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With all the furore over mygazines , you’d be forgiven for thinking that magazine publishers had missed the news for the last 5 years. Then again, if they’re reading their own news pages they are probably at least six months behind everyone else...
To recap for those that missed it ; the music industry has fought a protracted (and largely unsuccessful) battle against its own users in the form of P2P download sites, eventually having to settle for cut price legal downloads (like iTunes) or advertising –led models like the Sony BMG experiment.
The same copyright battle now looks likely to break out in magazine land, with several industry bodies (MPA,PPA etc) threatening to sic the legal hounds on anyone found sharing their members content without permission. I’ll remind my partner of this next time she takes home a free magazine from a show for her mother.
This sort of argument is becoming as ludicrous and ineffectual as the posted warnings at concert venues about “no photography allowed”. Er, camera phones anyone ? Face it – technology not only enables people to share content, it actively ENCOURAGES them to do it.
And lest the publishers cry “copyright” too loudly, think on this. Virtually every magazine now contains snippets from the web, photos from You Tube, comment from forums and reader submitted photos. To whom does that copyright belong precisely ?
Talking of the Press Gazette, this news should say it all. A magazine for print journalists now reduced to monthly - this internet thing might really catch on.
I've been mulling for some time over the question of how readership of magazines and the net differs, and came across this from Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0.
Essentially, its a grok on the whole "whyowhy don't we read books anymore" argument, but it has practical lessons for print readership as a whole. He argues that whereas magazines are read in a linear and predictable fashion, websites are read in a totally different way.
Randomly in fact, as users follow links and pages in a totally haphazard fashion. He goes on to postulate whether or not this means the whole way we THINK has changed - in a far more unstructured pattern than before - and it is this that is really insightful.
Google, he suggests, thinks as an algorithm does - in a networked fashion rather than just straight lines. That begs the question ; how do literature students and computer "literati" differ in their reading modes ? And more importantly, what does that portend for the way that we educate specific groups of people in the future ? Education is after all, a linear proposition - primary school, secondary school, university/college...
Thats a theme picked up by Jeff Jarvis, who talks about "distributed education " ; allowing students to use the internet to take any course they like at any academic institution. He goes further.. "Similarly, why should a professor pick just from the students accepted at his or her school? Online, the best can pick from the best, cutting out the middleman of university admissions. "
And even potentially, allowing students to teach and learn from each other. The true democritisation of education. Even allowing for the downsides of such a model - lack of research and the "Wikipedia" effect (where a minority of members so the majority of editing) this is fascinating stuff.
 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole "print vs internet" debate is the emergence of new business models. Many of these are being formed out of neccessity rather than design, but whatever the reasons, the outcomes are bound to be fascinating.
One of these is book publishing; most publishers are forced to maintain high cover prices because of the mechanics of the book trade. A £15 book, for instance has to absorb costs of around £9 per copy if you take into account print, paper, the cost of production, and of course wastage/unsolds. And that is before author costs as well.
So the new business model proposed by Chris Anderson (the ex editor of Wired) will be a useful test of whether there is another way of cutting this particular cake.
Anderson is evidently considering offering two versions of his next book (eerily entitled "Free"). Readers will either be able to buy the book for the list price, or download a second version, free of course, but full of advertising.
Anyone care to wager that he earns more from the advertising model than from the hardback ?
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