:) Indeed.

All in all, as this article states, the Digital Magazine Publishing business is a great opportunity for Adobe. It's a great fit.

And it's interesting how they are developing new tools that plug into InDesign CS5 to create a better workflow for Editorial Designers and exploring a standard for navigational metaphors which, I hope, may provide a great reading experience: http://www.the-constant.com/2010/05/adobe-wired-mag-ipad/
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Is This Really The Future Of Magazines (or, why didn't they just use HTML5?)

500 megabytes of rasterized (bit-mapped) text? What is it, a fax?

May as well have used PDF. ;)
 
Digitalclips said:
I agree it would make sense for magazines to be either free with ads or charge and no ads. That would be acceptable to most reasonable people IMHO.
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Considering that print magazines were never free and they have ads I wouldn't expect a digital magazine to be free if it had ads.

I would expect that a subscription be discounted from the single issue price. I would hope that subscription prices will be offered once the publishers have a better understanding of the digital market.
 
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