Do you still run into people who tell you they like reading a newspaper or magazine or book in print vs. digital? The iPad is about to change that.
Scott Dadich, creative director at Wired magazine, says Wired measures reader engagement in hours, not minutes like online. And that allows for higher ad rates. It was one of several interesting data points from a session at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. And it’s another reason publishers should be moving a lot faster of developing for tablet devices.
How different is the production of content for the print vs. online? He said Wired spends months, sometimes years, working on custom fonts to make reading of their content easier. thier custom typeface has 10,000 kerning pairs vs. 500 for a regular font. Conde Nast, Wired’s parent company, has 400 designers and 1,100 editors and its magazines reach 62 million Americans (about 1 in 3).It takes 24 days for each piece of magazine content to go from birth to publish at Wired.
The iPad and similar devices will allow all that design intelligence to become interactive and digital. “It’s revolution through evolution” says Jeremy Clark from Adobe. “The ads are as important as editorial content to the magazine.” Dadich says the technology is ahead of the business development at this point and declined to offer specific information about pricing models.
Wired and Adobe are working together to develop new products for the iPad and the demo was pretty impressive. The navigation goes both left-to-right and up-and-down with lots of zoom and interactivity. It makes a Kindle look like black-and-white TV in the age of HD (with 3D on the way.) Clark then showed an Android-powered tablet device that looks just like an iPad. He says there will be 40-50 of these devices coming out this year.
I plan to write more about this, and the implications for local media companies, once I have a moment to think (translation = after sxsw ends). How do you think tablet devices will change the game for local media? Add your thoughts in the comments or drop me a line.
